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

“The atmosphere in this 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 good for communities to win things, as well as for your own personal team. Hopefully, we can bring some of that energy from this week and carry it into the game on Sunday.”

Training for Game 2 of the MLS Cup Playoffs best-of-3 opening round series against the Vancouver Whitecaps while the The Dodgers celebrated With nearly 300,000 fans on Friday, O’Brien’s Los Angeles Football Club teammates and coaches weren’t yet contemplating their own double-decker bus rides.

“It is an amazing feat. Congratulations to the Dodgers and Peter Guber, part of our LAFC family as well,” said head coach Steve Cherundolo, whose MLS Cup-winning debut in 2022 ended with a quick run down Christmas Tree Lane that was applauded by 5,000 fans in Exposition Park. .

“It’s wonderful to see Angelenos happy and proud of their team,” Cherundolo added. “We would love to give them the same thing in a couple of weeks, but we try not to think about it too much. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We’re in the first round of the playoffs, so there’s a lot of ground to cover until any kind 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 deploying a deep bench are advantages in the postseason (both were vital in 2022), LAFC is in a great position facing the Whitecaps for the 11th time in two years.

“You can think about a full 90 minutes,” said Cherundolo, who explained that this is the second time in 2024 that he has a full roster to deploy. “You can have all the options, which means you can start very offensive and transition to defense to finish games or vice versa, start conservatively and finish offensively. Or you make a mix.”

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

“There’s always little things you can pick up in games and little things we’ve been watching on film trying to change for the next game,” he said.

After defeating the Whitecaps 2-1 at BMO Stadium last weekendLAFC is set to sweep the Canadiens for the second consecutive postseason on the artificial turf at BC Place, where they are 3-0-1 in all competitions over the past two years.

During LAFC’s final regular season road game in Vancouver on October 13, striker Mateusz Bogusz scored within 32 seconds and played a key role in Ilie Sánchez’s game-winning goal in the 93rd minute.

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