The Union’s next opponent, Mexico’s Atlas, has also been in a rut

If any fans think the Union have been struggling lately, the team they’re about to play in the Concacaf Champions League might have some sympathy.

Last season, Mexico’s Atlas won the playoffs in both halves of Liga MX’s split-season format. Those were the first league titles since 1951 — and the first trophies of any kind since 1968 — for the club that’s No. 2 in Guadalajara behind traditional power Chivas.

Think of the Jets compared to the Giants, the Angels to the Dodgers, and so on. That’s Atlas’ place in the world.

Especially Jets fan reading this, can guess what came next: Atlas fell flat on its face. The club finished 17th out of 18 teams in the first-half Torneo Apertura last fall, statistically the worst finish by a reigning champion in Mexican history.

In the ongoing second-half Torneo Clausura, Atlas is 12th in the standings. Its record is just 2-7-4; it’s one of four teams with 13 points, and 16th-place Tijuana has 12.

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That should give the Union some confidence as they prepare for Tuesday’s opening game of the quarterfinal series, at Subaru Park (8 p.m., FS1, TUDN). But naturally, Atlas has finally started to find some momentum right as it gets to town this week.

The spark came in the Champions League round of 16. Atlas lost the first game to Honduras’ Olimpia, 4-1, on the road on March 8. But in the home game on March 14, Atlas shockingly roared back for a 4-0 win and a 5-4 aggregate triumph.

Three days later, Atlas won a Liga MX game, 4-0, at Puebla. Then, this past Saturday, Atlas came from behind twice to tie Chivas 3-3 in what is not just Guadalajara’s big game, but one of the biggest rivalries in Mexican soccer: El Clásico Tapatío, to use its proper title.

“That’s become our characteristic,” Atlas manager Benjamín Mora said, “to never give up in any game. And we’ve carried that to our domestic league games now. We’ve come back, again and again, just like Rocky.”

That was the last thing the Union needed to see — and we don’t mean the Rocky cliché — as they deal with a short turnaround from Saturday’s scoreless tie with Kansas City. But it’s what they’ve got, and it raises Tuesday’s stakes even further.

So does the knowledge that the Union are starting the series at home instead of finishing it here, and goals scored on the road are the first tiebreaker. That incentivizes the Union to go for it out of the gate.

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“We know we have to score goals before we go to Mexico,” Union manager Jim Curtin said Monday at a news conference that drew more media from Mexico than from here.

But if that quote gave people hope that Curtin might change his usual defense-first ethos, too bad. He was back to it seconds later.

“I’ve seen in this competition, as a player before and now as a coach, you can’t necessarily win it in Leg 1, but you can certainly lose it,” he said. “If you just say, at home we have to go all-out attack, you see the players they have. If you do that and leave yourself exposed, it can be 2-, 3-0 pretty quickly. So we have to be very disciplined and smart in how we approach the game.”

Atlas’ key players to watch are veteran forwards Julián Quiñones and Julio Furch. Quiñones scored twice against Chivas and twice against Olimpia, while Furch is a 6-foot-2 line-leader up front. Atlas’ squad also has two MLS alumni in forwards Mauro Manotas (Houston Dynamo) and Edison Flores (D.C. United).

“What we don’t want in this match is it to go, Atlas gets a chance, we get a chance, and it goes end to end in a track meet,” Curtin said. “That game suits them very much with their individual attacking talent, how dynamic they are. We want to be nice and compact and organized — yes, we can go and transition, too, in certain moments, but we don’t want to play in a 4-3 game.”

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Inquirer staff writer Andrea Canales contributed to this report.