For the first time since 2009, the Fire are in the playoffs for back-to-back seasons – but this time, they didn’t get there under their own power, falling to the New England Revolution for the second time this year and failing to score for just the third time this season.
Here’s what we learned last night in Foxborough.
Life imitates art
In 2025, the Fire made the playoffs for the first time since 2017 and they did it in dramatic fashion, clinching off a dramatic win over Inter Miami in South Florida that was capped off with goals (including the eventual game winner) from Justin Reynolds and Brian Gutiérrez.
The rise of Fire homegrowns was one of a number of feel-good stories that year, and even if the team wasn’t always great (they couldn’t defend close matches for their lives), the vibes (almost) always were. This year, the Fire are objectively a better team in many ways but the vibes have been off, particularly since the departure of Hugo Cuypers.
That makes it all too fitting that the Fire qualified for the playoffs, not through a romantic win but instead, because a team far down in the table dropped points.
“We’re not celebrating,” Fire Head Coach Gregg Berhalter said after the game. “If you go inside that locker room, they are not celebrating. We are disappointed that we lost the game.”
That’s probably a good thing: Last year, making it to the postseason was the goal. This year? “We have higher aspirations for ourselves,” Berhalter said, later saying, “The message to the team after the game was, games like this against playoff teams, the margins are going to be razor-thin.”
The overall takeaway? “We need to understand what these games are about. We’re learning, and we’re going to continue to work hard.”
From here on out, that learning is going to have to happen off the pitch: Of the Fire’s four games, only two are against teams currently in a playoff position: Orlando City and the Colorado Rapids. Both are closer to fringe postseason teams than contenders, and anything past a first round exit would be a surprise for those squads.
The Fire have gotten wins against good teams this year, including a recent win against Vancouver, who look increasingly likely to finish atop the West, but even if they’ve put together strong performances against those kinds of teams, including against the Revs in this one, they haven’t consistently come away with results.
However they got in, the Fire deserve to be in the playoffs. But if they want to advance, they'll have to take a step forward that we haven't seen them do yet, at least, not with real consistency. It's not that they can't take that step, just, so far, they haven't.
You can’t brute force it past Matt Turner
In 2026, were the better team for all but maybe 20 minutes of the 180 they played against the Revs. They dominated possession, had 40 shots, with 12 of those on target, racked up 4.3 xG per MLS’s model (though other models have the Fire at around 3.0 xG for the pair of games) and scored once for all of their troubles.
Why?
First, the play of Matt Turner, who has once again been the best pure shot stopper in MLS this season. He is far from a perfect goalie – as friend of MenInRed97 Andrew Claussen has pointed out, he’s basically worthless at building out if you’re playing a high line, as the USMNT have done under Pochettino – but the he’s excellent at the “keep ball out of net” part of the job description.
Still, the Revs have allowed 41 goals this season, and with where the Fire are in the standings, a lot of those have statistically come from worse teams than the Fire.
So what weren’t the Fire doing? One is getting truly good chances on target.
Using American Soccer Analysis’s “Where Goals Come From” framework, none of the Fire’s shots have been top-quality scoring chances. In this game, six of the team’s 19 shots were “average” and the rest were “poor.” The Fire’s one goal in the first meeting between the two this season came off of one of a handful of “good” chances.
Against most goalkeepers, the Fire did enough to get on the board, and frankly, probably get the win. Not against Turner.
The Revs didn’t have a lot in that game, but what they did have was a quality chance created by Carles Gil, one of the best creative players in the league, that set up Matt Polster for his 12th career MLS goal.
The Fire didn’t have a guy doing that. Despite that, however…
The attack looks better with Gutman
Scientists like doing controlled experiments. In many cases, that’s hard to do, so you control what you can. The Fire weren’t going to play the same game against the same team multiple times, but Gregg Berhalter did try two players at left back in place of Andrew Gutman, a longtime chisel-it-in-stone starter when he’s been healthy.
The experiment didn’t go that well. Neither Noah Allen nor Leo Barroso did much for the Fire going forward as Andrew Gutman does, but it seems like that was in the game plan, because the team tried running a lot more through the right side with Jonathan Dean.
Gutman was back in the XI for this one, and the attack, although far from perfect, looked a lot more dynamic, and the Fire’s shape in the attack generally looked a lot more convincing than it had in recent games (with the very significant asterisk that it’s hard to evaluate a team’s shape when they’re shorthanded, as the Fire have been in their previous two outings).
There’s two obvious retorts to that: First, that the Fire didn’t manage to score a goal, but 1) it’s soccer, that happens sometimes and 2) I’m not sure you can put that at Gutman’s feet. He created chances, which is one of the things he’s there to do.
Second, he was involved in defending the play that led to Polster’s goal, and wasn’t able to recover the ball from Polster. The response there is that he slowed Gil down and didn’t allow for the skilled attacker to cut in on goal himself, and it really isn’t his fault that Polster, who entered the top of the box at a literal walking pace, was left entirely unmarked with four Fire players nearby.
Hanche-Olsen looks pretty good
When the Fire signed him, Andreas Hanche-Olsen looked like a quality center back pickup for the 2027 sprint season. 2026? That was more of an open question given that he has been returning from an injury and so hasn’t played much in the past year.
Last week, we got our first real look at Hanche-Olsen when he came on at half after Jack Elliott was sent off. I thought he looked decent, considering the situation; on The Bonfire, John said he thought he looked pretty rough. The reason I rated him higher, I think, is because of the situation: coming in as an unexpected sub at half with his team down, and because I thought his performance got stronger as the night went on.
This week, Hanche-Olsen got his first start and looked more than capable in the back line alongside Mbekezli Mbokazi, winning four of his six total duels, including a pair of each on the ground and in the air.
He held his position well, he and Mbokazi seemed to communicate well and he got a header off of Zinckernagel’s corner early in the second half, sending it to what would have been a dangerous part of the goal in front of a screened Turner – but Turner was too well-screened, and the shot was ultimately blocked on its way to the net.
One game is one game, but he didn’t have much visible rust in this one, and Fire fans should feel a lot more comfortable with the team’s center-back depth going into the playoffs.
