Game Review: DC United 1 - 2 Columbus

For a while now, my frame for looking at this season has been offense bad, defense good. The offense has been a talented but disjointed mess, with the defense providing some experienced cohesion to make up for the lack of production up top. Well, so much for that.

I guess that frame was also fairly ignorant, because thinking back, it ignored a major feature of the season thus far. DC's opponents have had ample opportunity to slash and run against this back line. Runs may get shut down with a timely tackle, but most of them have come with speed and numbers, finding plenty of passing lanes. Teams simply look dangerous against DC. They seem to almost constantly press ahead of the defense, which runs to play catch up and relies on far too many last-minute displays of skill to clear the ball.

And then there's the offense. If I got the defense wrong, I'm pretty sure I've tagged the attack nicely. Where other teams slash, we dither. The ball cycles around the midfield and then slowly makes its way up the field, by which time there are eight opposing players in the box. Thinking about the number of passes and shots that United have tried to thread through a jungle of legs is painful. Contrasting it to the way opponents swoop in on our own half is just mind-boggling.

Simply put, DC is slow; mostly slow in terms of raw physical speed and glacial in moving the ball up the field. This might not be a terrible problem if we, say, used the flanks or had a team of pinpoint touch and accuracy. But the current team is not set up that way by any means. It's worth noting that all our league goals have been garbage goals. We haven't been the beneficiaries of sustained build up or accurate shots, but rather the recipients of luck during goal mouth scrambles. Play has been unimaginative, and so have the players. A sobering thought: right now we have one forward in whom I have even a sliver of trust, and his name is Santino Quaranta. Glad we have that second DP slot now?

In conclusion, we have Emilio. I have no explanation. Maybe he's sulking in the wake of contract talks that didn't flatter him. Maybe he got too comfortable with MLS. Maybe he simply can't work with Gallardo, whose passes are constantly ahead of Emilio both physically and mentally, as if meant for a quality of player that the Brazilian may never achieve. All I know is that he's uniformly awful thus far, and awful in ways that even his slump of early last year didn't touch. His speed, touch, shot, and decision making are horrendous, and it's time for him to sit for a while.

MOTM - For all of the futility, Gallardo delivered the best balls, literally and figuratively. His effort can't be faulted, and his vision on the field was the most productive by far.

Enjoyable Soccer That I Did Not Watch

On the whole it seemed like a fairly good weekend for Spurs and United, which meant, of course, that a perfect storm of outside forces and channel choice keep me from watching either. Setanta and Direct Kick continue to be my mortal enemies. On the other hand, I had a good day watching the Final Four and the goalless part of NY-Columbus and Chivas-RSL, the latter being mostly good for annoying other people at the bar who wanted to turn to "a real sport." The real sport turned out to be arena football, and the irony was lost on many.

I did manage to see the highlights of DC United's apparently deceptive 4-1 ass-kicking of Toronto. All of them were essentially garbage goals, which is a little worrisome when viewed out of context. But then again there were four of them, and every one featured a whole lot of black running around the six yard box, so that's progress of a kind. But the general tenor of post-game commentary was not terribly positive, and the MLS highlight package included more quality chances from a lousy 10-man team than you'd think permissible. I remain unconvinced, and I guess we'll see whether or not the progress is real come Wednesday.

As for Spurs, I saw not even highlights, but a 1-1 draw on the road against a good team seems to be about as much as you could ask for these days. Even over the Spurs BigSoccer boards, the apathy was fairly widely-acknowledged and the first "Rate the Season" threads have already sprung up. It's post-mortem time, and no lousy actual games can get in the way of uninformed speculation about next season

Game Review: Pachuca 2 - 0 DC United

Yesterday's CONCACAF game was deja vu to any Spurs fan who suffered through the loss to Newcastle on Sunday. Both games started with a promising, engeretic flurry for the good guys, but then slowly descended lower and lower into near-complete impotence. Every United botched pass, dribble into traffic, or sorry giveaway recalled the disaster at White Hart Lane to perfection. Only if DC had been wearing road whites could the flashback have been more complete.

So yes, that was an immensely frustrating game. Not in the sense that the team has been completely abject, but in the more needling way that every flaw the current roster was intended to fix seems to have gone untouched. For a team supposedly renovated around crisp passing, there was almost none of that at Pachuca. Dribbling into several defenders, or a giveaway, seemed to be the standard procedure in the rare moments United ventured over the halfway line. Fred had another energetic and mostly positive game, but it's seeming that for all his danger, he may never discover what the outside of the field is there for. And even at the back, where performance has been largely as advertised, there was Martinez's gaping error on the second goal. All of it combined for twenty decent minutes and then a neverending cycle of goal kick/giveaway-oncoming rush-blown Pachuca chance-set piece-repeat. 2-0 was a miracle given the shape of the game after the half.

(Interlude: I will not blame Zach Wells for playing the high-percentage shot on the first goal. He got beat by a ludicrous goal, and that's that. Otherwise, I thought he had a solid game and deserved more than the 4 he got from Goff. Though, if trends continue, we will need to have a serious discussion about his distribution sometime next month.)

There are definitely excuses to be made about the altitude, but I would have found them more convincing had the same sloppiness not been evident from many players even in the first minutes. The guy I'm really thinking of here is Emilio, who is a shadow of himself right now. Really the only difference between him and Niell at present is the memory of last year. Otherwise, they had similar nights of frenzied but generally pointless running and forklift-like first touch. Gallardo was also iffy, going all over the place but still delivering more good intentions than good balls for the forwards.

It is still very early in the season, and the team is a work in progress, but to fail so meekly is still a little maddening. This team was built with CONCACAF in mind, lest we forget. And with each passing game, we inch closer the dividing line between "they haven't had time to gel" and "something is just wrong here." That line may be a lot closer if they can't summon a large amount of fight at RFK.

MOTM - Yeah, right. Honorable mention to Fred, but that's it.

Can I Admit the Following?

1. I just didn't care about last night's DC game. That is, of course, much easier to say the day before rather than the day of, when you still find yourself going to ridiculous lengths to watch the game and then fuming over score updates when you fail at the former. Such is the force of habit. But really, I care about CONCACAF right now, not our tradition season-opening loss. We will, however, leave last night's implications for said important game alone for now. There's only so much you can take in one weekend. And speaking of which...

2. I am having heretical thoughts about Juande Ramos. Already. Like, has he really done anything for the winning mentality of the players, who put up a very nice Potemkin village of resistance today? Or, has he been some lucky swings away from an Avram Grant-like substitution record instead of a tactical genius? I can't tell. Certainly he didn't put out the first team today, and it showed in spades (Michael Dawson, that will be quite enough, thanks). But it's now been two awful, embarassing home defeats since the Carling Cup, and it makes you wonder if he has in fact done those Jose-like magic tricks with the mental toughness and heart of the team. It didn't look like it today.

Game Review: DC United 5 - 0 Harbour View FC

The sound we were hoping to hear tonight was "click." So we settled in for the first half and nothing was really audible. All of the ideas were in plain view, most being solid and beautifully crafted, but the execution lagged far behind. And then suddenly when the dam burst in the second half, with all of those gorgeous late runs and multiple-man rushes and more of Fred than we would have ever thought possible, it was still hard to tell if a "click" had floated in over that long-missed roar of the crowd.

One of my favorite things about soccer is the beauty of an unrealized play, and tonight was a showcase of frustrating art. It was impossible to watch yet another broken-up pass without salivating over the missed play that was just inches from fruition. That changed in the second half, with passes finally paying off and combination play picking up, but Harbour View's disaster of an offside trap seemed to say almost as much about the result as did DC's own performance. Whether the team has to adjust to Gallardo's passing or vice versa, the future certainly looked good provided, as usual, just a little more time to gell. In that respect, nothing has really been answered, since it was what we were saying before this series started as well.

As The DCenters would have it: "[W]hile the score may flatter United, it flatters United only in the same a nicely tailored dress flatters an otherwise beautiful woman: It's just that much more." There was much to love in the second half, especially the realization that I was happy enough actively root for Tino Quaranta to score a goal. The defense was uniformly solid and aggressive, the work of Wells reassuring, and fitness seemed to tick up from last week. With all that in mind, I hope and suspect that tonight was the first flash of coming brilliance. It also could have been nothing more than an exposure of Harbour View. But for now, there's really no way to tell and nothing to do but enjoy ourselves.

MOTM - Fred in a landslide. I can always do without the pacifier celebration, but he would have been the Tasmanian Devil tonight if Niell didn't have that resemblance long since wrapped up.