Coach says Galaxy lacks ‘leadership,’ even with Beckham, Donovan

The Galaxy’s 2008 roster includes U.S. national team captain Landon Donovan, Guatemala national team captain Carlos Ruiz and former England national team captain David Beckham.

So it was strange to hear Galaxy Coach Ruud Gullit on Saturday night talking about the “lack of leadership” on the field during the team’s 2-1 loss to the New York Red Bulls.

True, Ruiz remains sidelined because of a knee injury, but Donovan and Beckham have played every one of the team’s 630 minutes this season. Between them they have scored 11 of the Galaxy’s 14 goals, but the team has won only two of seven games.

In part, the bleak record is because the Galaxy lacks quality and experience in key positions. But it is also because neither Donovan, Beckham, nor anyone else on the roster is the sort of calm but vocal on-field leader able to organize the players around him and get them to recognize what needs to be done in certain situations.

Beckham and Donovan are too busy trying to create goals, and veteran defenders such as Greg Vanney and Chris Klein are too busy trying to stop opposing teams from scoring. The lack of a take-charge central midfielder is glaringly obvious.

Not for the first time, Gullit pointed out how coaches in the NBA and NFL can call timeouts and can run the games from the sideline, whereas in soccer coaches rely on the players being intelligent enough to sort things out themselves.

That is a little bit of buck-passing on the Dutchman’s part, but he does have a point.

Gullit was particularly unhappy at the way the Galaxy gave up the winning goal only a minute or so after tying the score, and he bemoaned the players’ inability to “use their heads.”

Contrast that with the comments made by New York’s Juan Pablo Angel, who scored the game winner: “We were upset for having given up the goal, but I think the way we reacted leaves us all feeling good. They could easily have taken control of the game, but we didn’t let them, and that’s the most satisfactory thing from the game.”

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Beckham managed to stroll into the postgame news conference about 80 minutes after the final whistle Saturday and then talked about the Galaxy being “careless at certain points” and about how the game had been “a learning curve” for some players.

“There are going to be some games we are going to play well and some we are going to play bad,” he said.

With losses to Colorado, Toronto and New York, even though Donovan and Beckham were on the field, there is justifiable concern about how the Galaxy will do once those two, along with Ruiz and possibly Canadian defender Ante Jazic, have to leave for international games, including World Cup qualifying.

“When teams are clever enough to figure out how to stop certain plays, we have to find other ways of getting around them and tonight we couldn’t find that,” Beckham said. “It was just one of those nights.”

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It was just one of those days for Chivas USA, too, as Coach Preki’s injury-decimated team was taught a soccer lesson by the New England Revolution in a 2-1 loss on Sunday.

One of the Revolution players was former Galaxy defender Chris Albright, who joked that he had almost wandered into the Galaxy locker room at halftime before being pointed in the right direction.

Albright said he had settled in well in New England, where Coach Steve Nicol and assistant Paul Mariner have built one of the most stable and successful teams in MLS – a lack of league titles notwithstanding.

“It’s a good group of guys,” Albright said of his new teammates. “The coaches have played at a really high level [Nicol for Scotland and Mariner for England] and kind of let the older guys on the team, not control the team, but set such a good work ethic and impress it every day. I think that’s what makes the team go.

“The best players on this team show up and put in 110% every day. That just permeates through the team. They just stay level-headed and they never get too panicked about anything, and I think that’s why they’ve been so successful for such a long time.”

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One highlight that went virtually unnoticed at the Home Depot Center on Sunday came in the 16th minute, when Revolution and former U.S. national team midfielder Steve Ralston became the first player in MLS history to reach the 30,000-minute mark.

Ralston, 34, an avid fisherman when he’s not chasing a soccer ball, owns league records for minutes played (30,063), games (340), starts (337), assists (122) and game-winning assists (34).

The Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, N.Y., is already building a display case for him.

For comments or questions on soccer, e-mail: grahame.jones@latimes.com.