The Columbus Crew will face plenty of pressure to win Saturday’s Concacaf Champions Cup final against Pachuca, but per forward Diego Rossi, it’s all internal.
Facing the biggest game in club history, the Crew will head to Estadio Hidalgo hearing plenty of talk about how MLS’s aspirations are as much on the line as the club’s own hopes.
It is, after all, a rare opportunity for an MLS club to claim Concacaf’s biggest club prize, and the league has long placed a major emphasis on regional supremacy as the next step towards global prominence. In MLS’s 28 previous seasons, only nine of its clubs have gotten to this stage, and only three of those sides proceeded to win the final.
However, if you ask Rossi — who leads the Crew with three goals in the tournament — the Crew are only focused on bringing glory to Columbus.
“We don’t have another kind of pressure, or [at least] I don’t feel like this,” Rossi said in a Tuesday press conference. “I want to win every game and this is what I’m working for.
“We want to win like we already did there, in Mexico, but we just have our pressure, that we want to win. So yeah, I have maybe that pressure to win, but not from another [source].”
Rossi added that the MLS Cup champions — who are currently on a 5W-1D-1L run that includes wins in both legs of the club’s Concacaf Champions Cup semifinal over Monterrey — are “in a good way.”
“I think a good moment for the team,” explained the 26-year-old. “Obviously it’s a different competition, but I think the team is good, [and] working hard. For me, it’s the most important thing to go and have a great game there in the final.
“It’s a different competition, but you always want to win every game and to do good in every competition. We were focused last week on MLS, and we are focused on another competition [now], so yeah, we are training hard.”
Tall task ahead of Columbus at Estadio Hidalgo
It will still take something special for the Crew to become the fourth MLS club to win the Champions Cup, as the final will be held as a one-off event in Mexico due to Pachuca’s better overall record in this year’s competition.
Los Tuzos have not lost a game in regulation play in over a month, and managed to knock newly-crowned Liga MX champions Club América out to earn the place in this weekend’s final. Pachuca faced América in the Mexican playoffs as well, holding the Mexico City powerhouse to two 1-1 draws and only going out by virtue of being the lower-seeded team.
Additionally, Pachuca has a massive home-field advantage in terms of altitude. Even trips to play the Colorado Rapids will not prepare the Crew for Estadio Hidalgo, which sits 7,979 feet (over 1.5 miles) above sea level.
Guillermo Almada’s side showed just how meaningful that can be when it last hosted MLS competition. Back in March, the Philadelphia Union were on the wrong side of a 6-0 demolition, and no MLS side has ever walked out of the venue with a win.
Rossi brushed that history aside, insisting that the Crew won’t be intimidated.
“It’s just, be focused on the game and try to [make sure] this kind of thing doesn’t affect our game,” said Rossi. “We know that [altitude is] there, but we need to be focus on our ideas and our football.”
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