Sweeney: Chicago's own turnaround may be closer to fruition than the Revs'

Look at my photo above. Get a good look at it. I took that photo in my car — the Honda Spaceship — in the Gillette Stadium parking lot a couple of hours before the Revolution took on Chicago in the 2016 US Open Cup semifinals. It was the first time I covered at the Revs at Gillette, having covered two previous Open Cup games at Harvard for Fitchburg; we didn't do Saturday night games because they didn't align with an early print deadline -- but that's another argument for another time.

After that match, a 3-1 Revolution win, we in the Boston soccer press corps made the long walk down to the media workroom for the post-match press conferences of Jay Heaps and Chicago manager Veljko Paunovic. Paunovic was in his first year at the helm of the Fire, a little over a year after coaching the Serbian U-20 national team to the 2015 U-20 World Cup title, and even on that warm August day, one easily saw the stress the man felt while standing at the podium.

After all, Chicago had been in the tank for a while; to call the Fire “in transition” at that point might be an insult to teams in transition. In fact, the Fire were worse than the Revs at that point, given that New England was two years removed from its MLS Cup Final run, and was en route to Dallas for the US Open Cup Final.

But since then, one can make the argument that Paunovic’s side has done just a little better than the Revolution. Just a little bit.

Since that game in Foxborough, the differences in the two clubs are staggering. Heaps is gone, Brad Friedel is in (for how much longer, we ask?). Paunovic, though, is still Chicago’s manager.

For the Fire, they have scored — in the league, mind you — 149 goals, while giving up 150 goals. Again, that’s all in the league, and that is including Wednesday night’s 5-0 annihilation of the Revs. That's a goal difference of -1. Not bad.

Meanwhile, New England has scored 128 and given up 160. -32. Ouch.

Chicago also has one thing going for it that the Revs do not: it made the playoffs in 2017. The Fire are also closer to the playoff line — Wednesday’s win moved CF97 to eighth place in the Eastern Conference at 13 points, one point behind seventh-place Atlanta United (granted, the Five Stripes have two games in hand to Chicago, thanks to the Champions League) — then New England could ever dream of being. Compare that with the three years of missing the playoffs for Revolution, working on a fourth.

Quite simply, Chicago is that much better, given the talent in their team, between an aging Bastian Schweinsteiger, Nemenja Nikolic, Dax McCarty, and a young pup in Aleksandar Katai. In fact, there’s only one player — just one — who was on that Chicago team in 2016 that’s still on the Fire now, and that’s defender Johan Kappelhof.

On the Revs from that year to now, there’s still Diego Fagundez, Brad Knighton, Matt Turner, Cody Cropper, Teal Bunbury, Juan Agudelo, Scott Caldwell, Zachary Herivaux, and Andrew Farrell.

Telling, isn’t it?

And with the way Chicago played Wednesday, against an uninspired Revs side continuing a death spiral nearly a full calendar year in the making, they looked so much closer to lifting a trophy than The Boys In Blue ever have.