Two games into a five-game road swing, FC Dallas find themselves in an unfamiliar place in 2015. After spending much of season atop the standings of a loaded Western Conference, FC Dallas now sit in a three-way tie for third at 21 points.
The loss that dropped them in the standings, a 4-0 rout by Sporting Kansas City at Sporting Park, was one of the worst of their season as well – one of two 4-0 losses where the team looked completely discombobulated from the start.
“We weren’t concentrating. You could tell from the first whistle that we weren’t,” defender Matt Hedges told MLSsoccer.com. “We played bad. There’s no other way to put it. We were bad. I was bad.”
The first time the team suffered a 4-0 loss, an April 10 home loss to Colorado, it appeared to be an anomaly. Experiencing the same result seven weeks later left the club’s head coach scratching his head.
“The discipline of the team is nonnegotiable. I’ve said that before,” head coach Oscar Pareja said. “When you lose a game like that and see many things that we haven’t done well due to lack of discipline, that’s not right.”
But with a long week – nine days to be exact – to lick their wounds and dissect what led to the drubbing last Friday, the club remains optimistic by looking at their past.
After FCD lost to the Rapids, Dallas responded eight days later by storming out of the gate and jumping out to a quick 3-0 lead on Toronto FC before the game was eventually delayed for over three hours due to inclement weather.
Although Toronto cut that lead to a final score of 3-2, Dallas went on a 3-0-2 run following the Colorado debacle.
This is the message the team captain is relaying to his troops.
“Our whole mantra was ‘get a response, go out and do to the next team what Colorado or Kansas City did to us,’” Hedges said. “We had a couple of good results after the last one. We just need a response with some energy.”
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Explosive midfielder Fabian Castillo was a big reason why Dallas responded favorably following the club’s first big loss this season. He scored just 29 seconds into the Toronto game, which was the fastest goal in franchise history, and found the back of the net again just nine minutes later.
Castillo’s availability for the team’s second chance to respond to a 4-0 drubbing – Sunday’s match against San Jose (7 pm ET, FOX Sports 1) – is still a question mark, as he has been limited in training while nursing a hamstring injury.
But regardless of his status against the Quakes, FC Dallas are energized and hoping for yet another bounce-back performance.
“We need to be able as a group to overcome any obstacle for the team,” Pareja said. “We have done it before. So I don’t want our team to feel that this is about one or two players. This is about a team that should perform better than the we did.”
