Chicago Fire get encouraging win over Crew

The team that had nowhere to go but up is showing it might finally be going in that direction.

The Chicago Fire finished dead last in Major League Soccer the last two seasons but now finds itself comfortably toward the top of the early-season Eastern Conference standings after Saturday afternoon's 1-0 victory against visiting Columbus Crew SC.

Yet clearly this is still a team trying to figure out who it is and what it's capable of.

For instance, is it the Fire (2-1-2, 8 points) that won the first-half possession battle with 53 percent? Or is it the team that saw the ball only 35 percent of the second half?

The surest sign of improvement is that the Fire made Nemanja Nikolic's 22nd-minute goal stand up all the way to the final whistle.

The late, heartbreaking goals allowed in the past never came Saturday, an indication of improved confidence in the Fire and poor finishing by a Crew (3-2-1, 10 points) side that had been playing well lately.

"I was very disappointed with how we lost 2 points in the Montreal game (a 2-2 draw last week at home)," Fire midfielder Dax McCarty said. "I thought (the) performance warranted 3 points, but we didn't finish and we didn't close the game out well and we didn't defend well. And today I thought we learned from our mistakes. Defensively, we were a little bit more solid."

While the Fire defended better Saturday, it didn't take advantage of the scoring chances it created for itself.

"We could make it easier on the pitch to control the games if we win, maybe, games 3-0," said newly signed superstar midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, showing he's heard about the club's recent history, "because when you win 1-0 it's always like the last five, 10 minutes you never know if somehow maybe they score a goal and it's 1-1 and it's disappointing. For us I want that we come to the point where we score the second goal or third goal and control the game."

McCarty - who assisted Nikolic's goal with a perfectly weighted through ball - played against the bumbling Fire teams of the past several seasons. He's encouraged by the progress this group is showing.

"I would say that there's a good mentality in the group," he said. "I would say that there's a toughness about the group that says that we're going to make it really tough for teams to come and play here.

"Turning a team that's had a bunch of losing seasons and not a great mentality the last couple of years into a winner overnight is not easy. It's never a realistic possibility. But slowly but surely, if you create building blocks and you do the right things on the field, slowly the mentality starts to shift."

It does indeed seem to be shifting.