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Colorado controlled virtually the whole field, got a ton of meaningful ball progression from Djordje Mihailovic pulling the strings as a No. 10, and utterly dominated the second half. That was because they started winning those second balls that the Loons had been feasting upon in the first 45 minutes, and once that happened, Minnesota didn’t really have a way to play through the hosts.
“It didn’t feel like, for me, that there was a quick fire away at half time to make us immediately better on the ball, to have more control, to find more energy,” Ramsay said. “I think that almost the course of the game has been set from that point. So, yes, we tried to freshen up a bit with the way we used the substitutes, but in some senses, it had an air of inevitability about that in the second half that we were going to end up defending our box for long periods.”
While Colorado answered a toughness question in the second half, it’s kind of gone under the radar that Rafa Navarro has pretty thoroughly answered the No. 9 question. His 62nd-minute goal off a corner to make it 3-2 gives him nine on the season, and five in his past five games. It is a good run of form.
The best part about that – the actually convincing part? Four of those have been non-PK goals. Navarro, until this stretch, had been a pure PK merchant. He is no longer that (and even biffed a PK to prove it), and Armas said after the game that he expects the Brazilian to continue in Colorado.
That had been up in the air given his loan from Palmeiras officially expired in mid-July. Expect to see this man in Burgundy much, much longer than that.
Now, for the record, I am going to mention that Kévin Cabral had himself a brace. While I am in on Navarro, I can not quite get there with Cabral. As for now I’m calling this a black swan event and can not bring myself to believe that consistent goalscoring will follow. But if it does, I promise you, Rapids fans, that I will write about it at length.
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