HOUSTON – It’s been more than eight years since DaMarcus Beasley last won a club trophy, but that could change on Wednesday night as the four-time FIFA World Cup veteran looks to lift the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup with the Houston Dynamo.
Beasley’s last taste of silverware at the club level came at the end of the 2009-10 Scottish Premier League season with Rangers, when he was part of the team that won the league and League Cup double. He had yet to reach a final with any of subsequent clubs until this season, his fifth year in Houston.
“When you get older, you understand what it means and what it takes to get to the final,” said the 36-year-old Beasley in Tuesday’s press conference before the final. “When you’re young and you’re 17 or 18, you just play. You don’t think about all the work that you did in preseason or all the work that you do off the field to make sure your body is right, you just play.”
The Dynamo failed to qualify for the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs in Beasley’s first three seasons with the team. Last season was his first playoff appearance since 2003, his last full season in MLS before heading to play in Europe.
Beasley and the Dynamo were 180 minutes away from reaching the 2017 MLS Cup final but fell 5-0 on aggregate to the Seattle Sounders in the Western Conference finals. Though mathematically alive, the club is all but eliminated from qualifying for this year’s postseason, with FiveThirtyEight giving them a <1% chance to make up a 12-point deficit with five regular-season games remaining.
As such, Beasley and the Dynamo are looking at Wednesday’s cup final (8 pm ET | ESPN2) as a consolation to a turbulent season.
“This year, obviously, has been up-and-down, been tough,” said Beasley. “We want to win it for the city of Houston, ourselves, our families, our teammates, coaches, president, we want to win it for everybody, everybody that’s a part of this club.”
Should the Dynamo topple Philadlephia, Beasley would lift the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup for the third time in his career. He won it previously in 2000 and 2003 with the Chicago Fire, the latter season with teammate Jim Curtin – now the manager of the opposing Union.
“Jim is a competitor, Jim as a player, as a person, he always put in the work. He put in the work behind the scenes so I’m sure that’s how he is as a coach. He’s very organized. You see that with this team and how they play and how they’ve been able to keep a steady ship in the years he’s been the coach of the Union. … It doesn’t surprise me that he’s doing well,” said Beasley.
In order to be named champions on Wednesday, Beasley knows he will need that same kind of hustle from his teammates, and it’s a message the team captain has preached all week.
“This isn’t like any other game, this isn’t a game that’s three points,” he stressed. “There’s no tomorrow in this. Whatever you put into this game is what you’re going to get out of it because it’s one and done and that’s what I’ve told all the players.”
