MONTREAL – On March 3, in his Impact report card, RDS pundit Patrick Leduc gave one player a rare 10/10 mark.
The only time he’d ever done that was at the end of last season, when Marco Di Vaio played his last professional game. With a perfect score, Leduc – who American fans will recognize from last December’s MLS State of the League roundtable – applauded Di Vaio’s career-ending goal. This time, he celebrated a career-making moment.
Rookie Cameron Porter’s dramatic maiden goal sent Montreal to the CONCACAF Champions League semifinals, where they will meet Costa Rica’s Alajuelense starting this Wednesday, March 18, with the first leg at the Olympic Stadium. Porter’s feat also erased Leduc’s bad feelings from a certain night in Torreón, Mexico.
An injury prevented Leduc, at the time an eight-season Impact veteran, from contributing to their 2008-09 CCL campaign. But elimination at the hands of Santos Laguna hurt him as if he had. 4-1 up on aggregate midway through the second leg of the quarterfinals, Montreal somehow conceded the four goals that Santos needed, including two in stoppage time to Carlos Darwin Quintero. A cruel, cruel ending.
Not unlike what Pachuca experienced at the Big O on March 3, actually. Cameron Porter may become to Tuzos fans what Quintero became to the Montreal faithful then. Leduc says that he would have given the same mark to Porter even if there hadn’t been a Carlos Darwin Quintero. But he would be lying if he said it didn’t play a part.
“It would probably have been the same score, given the atmosphere in the stadium,” Leduc told MLSsoccer.com on Monday. “But would the stadium have been in such frenzy if the Impact hadn’t already had a painful experience at Santos Laguna? I don’t know. There was drama, and with this whole “Let’s make history” [Montreal’s CCL tagline] thing that refers to 2009, it makes what happened against Pachuca – and what I hope will happen against Alajuelense – all the more emotionally-charged.”
The surge of emotion in 2009, when Montreal beat Santos Laguna 2-0 in the first leg, had a lot to do with the fact that Montreal were a second-division team – think of Ottawa or Edmonton doing that nowadays.
For the MLS incarnation of the Montreal Impact, the goal of qualifying for CCL is a given. It’s what they feel they should achieve, year in, year out. Thinking that they can win the Canadian Championship on Toronto’s field is reasonable now – it was improbable in 2008.
“We weren’t expected to win the Canadian Championship. We weren’t expected to make it that far in the Champions League. But we did it,” Leduc said. “It was a little bit of an adventure, it was already too good to be true. We were playing without much pressure – actually, that’s not true; we felt the pressure of playing in front of 55,000 people [in the home leg against Santos Laguna], of playing in Mexico. But we weren’t supposed to have anything to lose – that is, until we had the keys to the semis in our hands and dropped them.”
That night in Torreón, the Impact dealt with perhaps the most hostile crowd they’ve ever faced in club history. The bubbling Estadio Corona crowd's chants of “¡Si se puede!” (Yes we can!) spurred Santos Laguna on. More of the same can be expected in three weeks’ time for the second leg in Alajuela.
No one from the 2008-09 edition of the Impact remains in the current squad. But many a staff member – technical director Adam Braz, assistant coach Mauro Biello and vice-president Nick De Santis, among others – can summon up Torreón memories collected either on the field or in the stands for the current players to learn from.
“There’ll be 18,000 people, and it’ll be much more hostile than in Pachuca – it was good-natured, because we weren't taken seriously,” Leduc said. “Now, you have to scare Alajuelense. You won’t scare them in their home. You have to scare them here. Here, you take a lead or you remain on track. There, you have to make it through the storm in the beginning, and then, they may start to doubt.”
You also have to keep them doubting. Montreal failed to do that in 2009. But the stakes are even higher now. The Impact could become the first Canadian team to qualify for the CCL final. Chances are they would be matched up against powerful Club América and their plethora of dangerous attacking players.
One of which is Carlos Darwin Quintero.
