Sweeney: Hope is dwindling for Revs fans

When I went down to Gillette last Tuesday, I stood outside the Revolution locker room and heard the assembled players talk about how they are all sticking together and trying to gut this bad run of form out. At that point, The Boys In Blue were coming off their sixth consecutive match without a win.

During that media availability, Teal Bunbury basically re-iterated what he had said to Greg the previous Saturday night, the 3-2 loss to Philadelphia: “We’ve got to continue to stick together. These times are when true colors show. Great teams get through these by sticking by each other, not hearing outside noise, but kind of going to work, working hard, continuing to push each other, continuing to strive to be better, watching film and seeing where we’re making the mistakes.”

Said Diego Fagundez: “We’ve said it from day one, we all have to stick together. I know after the last game, we came in the locker room and we said that no one is going to walk through these doors and help us out. We have to make sure that we’re all sticking together. It’s the only way. But right now we just have to keep going, keep grinding. It’s playoff mode right now, so everybody I know wants to win and wants to get there. Whatever it takes, we’ll do.”

And defender Andrew Farrell echoed that, too: “We’re coming down to the last couple games — well, not the last couple games, more like 11 games — but every game is just as important as this past one. We have to win a lot of these games, so we’re just working hard in practice, just trying to stay positive, keep everybody up, trying to get that confidence back that we had a couple months ago and just doing little things like that, focusing on the little details.”

Sticking together. Not hearing the outside noise.

Keep going. Keep grinding. Work hard.

Staying positive.

Right now, in the hours after the Revolution’s 2-nil defeat at the hands of surging DC United on Sunday night, there’s nothing positive to talk about. There’s lots of outside noise about how dire the situation has become, especially losing a game to a team that is now right at your back, their breath hot on your neck, two points adrift, with two matches in hand.

Sunday night’s loss had very little in the way of positive play. I outlined it in the match report, so there’s really no reason to re-hash it. And no, I’m not really going to re-hash all the negativity from the match, because I’m afraid I’d break the internet; seriously, too many kilobytes.

Sunday night’s loss had everything to do with many of the negative things we’ve already written about before: bad marking/late reaction to Luciano Acosta’s move to take Paul Arriola’s cross; barely reacting, if at all, to close down on Junior Moreno before he fed Zoltan Steiber the long, over-the-top ball that led to the 89^th-minute dagger; and a new one, not staying in control of oneself in critical moments, therefore disqualifying yourself from the rest of the competition.

Sunday night’s loss also had everything to do with not making the right substitutions. We can all agree that Juan Agudelo had to come off the pitch given that he had already been cautioned once, and nearly saw a second yellow card late in the first half.

Was Wilfried Zahibo the right sub, even though we’ve mentioned in the past that he is generally slow to react and fails to close down on players quick enough? Could Brad Friedel have put someone else in? Cristhian Machado was available. So, too, was Kelyn Rowe. And there was Zach Herivaux, too. Down a goal … is there any one of those four can anyone in Revs Colony trust to do that job?

And not subbing Scott Caldwell off before he found himself saddled with a second yellow… do you add offense? Do you put Jalil Anibaba in the back for that last half an hour?

If I’m being honest, I don’t think any of those options can really do the job the fans want done, which is why….. ugh. I can’t write it. Not yet.

After last Saturday’s match, I wrote that hope remains for the Revolution, but the time to act was now.

On Sunday, the Revs didn’t act. That much was clear.

After Sunday, now with 10 matches remaining in the regular season, hope for a return to the playoffs for the first time since 2015 is dwindling. It’s fading, especially with the clubs on the Revs’ schedule over the next two-plus months.

With what’s left, hope is almost all but extinguished.

Can The Boys In Blue turn this around? I'm not sure the players who are there are good enough to do it. Some, maybe. All? Not a chance. But maybe, just maybe, if the front office had brought in some impactful players that could turn all of this around in a heartbeat...

Oh, but wait. You heard Fagundez: "We came in the locker room and we said that no one is going to walk through these doors and help us out."

It's all on them, frustrating though it is to read.