Baseball may not mean much in Rochdale, England, but Lewis O’Brien didn’t need to watch America’s pastime to realize how much winning the World Series meant to fans of the Dodgers.

“The atmosphere around the place has been completely different since the championship,” said the 26-year-old midfielder, who arrived in Los Angeles this summer on loan from Nottingham Forest. “It’s always a good thing for communities to win things, as well as for your own personal team. Hopefully we can take some of that energy from this week and bring it to Sunday’s game.

Training for the second game of the first three games of the MLS Cup Playoffs against the Vancouver Whitecaps, while the The Dodgers celebrated With nearly 300,000 fans in attendance Friday, O’Brien’s Los Angeles Football Club teammates and coaches weren’t yet planning their own double-decker bus rides.

“It’s an incredible feat. Congratulations to the Dodgers and Peter Guber, who is also a part of our LAFC family,” said head coach Steve Cherundolo, whose 2022 MLS Cup-winning debut ended with a quick visit around Christmas Tree Lane which was cheered by 5,000 fans at Exposition Park. .

“It’s wonderful to see Angelenos happy and proud of their team,” Cherundolo added. “We would like to give them the same thing in a few weeks, but we try not to think about it too much. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. We’re in the first round of the playoffs, so there’s a long way to go until some sort of ceremony takes place. We will focus on the next task at hand, which is playing in a difficult environment in Vancouver.

If being healthy and fielding a deep bench are advantages in the playoffs – both were essential in 2022 – LAFC is in a great position as it meets the Whitecaps for the 11th time in two years.

“You can think of a full 90 minutes,” said Cherundolo, who explained that this was the second time in 2024 that he had a full squad to deploy. “You can have all the options, meaning you can start very offensive and go defensive to finish games or vice versa, start conservative and finish offensively. Or you make a mix.

Repeatedly defeating a familiar opponent presents its own set of problems, as neither side changes personality and players can learn enough about each other to create stalemates, O’Brien said. Having played a dozen consecutive matches in the LAFC midfield since the end of August, the Englishman has already played three times against Vancouver.

“There are always little things that you can pick up from games and little things that we watched in the videos to try to change for the next game,” he said.

After facing the Whitecaps 2-1 at BMO Stadium last weekendLAFC is poised to sweep the Canadiens for a second straight playoff season on the artificial turf at BC Place, where they are 3-0-1 in all competitions over the past two years.

In LAFC’s final regular season road game in Vancouver on October 13, forward Mateusz Bogusz scored in 32 seconds and played a central role in Ilie Sanchez’s 93rd-minute game-winner.

If LAFC avoids a playoff game at BMO Stadium next Friday, that would represent eight straight wins starting with the US Open Cup at the end of September.