Greed dooms FC Dallas in the end

So, FC Dallas Coach Steve Morrow is “disappointed” in his players, is he? A stronger emotion surely was called for.

What the Irishman should have done after Dallas’ ludicrous 3-3 tie Sunday with the defending MLS champion Houston Dynamo was rip into his squad big time.

A week or so ago, Dallas allowed a 1-0 lead over Chivas USA to turn into a 1-1 tie very late in the game when overpaid ($400,000-a-year) Mexican defender Dulio Davino, handed Maykel Galindo a goal on a silver platter. This time around, the Hoops were leading Houston, 3-2, in stoppage time and were only seconds away from a win.

But instead of holding onto the ball and letting time expire, the Dallas greenhorns got greedy and tried to add a fourth goal. Had there been more time left, say 10 or 15 minutes, that might have been a sound approach, but with less than a minute left, it was naïve.

The outcome was inevitable. Houston gained possession, attacked on the fast break and rookie Geoff Cameron, making his MLS debut, banged the tying goal in off the crossbar virtually as time expired.

It was two more points unnecessarily lost by Dallas, points that could well come back to haunt the team in October.

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Don’t be surprised if Houston Coach Dominic Kinnear is shopping for a goalkeeper this week.

After Canadian international and five-year MLS veteran Pat Onstad was forced out of the game by a shoulder injury Sunday, the Dynamo sent in a player who apparently had just gotten off the bus outside Robertson Stadium.

Goalie Tony Caig was appalling. He was way out of position when Kenny Cooper lobbed a shot over him and into the net. He was unable to hold on to the shot that earned Cooper a second goal, and he was not agile enough to get down low to smother or even deflect ArturoAlvarez’s shot that gave Dallas its third goal.

Caig, who turns 34 on Friday, is an English goalkeeper who was picked up by Houston in late January. Considering how many talented American goalkeepers there are out there, it was a strange acquisition by the Dynamo.

And if Caig thinks FC Dallas was tough, wait until Wednesday night when he has to face Saprissa on its home field in Costa Rica in a winner-take-all CONCACAF Champions Cup semifinal.

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Toronto FC continues to stumble.

After being blanked, 2-0, in its season opener at Columbus, Coach John Carver’s hapless squad was trounced, 4-1, in its home opener by D.C. United. The loss brought its all-time record to 6-19-7, with no reprieve in sight.

Or is there?

Word out of Honduras on Monday was that 2004 MLS most valuable player Amado Guevara had played his final game for Motagua over the weekend and was about to return to MLS.

In fact, during the match Guevara lifted his jersey to reveal a T-shirt bearing the words, “Thank you, Motagua. I keep you in my heart.” In Spanish, of course.

Toronto officials denied Monday that any deal had been done. The line on Guevara during his first stint in the league: 115 games, 34 goals, 37 assists.

His Toronto debut could come against the Galaxy on Sunday in Carson, where Guevara can renew acquaintance with Chivas USA Coach Preki, who sent him packing last season because of a perceived – indeed, obvious – lack of effort.

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Bowing to the inevitable, the new Seattle team in MLS will be known as … Seattle Sounders FC. The team colors will be blue, green and shale and the team logo will feature the Seattle Space Needle.

Bit of an anticlimax, isn’t it?

Owners Joe Roth, Paul Allen, Adrian Hanauer and Drew Carey had wanted to go in a different direction, and the league had hoped for that too, but tradition proved too strong. The Sounders were a hugely popular North American Soccer League club in the 1970s and had stuck around ever since as a minor league team after the NASL folded in the mid ’80s.

In online voting to pick a team name, 49% of the 14,500 participants selected Sounders as a write-in choice, rejecting the other options by at least a 20% margin.

So Seattle Sounders FC it is, and there’s a countdown clock on the team’s website to its first game at Qwest Field.

Times staff writer Jaime Cardenas contributed to this report.

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