New England Revolution star Carles Gil has claimed the club ‘don’t deserve’ to make this season’s MLS Cup Playoffs.
A 3-1 defeat to the Houston Dynamo on Tuesday has left the Supporters’ Shield holders ninth in the Eastern Conference, still only three points adrift of the Columbus Crew in seventh but having played a game more than most of their rivals.
What’s more, the Revs have won just one of their last seven MLS matches, taking only five points during that run. Hardly form that leaves you expecting a turnaround.
“We lose many, many games, many chances to try to be there,” Gil told reports following Tuesday’s damaging loss in Texas. “I think maybe we don’t deserve to be in the playoffs because I think we are not now a competitive team, me the first one, of course. So yeah. Difficult, difficult moment for everyone.”
Even more worrying will have been the manner of New England’s defeat. The Revs allowed Houston 21 shots and seven big chances worth 4.54 xG. The scoreline would have been much worse had it not been for goalkeeper Djordje Petrovic, who made eight saves, including keeping out a Sebastian Ferreira penalty.
Safe to say head coach Bruce Arena wasn’t impressed with his side’s performance.
“We played poorly. There’s no excuses,” he said. “You can come up with a million of them. But we were outplayed on the evening, we looked like a tired team, but also a team that didn’t play together. And we played poorly, 1-1 for about 70 minutes is a miracle that we were in the game, to be honest with you. So we got no excuses. We deserve to lose a game. And I got to accept the responsibility for the performance of that team. It wasn’t good.”
Though he’s not fully conceded, Arena echoed Gil’s sentiment regarding the Playoffs race and just how difficult it’ll now be for the Revs, who face high-flying CF Montreal next.
“I don’t know what the probability of us qualifying for the Playoffs would be, I don’t think it’s great,” Arena said. “We’re certainly going to try to win our last three games, but we tried to win tonight. We tried to win in New York and we’ve come up short and we had a very poor homestand as well before this. So there’s no excuses. It was all there for us and we have not performed up to I think our expectations.”
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