Photo: Marjorie Elzey
CF Montreal came from behind to defeat the 10 men of Philadelphia Union 3-2 on Saturday night in Montreal. Julian Carranza was sent off with a second yellow card in the 69th minute and the hosts scored twice in stoppage time to grab their first win of the season.
Romell Quioto gave Montreal an early lead with a goal from the penalty spot in the 3rd minute. Mikael Uhre netted a second half brace with goals in the 46th and 60th minutes. But Chinonso Offor equalized in the 90th minute before Quioto scored his second of the game to win it for Montreal in the eighth minute of stoppage time.
Jim Curtin reverted to his standard XI after rotating his squad for the midweek win in Concacaf Champions League. Andre Blake remained on the sidelines with Joe Bendik starting in goal.
Montreal would take the lead in just the 3rd minute. The hosts were given a penalty kick after the ball struck the arm of Jakob Glesnes inside the Union box. Romell Quioto stepped up and sent Bendik the wrong way to give Montreal an early lead.
The Union would have their best opportunities of the first half in the 45th minute. Jose Martinez floated a ball into the box and it fell nicely for Julian Carranza on the left side, but his shot was saved by Jonathan Sirois at the near post. From the ensuing corner, Kai Wagner’s cross came to Mikael Uhre at the far post, but again Sirois was able to come up with the save and cover the rebound.
Philadelphia would equalize just after the halftime break in the 46th minute. Leon Flach did well to win the ball back inside the Montreal half and guided it to Daniel Gazdag. Gazdag picked out Mikael Uhre at the top of the box. From there, the striker was able to spin and hit a shot into the lower left corner of the goal past an outstretched Sirois, opening his account for the 2023 season.
Uhre would net his second of the game in the 60th minute. Philadelphia won the ball back inside their own half and found an outlet in Gazdag, 35 yards from his own goal. Gazdag chipped a perfect pass over the top for Uhre to run onto, and the striker took one touch to push the ball into the Montreal box and a second touch to coolly slide a shot into the bottom left corner of the goal.
Julian Carranza would be sent off in the 69th minute. He received his first yellow card of the night in the 58th minute for persistent infringement and received his second and his marching orders from Nima Saghafi in the 69th minute for a late challenge.
Montreal equalized in the 90th minute through substitute Chinonso Offor. After a short corner, Montreal rotated the ball around the top of the box and eventually threw in a cross from the right side that Mathieu Choiniere rose highest to meet and headed it off the crossbar. Offor was the quickest to react to the rebound and headed home from close range. Referee Nima Saghafi reviewed the play and initially chalked off the goal for offside, but after going to the video monitor for a second time, eventually gave the goal as Kai Wagner was keeping Offor onside.
Montreal would win the game at the death from a header from Quioto in the eighth minute of stoppage time. It was Choiniere again who was the provider, floating in a cross from the right side. Quioto shrugged the challenge of Olivier Mbaizo away and headed in from six yards through the hands of Bendik.
The Union are next in action when they host Orlando next Saturday at Subaru Park. Kickoff will be at 7:30 p.m.
Three Points
- Yuck. A road loss to a poor Montreal team was not what anyone was looking for. The turf sucked, the red card to Carranza made a poor game worse (for me, his first yellow was crap but the second was worthy of a card), and a goal after a double VAR review isn’t flattering for the league or the referee.
- Not good enough. The two goals in stoppage time saw some poor defending from the Union. Olivier Mbaizo gets beaten in the air on both occasions, with big questions to be asked of his defending on the winning goal. Joe Bendik didn’t cover himself in glory on the evening and perhaps should have come to claim the winner. Substitute Damion Lowe was also the wrong side for Montreal’s winner.
- Mikael Uhre. After a slow start to the season, the striker got off the mark in style with a brace in Montreal. His second goal in particular was what you want to see from Uhre, getting in behind with his pace, a perfect ball over the top from Gazdag, and a cool touch and finish from the Dane.
Philadelphia Union
Joe Bendik, Olivier Mbaizo, Jack Elliott, Jakob Glesnes, Kai Wagner, Jose Martinez, Alejandra Bedoya (Daimon Lowe 87′), Leon Flach, Daniel Gazdag (Andres Perea 74′), Mikael Uhre (Chris Donovan 74′), Julian Carranza
Unused subs: Joaquín Torres, Quinn Sullivan, Jesús Bueno, Holden Trent, Jack McGlynn, Nathan Harriel
CF Montreal
Jonathan Sirois, Rudy Camacho, Kamal Miller (Robert Orri Thorkelsson 80′), Joel Waterman, Victor Wanyama, Rida Zouhir (Sunusi Ibrahim 79′), Nathan Saliba (Sean Rea 53′), Lassi Lappalainen (Zachary Brault-Guillard 80′), Mathieu Choinière, Romell Quioto, Mason Toye (Chinonso Offor 80′)
Unused subs: Ilias Iliadis, Logan Ketterer, Jules-Anthony Vilsaint, Ahmed Hamdi
Scoring Summary
MTL: Romell Quioto – 3′ (PK)
PHI: Mikael Uhre – 46′ (Daniel Gazdag, Leon Flach)
PHI: Mikael Uhre – 60′ (Daniel Gazdag, Jose Martinez)
MTL: Chinonso Offor – 90′
MTL: Romell Quioto – 90+8′ (Mathieu Choiniere, Victor Wanyama)
Disciplinary Summary
PHI: Jakob Glesnes – 2′ (handball)
MTL: Victor Wanyama – 18′ (foul)
MTL: Rida Zouhir -43′ (foul)
MTL: Romell Quioto – 43′ (dissent)
PHI: Julian Carranza – 58′ (foul)
PHI: Julian Carranza – 69′ (foul – second yellow/red card)
PHI: Alejandra Bedoya – 90+6′ (dissent)
Not happy with the official AGAIN.
This team playing like this isn’t going to wIn MLS cup. Maybe Curtin Will get the USMNT job and we’ll get a coach who can fight for his team in the face of horrible officiating. Carranza gets abused every game and then gets a soft 2 yellows against Montreal? What a joke.
Totally agree.
You could see it from the start that the ref had something in for Carranza. possible history there…. but it sure looked odd.
And seriously…. VAR?
I refuse to even watch highlights from last night.
Now…. NOT blaming ref for the loss. Defensive collapse… that’s what caused the loss.
A shameful loss… a “Fire Curtin” loss… but thankfully, maybe, Uhre got started.
PS: the TV production was just terrible. How many times did the camera remain on the Montreal coach as play proceeded?
Just TERRIBLE production last night.
Can I just say the Apple TV coverage of this game was awful. I really think the director in the feed booth was intoxicated or hung over. Multiple misses of live action being missed to focus on a player’s reaction or a replay. Or do they just use interns who have never shot a sporting event before?
+1
Awful is too good a word for it. How do we really know whether Carranza deserved a second yellow when Apple was busy showing a replay? It’s completely unprofessional and scary that we have to look forward to it for the next 10 years.
+ 10 !
The stream was still jagged and sometimes stopped dead during live action. Amazingly it is totally smooth during the commercials and the halftime bs. I thought espn + was poor, Apple TV is lowering the bar.
Low point of the announcing was during the VAR of the tying goal, when they claimed the Montreal player couldn’t be offside because the ball hit the crossbar. Know the laws, lads.
I’m not sure I know what happened there. Uhre looked really good. Glad he’s off the mark (long term this is huge to get him going). Sadly we were well and truly in control before the red. Carranza arguably would have received his first yellow for infringement eventually but to get it for a non-foul with no obvious contact… frustrating. His second though was definitely a fair card. Lost his head there. I have never seen a var review the was itself reviewed. Embarrassing, ugly look for the referee staff. Here’s the thing… while there was a clear angle to send the ref to the monitor the first time, they didn’t show me anything that would be clear and obvious enough to overturn the first var decision. It could be Wagner kept Offor on, but I didn’t see any clear view of that. Arguably if they had a clear angle they wouldn’t have overturned the call on the field to begin with. I don’t see how you can take it back after that.
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On the killing blow, Mbaizo is sitting on the ground. Replay seemed to show him getting thrown down by Quioto. Hard to tell. I’d have preferred the ref take a look there.
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After the red, Union simply lost their minds. Simple as that. The ref situation made it 1000 times worse. They were too incensed to focus.
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Put it behind you and move on.
Wagner was keeping everyone onside and it wasn’t close. No clue how the moronic commentators couldn’t figure it out, nor how VAR could miss it
Every MLS season is long and strange. Honestly didn’t have a lot of hope for us in that stadium on that turf and without Blake. Glad Uhre looked good. I’m not going to lose too much sleep over this.
Just like the 10 ties last year?
1/ Bendik is not good enough. A team competing to win multiple trophies needs two strong keepers, particularly if one is the captain of an international team in a league that does not honor international breaks.
2/Questioning decision to bring on Chris Donovan after going a man down.
3/ Kai Wagner flinging/throwing away handshake attempts post game was hilariously petty
4/ the team sucks at game management (time wasting). Glesnes pathetically pretended he needed his leg stretched only to hop right back up. No other attempts I noticed once man down with lead
Donovan should have come on earlier, as soon as the Union went ahead, given that Carranza had a card and had played the better part of the game on Tuesday.
Agreed that Carranza should have been subbed off. Bringing on Torres would have been another possibility. He might have had something to prove against his former team.
The Union have had and have had leave a series of good second keepers. Blake keeps forcing them to move on and they mostly start everywhere else they go. It’s easy to say they should get a better guy to play backup, but what ambitious player will be OK sitting behind the best player at his position for years at a time?
+1
Exactly this. One of his former backups left because he wanted a chance to be a starter… and he now starts for one of the league’s best teams.
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Also, blaming Bendik for this particular loss is misplaced. Maybe Jamaican Superman would’ve stopped one of those, but you can’t hold Bendik to that standard. Those goals were not on him.
This
I have to agree with the sentiments of Jim Curtin in his postgame interview that tonight’s Union-Montreal match was not the best advertisement for MLS. For starters, the game was played on artificial turf within a stadium that’s a relic of the 1976 Summer Olympics and saw Mike Schmidt bury one in the left field bleachers to lead the Phillies to clinch the 1980 NL East title. Then there’s VAR that overturns then overturns the overturn on a good goal called on the field. All of this drama was narrated by commentators who were late to explain what was going on and a broadcast that was late to provide critical replays and missed some other key moments (e.g. Carranza’s red card) throughout the night, not to mention seemed to know a brochure’s worth of information about the Union including the ultra-tricky bit about Carranza’s first name being Julian, rather than Jonathan. Fortunately this spectacle was withheld from a broader public consumption as the game broadcast is exclusive on a shoddy online pay to watch platform (unless you’re a Season Ticket Member).
Sometime during the review and re-review of Montreal’s second goal I swore I heard an on-field microphone capture someone (Curtin perhaps?) exclaim “what a shit league.” I don’t endorse the sentiments because it verges (and I didn’t mean to verge) on Euro-football snobbery, but what I saw tonight is in the same ballpark of bad looks as having the Super Bowl on a suboptimal playing surface.
I’ve liked Mbaizo for the most part early on this season but that third goal is on him. Something doesn’t seem to be clicking with Uhre-Carranza-Gazdag (though I was happy that Uhre found a groove with his brace tonight).
Ce n’est pas très bon.
It is a shit league. They are playing during an international break when several top players are unavailable. They have an odd number of teams which screws up the schedule. They have a playoff system where a team can have a win and two draws and be eliminated by a team that has a loss and two draws. They insist on using a different tiebreaker than the rest of the world. That’s not Euro snobbery, that’s just bad management.
Carranza’s first yellow was for persistent fouling. The ref had warned him earlier.
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This game was not a good advertisement for squad rotation. Carranza and Bedoya both should have been taken out when the Union went ahead given that the former was on a yellow and the latter was pretty much dead on his feet.
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Union have let in 6 goals in 4 games. Last season they didn’t give up their 6th until their 9th game. They’ve dropped 6 points that they won last year (in Montreal and in Miami).
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And F**K Apple.
Nima Saghafi is, in a word…bad. Montreal…dirty. I’d love to put the blame on them, but the Union lost this game.
Just brutal. That game needed an enema.
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In other news Uhre cleansed his bowels.
I told a buddy at one point deep in the first half… at this point if Alejandro Bedoya is the best player on the field- something is wrong. Luckily they snapped to attention in the second— before snapping their minds. The end of that match caused a Garcia psychological gage reflex because it felt eerily like the final game of last season.
Flach looked gassed by 75’ as well
OMG yes… such strong 2022 MLS Cup energy that I walked around in a stunned state for half an hour afterward.
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But it’s only one regular season game. And an exceptionally weird one. Put those vibes away, chalk it up and move on.
It’s Montreal…..nearly every time the Union play in Quebec drama always ensues and the games have weirdness. It’s just the way it is.
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Caranza’s second yellow was well deserved. That’s a classic “strikers challenge.”
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The Union lost their composure in the last 15 minutes and stoppage time. They were scrambling.
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That said, up until about the 80′ minute the Union played quite well. If anything the Union should/could have scored 4-5 goals tonight.
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Bendek is not Blake. We knew this. Freeze wouldn’t have done any better. Would we rather the Union spend money on a backup keeper or backups in Midfield and striker?
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Wonder if M’Baizo will get his starting spot back when he returns from International Duty? Believe that happened around this time last season too….after he had a bad game in Montreal….
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Lastly…..I get that you all loved MyPHL’s coverage of the U. That said Apple’s coverage and feed are far better than ESPN+. Half of the time their Bundesliga coverage doesn’t start until well after the games have begun. The feed quality is also highly variable. So far I haven’t had any issues with the video quality and stream quality on MLS Season Pass. Here’s the thing……Apple isn’t producing the games….MLS is.
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Anyways, onto the next game. We all remember last season prior to July right?
If the production crew, announcers and referee are all MLS employees, they should all be fired this morning. Mispronouncing Glesnes and Wagner’s names all night is one thing, but Jonathan Carranza and this guy ‘Perez’ who subbed in for Bedoya but I can’t find on the roster is another. Showing replays and missing live action multiple times. And whatever that VAR review was….
+1 That was shit coverage. I have heard better commentary from college students and I have seen better from ESPN+ coving a college game with one camera.
Part of this is a function of not having the local crew. I just hope Crapple gets the production shit together.
None of this excuses the result last night, which was eerily similar to last year, but could also have come from an early Union team.
At least you can switch on local commentators for home games through apple…
I thought the local commentary was only through the radio feed not through apple. Are you saying you can turn it on in the apple TV app?
Even with a man down and all other things, the fact remains that they were up 2-1 heading into 90 minutes and gave up two goals against a depleted team from last year that hadn’t scored this year until tonight (and the first being a PK).
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That’s piss poor. We threw away all three points at closing time, and Montreal were entitled to be gleeful that we allowed them to do so. Curtin & Co need to get it together on that.
Union badly needed some possession late to kill the game off. You could sense a Montreal score(s) coming with waves of chances. They really fell apart.
Agree with all comments on Apple. The missed game action is especially frustrating. Hopefully it gets better as season progresses.
My 5 Points
The officials decided the results of the game.
I disagree with Mbiazos blame on the last goal. The author described it as Quioto shrugged off Mbaizos Challange. It was a mugging not a shrugging. Quito threw an elbow to Mbaizos neck which allowed him to head the ball in. The ref clearly refused to make the call.
VAR Works
The 2nd Montreal goal clearly showed 2 Montreal players offsides. The ref totally succumbed to pressure. I think the Montreal coach offered him a bribe. Something about the girl ringing the Montreal bell.
Michael Uhre will score many more Union goals
Blake is the cornerstone of the team.
Apple tv sucks
The broadcast team are total idiots. They are biased about when to show replays that make the officials look bad.
One to be quickly forgotten. All the players should be docked 50% of their pay for only showing up for one half (the second).Moron of the Match: Carranza, he was warned by the ref after his first 3 fouls, then got the yellow for admittedly a cheap one, but he put the ref in the position of having to give it. I know he’s won us some games, but that performance last night was unprofessional.
This one may come back to bite, like some of those horrible mid-season draws last year which cost us the Cup by moving the final to LA. Really disappointing.
I apologize for adding insult to injury.
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Think about what players will be available for next Saturday against Orlando.
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Or not.
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Blake is out hurt. Carranza is suspended.
Martinez will be with Venezuela. Craig, Sullivan and McGlynn will be with the US U20s.
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Very, very likely Gazdag will be with Hungary.
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Possibly Lowe will be with Jamaica. Possibly Mbaizo will be with Cameroon.
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And if Kenya has scheduled any friendlies to stay active while they are suspended from African Cup of Nations qualifiers, conceivably Odada could be away.
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That’s as many as nine field players gone, with six being certain or virtually so. If it’s nine, that leaves 13 field players, three below the number that triggers eligibility for emergency extreme hardship call-ups. Same trigger for eight or seven field players gone.
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There may be some affiliate short-term agreements and emergency extreme hardship call-ups.
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And those would come the night before Union II’s season opener against Orlando City B. Fortunately that match is at home, so the logistics of double duty are possible.
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Actually I think they said Blake might be back and if he is it would be far too early for him to join Jamaica. Thin squad for sure.
Given his importance to the season, I would expect them to get him healthy and then build up the strength of the injured part before letting him back onto the pitch.
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There is a correlation n between rushing a rehabilitation and re-injuring the same body part.
That is the very reason Jim should have rotated more last night. Not taking Carranza out when he was clearly having ref problems, etc. Why Donovan? At least Lowe was an extra defender.
Also is MLS the only league not to have an actual “break” during call ups? Now with the Crapple contract that will never change!
It has more to do with Leagues Cup than the Apple TV Deal
Doesn’t have anything to do with either really. MLS usually has not paused play in the past anyway.
I agree. It is a shit league. Unless they can address the horrible officiating it will not change. Glesnes was mugged on the “tying” goal and Mbaizo was mugged on the “winning” goal. Absolute dog shit.
Mbaizo is soft. If he attacks the ball he wouldn’t have been on the floor. Apple should have just used the broadcast teams that have been already at it…finally, Mbaizo is soft
Can someone please tell me how to find union games on the radio???
I believe it’s on 97.5 The Fanatic- but I haven’t listened to any games yet this year so not 100% sure. It is different station than last year.
IF there are competing games (Flyers, Sixers) you have to go to their web site and pick up the stream… upper right corner of the web page.
Haven’t found it yet… but you can bet I’d rather hear Dave Leno and Seba than these Apple clowns who call themselves professionals.
Seba works for MLS/Apple now……he does the French commentary.
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I believe Sheanon Williams is the color guy for the Union Radio Broadcasts.
I can’t even bring myself to watch the highlights from that match. Big 2022 MLS Cup energy from that one. Meanwhile they looked excellent for about half the match. It’s tough playing CCL. They’ll get it together.
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I’ve had Apple products my entire life, and I am very excited about the Apple-MLS deal, which I think could be a harbinger for sports coverage to come from other leagues. But even from my optimistic seat, that was some of the worst broadcasting I’ve ever had to endure. The camera work was repeatedly horrendous. Both broadcasters were simply ignorant and god-awful. How on earth do you hire these clowns and not JP Dellacamera?!
+1
Guaranteed he said no, turned them down… FOX will use him and internationally he is more respected than most.
Come. From. Ahead. Some things never change.
Hey, anyone catch the report that Herr Tanner turned down US Soccer?
Thank the stars!
What a mess, top to bottom. That organization was “Reyna’d”, and much like the Flyers, is run by a bunch of out of touch ego maniacs.
Both orgs need giant enemas.
Four years goes by very quickly.
Will we be embarrassed on our own turf?
I heard him on FOX just the other day. CONCACAF Champions league? I forget.