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.

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.