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.

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.