Baseball may not matter much in Rochdale, England, but Lewis O’Brien didn’t need to watch America’s pastime to realize how much winning the World Series meant for Dodgers fans.
“The vibe around the place has been completely different since the championship,” said the 26-year-old midfielder, who arrived in Los Angeles this summer on loan from Nottingham Forest. “It’s always good for communities to win things, as well as your own personal team. Hopefully, we can bring a bit of that energy from this week and take it to the game on Sunday.”
Training for Game 2 of the MLS Cup playoffs best-of-3 opening round series against the Vancouver Whitecaps while the Dodgers celebrated with nearly 300,000 fans on Friday, O’Brien’s Los Angeles Football Club teammates and coaches weren’t contemplating double-decker bus rides of their own just yet.
“It’s an amazing feat. Congratulations to the Dodgers and Peter Guber, part of our LAFC family as well,” said head coach Steve Cherundolo, whose MLS Cup-winning debut in 2022 ended with a quick tour around Christmas Tree Lane that was cheered on by 5,000 supporters in Exposition Park.
“It’s wonderful to see Angelenos happy and proud of their team,” Cherundolo added. “We would love to give them the same in a couple of weeks time, but we try not to think about it too much. Don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We’re in round one of the playoffs, so there’s a lot of ground to cover until any sort of ceremony is going on. We’ll focus on the next task at hand, which is playing in a difficult environment in Vancouver.”
If being healthy and mobilizing a deep bench are advantages in the postseason — both were vital in ’22 — LAFC is in a great spot as they meet the Whitecaps for the 11th time in two years.
“You can think about a complete 90 minutes,” said Cherundolo, who explained that this marks the second time in 2024 that he has a full roster to deploy. “You can have all options, meaning you can start very offensive and transition to defensive to finish out games or vice versa, start conservative and finish offensive. Or you do a mix.”
Repeatedly defeating a familiar opponent presents its own set of issues because neither side changes its personality and the players can learn enough about one another to create stalemates, said O’Brien. Starting a dozen straight games in the midfield for LAFC since the end of August, the Englishman has already played against Vancouver three times.
“There’s always little things you can pick up in games and little things that we’ve been looking at in video trying to change for the next game,” he said.
After tackling the Whitecaps 2-1 at BMO Stadium last weekend, LAFC is poised to sweep the Canadians for a second consecutive postseason on the artificial turf at BC Place, where they are 3-0-1 in all competitions the past two years.
During LAFC’s final regular season road match at Vancouver on Oct. 13, attacker Mateusz Bogusz scored in 32 seconds and played a pivotal part in the 93rd minute game winner by Ilie Sanchez.
If LAFC avoids an elimination match at BMO Stadium next Friday, that would be eight straight wins starting with the U.S. Open Cup in late September.
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“It’s a three-game series but we really want to finish that on Sunday because this can give us more days off,” Bogusz said. “We can prepare well for the next round. But even not, we want to finish this 2-0. That’s our focus, to go in there and win this game.”
Admittedly not much of a baseball person either, Bogusz was struck by the excitement that surged in the city once the Dodgers sealed their series in five games against the New York Yankees.
“The Dodgers bring the championship here to L.A.,” Bogusz said. “So now maybe it’s time for us to bring the championship.”
LAFC AT VANCOUVER WHITECAPS
When: Sunday, 5:55 p.m.
Where: BC Place, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
TV/Radio: Apple TV – MLS Seasons Pass, FS1/710 AM, ESPN App, 980 AM