Chicago Fire needed a big finish to keep their Leagues Cup hopes alive, and they delivered one. Down 1-0 to Santos Laguna for close to an hour on Sunday, the Fire scored three times in the closing stages to win 3-1 at SeatGeek Stadium.
Robert Lewandowski got the last of them, in the third minute of stoppage time. It sets up a mouth-watering match on Thursday when Chicago host Cruz Azul, the reigning Liga MX Clausura champions, with a place in the Leagues Cup quarter-finals up for grabs.
Credit: Sven Mandel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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How Chicago Turned It Around
Ezequiel Bullaude put Santos Laguna ahead after 20 minutes. For a long spell, the Fire looked more likely to be heading out of the competition than into the knockout rounds. I’ll be honest, at 1-0 down with an hour gone, this looked like it was slipping away. Then the substitutes changed the game. Philip Zinckernagel levelled it in the 72nd minute, Robin Lod put Chicago ahead in the 90th and Lewandowski, who’d missed his first two chances of the night, made sure of it soon after.
“This is Leagues Cup soccer, right?” said Gregg Berhalter afterwards. “Intensity, passion, physicality, this game had everything.” Chicago have won both their group games in regulation so far, 2-0 over Necaxa, then Sunday’s comeback, meaning that they sit third in the MLS table on six points. There was a landmark on the night, too. 16-year-old academy product Robert Turdean started the match, becoming the youngest player in club history, 94 days younger than previous record-holder Craig Capano, whose record had stood for more than two decades.
Thursday’s visitors aren’t short of pedigree. Cruz Azul have already won the Liga MX Clausura and the Campeón de Campeones this year. They match Chicago point for point, too, sitting third in the Liga MX table, also on 6 points from two regulation wins. José Paradela has scored in both of their Leagues Cup games, the second of them in Sunday’s 2-1 win over New York City FC. Beat Cruz Azul on Thursday and Chicago will have given themselves a real shot at a first Leagues Cup quarter-final.
Two goals in his first three MLS appearances, now added to Sunday’s Leagues Cup winner, mean that Lewandowski is starting to look like exactly the statement signing Berhalter wanted him to be.