GOAL: You've been around this team for a long time, but none of us have ever seen anything like Messi and Inter Miami. They're an outlier in the sense that they can just outscore you, and there's not much you can do to stop it. What do you think about them?
MCCARTY: Yeah, they certainly seem to be a juggernaut right now, the likes of which we haven't seen, especially in the playoffs. Inter Miami had an up-and-down season. If we want to take their season as a whole, yes, they had some very high highs, but they've also had some lows, and they've also not won a trophy this year. You have to obviously take their season in totality to really judge everything that's happening, but if we want to break it down in just their playoff run, it's been spectacular.
I think Javier Mascherano made the biggest and best decision of his young coaching career to put Luis Suarez on the bench. I've been vocal that that was the right decision, and it must have been a difficult decision, but Inter Miami is certainly finding their best form at the right time, and it's because they have balance now. They've got young legs around Lionel Messi. He's always had a sort of free role, but now, with younger legs around him, it's even more free. He's free to do what he does best, which is score spectacular goals, but he's also free to create and to drop a little bit deeper in midfield and kind of be that conduit between midfield and attack.
One thing you said that really stands out is that you're not going to really be able to keep Inter Miami off the score sheet. That doesn't seem to be something that is likely to happen, so you're going to have to outscore them. You're going to have to hope that their back line, which has been significantly better recently, kind of reverts back to the mistake-prone back line that we saw a few months ago, but your focus has to be on Messi.
GOAL: How do you stop them? If you're playing in a one-game cup final, what do you do about it?
It frustrates me to no end when I see teams just giving Messi time and space on the ball in midfield and not tracking his runs into the box. Go back to the first goal that he scored against FC Cincinnati in that Eastern Conference semifinal, and it's unacceptable for Messi to be scoring a header in that type of situation. It's a great play. It's a great ball by Silvetti, so don't take anything away from the actual attacking movement in play, but you have to make sure that when Messi gets the ball in the final third, he's going to look to pass it and then get the ball back at some point in the box so he can finish in one touch. It frustrates me when teams don't game plan for that, and when players lose track of where he is, because he's going to get his chances and he's going to beat you in certain ways, but don't let him beat you in the obvious ways.
That's kind of where I'm at with it. Look, Vancouver, they've done it already this year, right? So if there's one team that I think matches up really well with Inter Miami, and who won't be scared to go in there and go toe to toe with them, as far as goalscoring is concerned, it's definitely this Vancouver Whitecaps team.
