Edelman Leads Red Bulls to First Round Upset

For sports fans, mid-to-late autumn can be overwhelming.

The World Series has just ended. The NFL season is entering its second half. Saturday evenings are chock-full of the best matchups of the college football season. The NBA and NHL are underway — as is college basketball, for that matter. Not to be lost in the shuffle, however, is the Major League Soccer (MLS) playoffs, showcasing some of the most talented players in what is, after all, the most popular sport in the world.

And this fall, the Jewish community has had a pronounced presence in the MLS postseason, thanks largely to 21-year-old New York Red Bulls midfielder Daniel Edelman whose shootout goal in the bottom of the seventh frame of Game 2 of the first round of the MLS Cup playoffs on Nov. 3 catapulted his team to a two-game sweep of the defending champion Columbus Crew.

Columbus, the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference, was an absolute juggernaut this year, establishing club records during the regular season for most goals (72) and points (66). As the No. 7 seed, Edelman’s Red Bulls were given nary a chance to pull off the upset.

“I think it definitely helped us – the notion of us being the underdog team,” Edelman acknowledged moments after New York prevailed in a stunner of an opening-round series (although probably not as big of one as Atlanta United getting past Lionel Messi and Inter Miami). “Columbus is an excellent squad, the best in the league. We really stuck to our tactics and believed in our philosophy and the culture that we built throughout the whole year to have a performance like that.

“I think on the day and in this series, we really just fought and won those little moments that really built up over time.”

This wasn’t the first time Edelman was at the epicenter of a high-octane moment with the chance to seal a big-time victory. Back on July 27, Edelman had an opportunity to convert the game-winning penalty kick in a Leagues Cup game against Toronto FC, but misfired well over the crossbar. Toronto then went on to win the shootout, 5-4, and, ultimately, the match that had been played to a scoreless draw. Evidently, the botched attempt weighed on Edelman for months.
“I’ve been begging for a moment like that to redeem myself,” added the native of

Warren, N.J., who’s finishing up his third year with the Red Bulls. “I’m a guy that wants those moments. It just shows that I stayed locked in and I’m super proud of myself to be able to step up there and have the team trust me in that moment as well to step up and bury it.

“After I buried it, it was just a full-circle moment because I had missed earlier this year, and I wanted that moment to right the wrong. And I stepped up.”

In this year’s MLS playoffs, there has been an exceptionally long, nearly three-week layoff between the opening round and the single-elimination Eastern Conference Semifinals, in which the Red Bulls battle New York City FC before Atlanta and Orlando City square off this weekend. Understandably, that issue was brought up in the press conference following the grand finale of Round One.

“It’s definitely interesting to have this much time off now until the next game,” noted Edelman following his late-game heroics. “It’s a great moment to beat Columbus, the two seed, especially at home to give our fans a last match like that.

The job isn’t done yet. We have our sights set on the Eastern Conference Semis. The MLS Cup is obviously a big goal. We proved that today we can beat the reigning champs and that anything is possible.”

While the Red Bulls survived their opening round matchup, the league’s two other teams with a strong Jewish representation – Charlotte FC and FC Cincinnati – were not so fortunate.

Despite dropping its opening-round series in three games to Orlando, Charlotte has a promising young nucleus, highlighted by Liel Abada, a 23-year-old winger from Petah Tikva, Israel, who came over to Charlotte in March following a magnificent run with the Scottish Premiership club Celtic. Abada, who played for Team Israel during this past Summer Olympics and tallied an assist in his MLS postseason debut, has drawn rave reviews from Charlotte FC head coach Dean Smith, who told The Charlotte Observer back in June, “We knew what he could do. I think the great thing for us is knowing we can develop him further as well. He’s a really bright young player and he’s getting better and better. With any new player that comes in, there’s always going to be an adaptation period. I think he’s been shorter than most if I’m honest.”

On the same afternoon that Abada’s Charlotte FC squad was eliminated, Cincinnati and DeAndre Yedlin – a standout for the U.S. men’s national soccer team who recently returned to the MLS after a seven-year run in Europe — fell to New York City FC in a 6-5 shootout after the two teams played to a scoreless draw in their winner-take-all Game 3. The 31-year-old defender Yedlin, the product of a middle-class Jewish home in Seattle, registered three scoring attempts in his first MLS postseason with Cincinnati.