Brian White and Pedro Vite scored two minutes apart and the Vancouver Whitecaps stunned Inter Miami 3-1 in the second leg of their Concacaf Champions Cup semifinal Wednesday night, spoiling the hopes of Lionel Messi‘s squad to reach the tournament’s final.
Sebastian Berhalter also scored for Vancouver, which advanced with a 5-1 aggregate to face either Cruz Azul or Tigres UNAL in the Champions Cup final on June 1.
Miami entered Wednesday’s match trailing 2-0 in aggregate after being shut out in the first leg last Thursday. That meant they needed to win by at least three goals in regulation on Wednesday at Chase Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to advance.
Messi was held without a goal for the fourth straight match.
In the tournament’s history, four MLS clubs, including Inter Miami last week, have lost the first leg of a semifinal by a 2-0 score on the road. No team has come back to advance to the final.
Those chances were dashed quickly in the second half Wednesday when Vancouver erased a one-goal deficit minutes into the frame.
Berhalter found White for the equalizer in the 51st minute and Vite sent a deflection past Oscar Ustari in the 53rd. Berhalter, who had an assist on the first two goals, put the game away with a shot from the center of the box into the bottom left corner in the 71st.
Berhalter has accounted for all five of the Whitecaps’ goals in the semis after scoring one in the opener, but he will sit out the championship because of yellow card accumulation. He was shown one in the first half after a foul on Miami’s Tadeo Allende.
“They have a great team,” Whitecaps coach Jesper Sorensen said of Inter Miami, “and it’s not always easy for them because they have these players who come in with all the pressure on them.”
Jordi Alba got Miami on the board with his first goal of the season nine minutes into the game on a feed from Luis Suarez. Miami couldn’t capitalize on a series of chances after that.
Miami also dropped its third straight match, the first time the team has lost that many in a row in the Messi era.
“We need to improve, we have to look forward, we need to learn from this and the last week. Today the feeling is really, really bad. The last three games we’ve lost, we concede a lot of goals that we didn’t in the past,” Miami coach Javier Mascherano said.
The Whitecaps are the early leaders for the MLS Supporters’ Shield, the prize for the league’s top team in points during the regular season. Manager Jesper Sørensen’s side have 23 points after 10 matches in the 34-game MLS season.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
