Curt Onalfo may have saved Galaxy’s season — and his job — with one substitution
Curt Onalfo wasn’t even nine games into his stint as the Galaxy’s new coach, yet it looked as if he was already headed toward the exit.
His team hadn’t won in a month. Two weeks earlier a pair of players had refused to shake his hand after being subbed off. And now, with the Galaxy down by two goals after just 17 minutes of a May 6 game with the Chicago Fire, the StubHub Center crowd was loudly calling for his head.
In rapid succession the coach seemingly had lost his team and its fans and was about to lose his job. And that’s when he appeared to lose his mind, too, taking Jelle Van Damme, his captain and top defensive player, out of the game with 12 minutes left in the first half.
But what looked to be an act of desperation actually proved to be the move that saved the Galaxy’s season. With Van Damme in the locker room, the team rallied for two second-half goals to earn a draw, and the Galaxy (5-5-4) haven’t lost since, taking a seven-game MLS unbeaten streak, longest among Western Conference teams, into Wednesday’s road match with the Colorado Rapids.
The turnaround, many players say, began with that one substitution.
Veteran Baggio Husidic said Van Damme’s temporary benching sent a message that Onalfo was no longer going to base lineup decisions on salary or status. His future was on the line and he was going to use players who were as desperate to win as he was.
“People were like ‘oh . . . anybody can be taken out. This is Curt’s team,’” said defender Dave Romney, who replaced Van Damme in the Chicago game and hasn’t missed a game since.
“When that fire gets lit,” Romney continued, “that will wake a lot of guys up.”
The challenge now is to keep that flame burning during an exhausting stretch of five games in 14 days, one the Galaxy will enter missing seven starters due to injury or international duty. It’s also one the Galaxy will begin in the rarefied mile-high air of suburban Denver, an altitude midfielders Romain Alessandrini — the team’s leading scorer with seven goals and seven assists — and Joao Pedro haven’t dealt with before.
Plus they’ll be facing a 5-8-1 Colorado team that has won three straight and hasn’t lost at home since May 5.
The Galaxy already have weathered worse crises. When the team was reeling, Van Damme said, the players were anticipating some kind of shake-up. And while he was surprised he became the flashpoint, he played his best two games of the season in the three weeks following his benching.
“It was just something that was coming. I think everybody was waiting for it. Everybody was expecting it. You always need a turning point,” Van Damme said.
Without it, he said, last Saturday’s game, in which the Galaxy scored a tying goal four minutes into stoppage time, would have ended differently.
“We would have lost that game,” he said. “[But] guys kept going until the last minute.”
Another factor in the team’s slow start, he said, was the adjustment to a new coaching staff and more than a half-dozen new players. Onalfo agreed.
“It’s a group getting used to a new coach, a coach getting used to a new group,” said Onalfo, who has declined to publicly take credit for the turnaround. “It’s a back and forth. We just started, at that point, to really click.
“You can’t necessarily put the exact 100% reason. I just knew that at that moment we became a team. And it just kept building.”
Follow Kevin Baxter on Twitter @kbaxter11
