The Colorado Rapids’ best attacking night of the season was nearly wasted.
While a 3-3 draw to FC Dallas was disappointing from a Rapids standpoint, a quick shift in attacking philosophy following a swift exit from the CONCACAF Champions Cup was effective.
In their MLS home opener at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park on Saturday, the Rapids looked comfortable attacking — and like they were having fun.
Scoring three goals, one in lucky and improbable fashion, is enjoyable. Giving up three at home, as Djordje Mihailovic put it, is not.
Here are three takeaways from a hard-earned point at home:
Attacking vision being realized
Early this MLS season, either by design or by necessity due to injury, coach Chris Armas has toyed with formations and where exactly he deploys his players within them.
Against LAFC in the second leg of the CCC matchup, a 4-3-3 with Cole Bassett out wide was awkward offensively and cautious defensively. At home against Dallas, it thrived with Oliver Larraz in a wide role instead. He had a career-high two assists.
“He’s just got big mentality. With our second team in 2023 I believe he had (8) assists as a 10, played more up the pitch,” Armas said. “The match plan had him up in those pockets in and around Djordje, almost like playing with two 10s.
“He was able to catch balls in the pocket and turn, and more impressively he drives at the back line with tempo. He’s a very vertical player, he’s got big self-belief, and he’s a winner.”
Perhaps the biggest and most subtle change was to play Kévin Cabral in a more advanced, more central role than the strictly outside winger role he’s used to. He still got the ball out wide — which hasn’t yet produced much this year — but he was instructed to make more central runs and become a target of crosses.
There might be nights when it benefits him directly, but perhaps his biggest effect on the Dallas game was taking a defender’s attention away from Rafael Navarro. On his second goal of the night, Cabral streaked just a little farther from the goal than Navarro, took a defender with him and opened a pocket of space through which Larraz played a perfect pass for an emphatic finish by Navarro.
Don’t make a mess to clean
At times, the Rapids looked like the formidable defense as they’d been the first few games of the season. That much has been a clear upgrade for a team that gave up 60 goals in 2024, but Dallas was the first match riddled with multiple defensive breakdowns that led to direct goal-scoring opportunities.
Dallas’s first and third goals were the results of last-ditch chaos in the back and poacher-ism by Pedrinho and Petar Musa, respectively. According to defender Keegan Rosenberry, those moments could be preventable even well before they happen.
“It’s all about the momentum, the rhythm of the game, the ebbs and flows of how the match goes,” Rosenberry said. “We can do a lot of things better in the moments leading up to the goals, maybe some fouls in the middle of the field before things get going, especially with (Luciano) Acosta and Musa linking up like that.”
“It’s something we focus on in the match prep and we didn’t do a good enough job of it.”
One thing Dallas and Colorado have in common: They’re both teams built to score a lot and concede a lot. High-risk, high-reward systems with elite attacking talent. The Rapids relied on their offense to score, Dallas on mistakes or shortcomings by the Rapids’ back line.
Navarro for 20?
Mihailovic thinks so.
With five goals in the last three games against Dallas, Navarro said after the match that if he could play against Dallas every game, he would — there’s just something about it that gives him an edge.
Obviously, he can’t. But what Navarro flashed Saturday night is repeatable: well-timed runs into the right spots. That accuracy and timing is not new for Navarro, but the Dallas match showed that others around him — Larraz and Mihailovic out wide — are figuring out how to get him the ball. Accurately and timely.
Armas is clear in that he wants his tandem of central midfielders on the field at the same time. There are too many to fit centrally at one time, but it seems after a couple of tries, he’s closer to figuring out who fits where.
If last season was about implementing a system, this year is all about making fine tweaks to the blueprint and finding some adaptability and unpredictability at the macro level. If the game against Dallas is any indicator of what’s to come from the Rapids, especially in creating for Navarro, the club’s single-season goal record (16) could be in danger.
“The first few games, he might have been a bit more stressed than normal because he’s not getting the chances — same across the whole front line, actually,” Mihailovic said. “We were kind of waiting for that one game to finally have a lot of chances and today was the day, so I’m happy for him.
“He’s a striker, he needs to score as many as he can, it’s good for his confidence,” Mihailovic said. “To have a striker to get maybe 20 goals will probably put us really high in the standings.”
The room paused, and a media member asked if he thought Navarro really could score 20 goals this year.
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
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