VANCOUVER—It’s been a bumpy few weeks for the Vancouver Whitecaps, who are coming off back-to-back losses and have been shut out in three straight Major League Soccer matches.

That last part of the early season narrative—the lack of scoring, and especially the failure thus far to score from open play—feels like the dramatic arc of a daytime soap opera, played out in excruciatingly small increments from one episode to the next: it just refuses to wrap up.

But Whitecaps coach Carl Robinson maintains the goals will come, and the players have been echoing that sentiment this week. Plus, they insist they’re not rattled. Not yet, anyway.

“I think you guys think about it a lot more than we do,” midfielder Andrew Jacobson told Sportsnet, explaining why Vancouver’s standing near the bottom of the Western Conference isn’t a concern just yet. “We’re looking to play well and perform well, and do that for a season.”

It’s true that Vancouver has a long way to go yet in their MLS campaign, but a good performance on Saturday, when the Whitecaps host FC Dallas at BC Place, would do a lot to put the scoring-woes storyline to bed.

Like any battle worth watching, it should be a tough one: Dallas currently sits atop the league standings with a 5-1-2 record, and they’ve proven in their performances so far this season that they’re a very dangerous team.

Jacobson knows not to underestimate them. The 30-year-old MLS veteran spent four seasons with Dallas before joining New York City FC for their inaugural campaign; he was traded to Vancouver in March at his request (the California native wanted to live closer to his family on the West Coast).

The key to a result against his old team, says Jacobson, will be for the Whitecaps to be stronger in possession. Dallas has a very disciplined and organized defensive unit, which allows their offence a lot of freedom on the pitch.

“A lot of it’s going to be in the transition when we do lose the ball, to make sure we get guys behind it,” Jacobson said. “They have some very fast, creative players, so it can be very tough to defend.”

While Jacobson spent several years in Dallas, he doesn’t draw any extra motivation from facing a former team. “I try to take every game the same,” he explained.

That’s not the case for 35-year-old forward Blas Perez, whom the Whitecaps acquired from Dallas in February.

Perez spent his entire MLS career with the club before coming up north to wear the blue and white. He was a fan favourite in his time with Dallas, though he spent much of last season coming off the bench.

The six-foot-one Panamanian was left off the roster for last week’s matchup with Real Salt Lake as he dealt with some hamstring tightness. But he participated in training this week and insisted to a crowd of reporters that he was ready to go. The player known as Super Raton (“Mighty Mouse”) called the opportunity to face Vancouver’s Western Conference rivals “an exciting and motivating match.”

“I think we’ll definitely be out there helping him, and we’ll want to win that game for Blas,” winger Kekuta Manneh said. “He’s a big character for us in the locker room right now, making everyone smile and just helping the younger players and trying to make everyone around him better.”

Dallas, meanwhile, has a similar storyline in motion. Midfielder Mauro Rosales, who spent two years with Vancouver, was sent south in exchange for the rights to Perez. Saturday’s game will mark his return to BC Place in a new uniform.

If the Whitecaps are going to prevail, they’ll need some of the players who haven’t quite lived up to their potential thus far to come through, namely Manneh, Cristian Techera and Christian Bolanos.

The list also includes striker Octavio Rivero, though given his scoring drought—the 24-year-old last scored in September—there have been calls for benching the struggling designated player in order to give some new faces an extended run.

One such player is Japanese striker Masato Kudo, who was mostly invisible when he came on as a late-game substitute last week versus RSL, but whose movement across the pitch was impressive in his first MLS start earlier this month. Though Kudo has zero goals through five appearances so far, he requires service from his teammates, so Vancouver’s midfield especially—missing captain Pedro Morales, who’s still out with a hip strain—will need to connect with him if he’s going to make some magic.

Dallas, too, is missing its captain due to injury (Matt Hedges underwent surgery for a torn meniscus in his left knee earlier this week), but the team will see the return of playmaker Mauro Diaz, who reportedly made the trip to Vancouver. The 25-year-old midfielder has been sidelined with a hamstring injury; he could provide a burst of creative energy on offence if he makes an appearance on Saturday.

As Robinson prepares his team to face Dallas, he’ll be considering not just the stakes of this game—for optics reasons at least, a result seems crucial—but the strategy going forward. Vancouver faces two more matches in a one-week span: a Wednesday evening game at home versus Sporting Kansas City, followed by a Saturday road game versus New York City FC. That’ll be a tough and tiring string of tests in quick succession, though Robinson is taking them as they come—and preaching patience.

“We’ve just got to keep going,” said Robinson, acknowledging the slump his team’s been on.

“I think we just believe in the process, keep doing what we’re doing,” offered Manneh. “We went on the same slump last year. It happened and we changed it. I think we can do it again.”

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