In the face of increasingly difficult table math, Austin FC interim head coach Davy Arnaud is still speaking as if his team has a path to the playoffs — though following Saturday night's 2-1 loss to Vancouver Whitecaps FC, the charged tone present during the team's recent eight-match unbeaten streak has become more muted in the wake of three straight losses.
"We play teams in these last four games ... that are kind of in that same mix," he said in Saturday's post-match press conference, noting that 11th-place RSL, 8th-place LA Galaxy, and 10th-place Portland follow next Saturday's trip to already-out-of-it SKC. "So it's obviously still there for us. I mean, we can still affect teams around us. It's obviously hard. The more games you go, the harder it gets. But yeah, we're gonna keep fighting for this thing until there's someone tells us ... that it's not available anymore, and that's the approach. There's no other way to go about it."
Despite going up 1-0 before halftime on a Myrto Uzuni goal assisted by an errant Tate Johnson backpass, both Arnaud and his players noted the first half wasn't up to the team's standards.
"I didn't think, especially in the first half, we were quite good enough to get them in positions to score," Arnaud said, referring to the bold move of putting Uzuni, Christian Ramírez, and Brandon Vázquez on the field together to start. "We just weren't sharp enough in the first part of the buildup."
"I don't think anything was going right for us in the first half. I don't think we can connect three passes together," assessed goalkeeper Brad Stuver in a post-match interview unusually clocking in at more than 13 minutes. "We just kind of kept putting ourselves in bad positions. They didn't have too many dangerous chances, but, I mean, we're defending a lot. We had a lot of blocks, a lot of defensive work that we had to do."
But then came the second half, with Ryan Gauld scoring on a header barely a minute after the restart, and sub Yadaly Diaby scored a match-winner that will lead his highlight reel regardless of what other amazing shots are still to come in his career.
