St. Louis CITY SC have been flying high in their debut MLS season, making history as the league's first-ever expansion club to start their inaugural campaign with five straight victories. This week, they'll have to contend with their first real test of adversity.
The historic winning streak was halted in Matchday 6, as CITY fell 1-0 to visiting Minnesota United FC at CITY Park. As they look to bounce back, they now have a two-week gauntlet coming up that pits them against two of the league's top teams: It starts with Saturday's road trip to face Seattle Sounders FC at Lumen Field (10:30 pm ET | Apple TV - Free), followed by a home clash with Eastern Conference frontrunners FC Cincinnati.
"I think in the first three weeks, I had a lot of friends, and then the next three weeks my phone went pretty quiet because now it's like, 'Damn, are these guys for real? What is going on here?'" head coach Bradley Carnell said on Thursday.
"So, I've experienced a bit of both. Obviously it gives us energy as we thrive off of certain bits of information and some of the data. But we're not really too concerned what the outside chatter is. We just are really focused on ourselves and what we can control. So, we try to control the chances we give away, we try to control and mitigate situations that we feel we need to work on.
"We start a new block. It's a new window for us. It's a new window of opportunity to go and start something fresh, start something new. So, what better opponent against Seattle, and then at home against Cincinnati next week?"
Test of character
Goalkeeper Roman Bürki said that Saturday's upcoming match in Seattle should be instructive in terms of how the group responds to their first defeat, which arrived much later than anyone from the outside anticipated.
They're no longer flying under the radar after becoming the dominant early headline of the 2023 season. Now that they've absorbed their first body-blow, Burki said his hope is that the adversity will have a galvanizing effect.
"It's always easy if you win all the time," said Bürki, CITY's Bundesliga veteran backstop. "Five games in a row, everything's good and sunshine every day. But I learned that we have actual winners and fighters in the team, guys who can speak up, get loud, a little trash-talk here, trash-talk there. I would say this group are a team. After the training, they look to each other's eyes, they smile together, that's how it should be."
Seattle figure to provide CITY with their toughest test yet, with the Rave Green hoping to leap St. Louis for the top spot in the Western Conference table, which they would do with a three-point haul. Should St. Louis pull a positive result, it would lend even more credence to the sustainability of the hot start.
"On the field we want to fight, we want to win," Burki said. "And off the field we are friends, we are I would say almost for me it feels like almost a second family. So I have really good friends here, people I can talk to and I think after the last game, after the loss against Minnesota, we were angry.
"And that's good in one way, because I think the power now, we have the energy to go to Seattle and make it very difficult for them, hopefully good for us."
