VANCOUVER, B.C. — They call him Scooter here, the slight, soft-spoken speedster ambling into BC Place a day before the Whitecaps’ biggest game of the season.
As he padded lightly through the empty, darkened stadium to the locker room, he tucked a bag under his arm as he ran through a gauntlet of meet-and-greets. His broad smile greeted each handshake before his small frame disappeared into the bowels of the stadium.
Scooter, it seems, can’t go far without stumbling across a fan or a friend these days.
The rest of the world knows him better as Kekuta Manneh, the scintillating young gun burning up MLS with his pace and mastery of the wing. When Sounders FC steps into the ring with the Whitecaps with the Cascadia Cup on the line Saturday (4 pm; JOEtv/This TV), nobody better embodies the entertainingly technical style of play Vancouver puts in the shop window than Manneh.
The Sounders know Manneh as well as anyone. The 20-year-old Gambian wide player has 16 goals in his 3,851 MLS minutes since joining the Whitecaps in 2013, and none were bigger than a 45th-minute tally late last year that handed the Whitecaps their second consecutive Cascadia Cup, in Seattle.
What’s more? That was nearly a year to the day after Manneh put in a hat trick against the Sounders during his rookie year.
Last year, the Whitecaps were just trying to assure a playoff position, while the Sounders were doing their best to lock up a first Supporters’ Shield. Nearly a year later, those roles are flipped. The Whitecaps lead the league in points with 48, while Seattle still need results to feel comfortable about its purchase on the rocky climb to the postseason.
That’s the backdrop to this one: Whether Seattle can fill the canvas with its own colors is largely dependent on whether it can slow Manneh and the most turbulent, chaotic attack in the league.
“It took a little bit to get used to, but I feel like I know the guys now,” Manneh said on Friday. “I know them very well. I know Cristian (Techera)’s quality and Octavio (Rivero)’s quality, and then I know Mauro (Rosales) because he was here last year too. I’m really very, very comfortable playing with the guys going forward.”
That’s been more evident than ever this season. Statistically, the Whitecaps are one of the most unique teams in the league. They don’t play long ball, as evidenced by the team’s No. 13 ranking in the long-balls-per-game category. But the Whitecaps don’t keep possession, either. In fact, in terms of share of possession-per-game by percentage, Vancouver is dead last in MLS with 46 percent.
So what are they? And why the heck do they lead all of MLS in points with a shade under six weeks left in the regular season?
The answer to that question lies in the long-term vision set down by Whitecaps coach Carl Robinson. The 38-year-old former Wales international was quick to surround himself with fast players with technical ability after he was promoted to head coach before the 2014 season. Vancouver is direct, but unconventionally so. The second they turn possession over, the team’s fleet of midfielders is already gliding forward, probing for openings, unafraid to go long but determined to keep it on the carpet.
In that sense, the Whitecaps are a possession team on steroids.
The ‘Caps don’t complete a large number of their passes, because they continually push the tempo. But that also has a positive effect on the back line. Since Vancouver scores so many goals early in games by catching defenses off guard, opposing attacks are often thrown out of whack and into a foreign scheme to equalize. As a result, nobody’s given up fewer than Vancouver’s 28 goals this season. That’s remarkable, given the fact that Vancouver controls so little of the ball. Low possession tends to correlate with goals conceded. But not in Vancouver.
The Whitecaps spent much of 2014 coming online with Robinson’s super-charged brand of soccer. With players like Manneh, Darren Mattocks, Matias Laba and Pedro Morales already entrenched in the system, adding technicians like Nicolas Mezquida, Techera and Rivero didn’t just make them younger. It made them better. Considerably.
“All the new players that came this year to help us, everything is coming together,” center back Kendall Waston said. “I think from last year, we’re knowing more the mentality of the coaches, what type of game they want. All of those things are getting together, and that’s why the team has had success until now.”
The Sounders proved they could win at BC Place earlier this season in a 2-0 victory guided by a pair of goals from Chad Barrett that was even more comprehensive than the scoreline indicated. And they proved they could get a result against this team in a CONCACAF Champions League match in a 1-1 draw in August, which will give the team confidence headed into another fixture against the Whitecaps at home in the Champions League on Wednesday.
Either way, silencing Manneh’s speed and quieting a rowdy crowd will be chief on the Sounders’ list this weekend. If they succeed, Seattle will bring the Cascadia Cup trophy home with them.
“It’s a six-point game,” Sounders FC captain Brad Evans said. “For us, we can leap up in the standings, separate ourselves from the pack, but also (win the) Cascadia Cup as well. There’s multiple things on the line with this game. The guys know that. We got a decent result there when we drew in Champions League, so we look at what we did well then, we’ll have our traveling support and we’ll be ready to go.”
