Caleb Folan’s improvement is just in time for the Rapids

This led to a meme that the 'Caleb Folan experiment has failed', which I've always found strange because Folan is  not really an experiment but a simple story of a classic target forward adjusting to a new league. Fortunately, patience has started to pay off a bit and those of us who have expected Folan to get better as the season went along have been rewarded with some great performances out of the big man, leading to his spot tied for the team lead in goals.

The mark of a goalscorer is not necessarily how many goals he gets into the net – everybody can have a dry spell despite playing well as Conor Casey did for his first few appearances of the season before he went on that six goal tear – but to say that his play at the start of the year was a simple 'dry spell' would be a bit too nice to the guy. He was playing flat out terribly at times and passably at best in the other times. Caleb looked slow – we're talking 'Conor Casey' levels of slow here – and uninterested in getting physical with defenders as his leaps for headers never seemed to reach the ball. When it came to shots… well, what shots?

While his goal against Seattle didn't seem like much at the time, it's actually started a decent little goal-scoring rip for the Irishman. Caleb has started to play physically like we never thought we'd see from him after some of his earlier appearances in the year, though that red card against that diving bastard Juninho was a bit of an abberation of what we meant when we said we wanted him to play physical.

Another underrated use for Folan he's shown has been as an almost automatic penalty taker, something the Rapids usually don't have when Casey is out. His two PKs on the season have both been taken very well and with no hesitation. With the playoffs often coming down to penalty kicks, keep your eye on that.

Caleb's still got a ways to go to become worthy of the overpayment that the Rapids gave him salary-wise to get him out of the Championship but his play has been quite bright as of late and if the Rapids are to make another run to the championship game of MLS and win another title, his play will be absolutely vital to the team's successes. Remember, it was not the players like Omar Cummings who won the title for Colorado last season, but the big man up front who scored the gritty goals when the team needed them.