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ӣ����Ƶ City SC goalkeeper Roman Burki is not only the team’s captain, but its conscience. As the hands-down most successful and accomplished player on the team, his words carry a gravity in the dressing room and on the field that no one compares to.

And right now, he’s happy.

“For me, it feels great,” he said Thursday when asked about the events of the past two weeks. “It’s great to have some fresh air, it feels like a new start. Obviously, we are the reason why it didn’t work out before these two weeks, and now, I think we can see that the change of the game style, the game play that we want to achieve on the field, fits the team. Everybody wants to be involved. Everybody wants to press. We have a better understanding of when are we doing things, so it feels fresh. I love that Lutz (Pfannenstiel) took the decision and made the decision to give someone the chance that’s already in the club.”

David Critchley, who took over from Olof Mellberg after the team’s disastrous start to the season, will coach his third game as interim coach on Saturday, when City SC faces the Los Angeles Galaxy at 3:30 at Energizer Park. On paper, the game doesn’t look like much: the teams are the last two teams in the Western Conference standings, City SC with three wins, the Galaxy with one, after 17 games. The teams are 27th and 30th overall.

But the stakes are also, relatively, high. It’s probably too late for the defending champion Galaxy, which won its first game of the season last weekend, to get a playoff spot, and City SC’s position isn’t that much better. But there’s still some light left for City SC, and if it’s going to get back in the race, it definitely needs to win games against the few teams beneath it in the standings.

For Burki, the belief is restored, and for City SC, if Burki believes, the team believes.

“To be honest, if you lose or don’t win, like, 12 games in a row, it hurts,” he said. “There’s not just like, ‘Let’s go again, next week is another …’ At one point you’re questioning what’s going on. … Now we see improvement. We see how the team is playing, how the team is asking questions of the coach. What can we do in this situation? What can I do better in these situations? And we have a lot of meetings. We talk a lot, so you see definitely the fresh air, like that we have kind of like a new start, and everybody wants to improve and get better as a team.”

One thing that’s change is Burki’s involvement in the offense. It’s up, which is another thing that makes him happy.

“I think I wasn’t used as much in the first half or first quarter of the season,” Burki said, “because we didn’t really have a plan to play out from the back. Sometimes we try to play out from back, but we never really had a plan how we’re going to do this. Now, everything is a lot clearer, so I know exactly when Timo (Baumgartl) is going to take over my position, or one of the center backs, and I drop down, and I know exactly when I have the ball, when I go in between both center backs, and it’s just a lot more clearer. And for me, that’s one of my strengths. Ball on my feet too.”

This figures to be another challenging week for City SC, which will be down three key players in the middle of its lineup. Eduard Lowen will miss his second game in a row with a sore hamstring, Chris Durkin’s knee is still bothering him, and Henry Kessler is also out. Since hurting his knee before the Vancouver game on April 19, Kessler, who had probably City SC’s most valuable player over the first eight games, has played just three times, twice off the bench. He went the full 90 minutes against Portland, the first time he had gone the full 90 in two months. Jannes Horn, who Critchley said the team was being careful with last week when he was held out of the lineup as he returned from an injury, and Conrad Wallem, who missed the Portland game with a red card, are back, along with forward Cedric Teuchert. Meanwhile, the Galaxy is coming off its first win of the season.

Even coming off a loss where the team squandered a 1-0 lead, City SC is feeling good about itself and the progress it believes it has made under Critchley.

“We have to be confident,” Burki said, “and I think the more you have the ball, the more confident you will get because having the ball is showing strength, I would say. Maybe you saw against Portland, we made them run a lot in the heat, especially the front line. So, I think that’s one way to do it, and that’s something we need in our playing style.”

“They enjoy playing in this system and in this style,” Critchley said. “So, for us, when we attack, we attack with Roman as the deepest player. When we defend, we defend with the nine and Klauss as the highest player. So, it’s a group that feels very connected together, and even though the result didn’t go our way, there were a lot of numbers. When we look at the field, say, we look at the possession, the (expected goals), there’s a lot of objective data there that will show you. If we continue behaving on the field the way we behave, we’re going to win a lot more games than we’ll lose.”

That’s what City SC is going to need to make the playoffs, about two wins for every loss the rest of the way.