Pain of Loss Lingers for Galaxy Five

There are five left.

Five Galaxy players who were there, rain-soaked and mud-splattered, when Major League Soccer’s first championship inexplicably slipped from the team’s grasp three years ago.

Now, Robin Fraser, Cobi Jones, Mauricio Cienfuegos, Greg Vanney and Jorge Salcedo are back. The mud long ago was washed from their jerseys, but the bitter memory has not been as easy to erase.

“I haven’t ever watched it and I never will,” Fraser bluntly answered when asked if he had ever seen a videotape of the Galaxy’s 3-2 overtime loss to Washington D.C. United in 1996.

“It’s not talked about much,” Jones said.

Small wonder. Los Angeles was leading, 2-0, with 17 minutes to play on a monsoon-like afternoon at Foxboro Stadium when its dream collapsed.

A headed goal by D.C. United’s Tony Sanneh off Marco Etcheverry’s cross cut the lead to 2-1 in the 73rd minute. Shawn Medved then scored off the rebound of his own shot against Galaxy goalkeeper Jorge Campos in the 81st minute to tie it.

Eddie Pope applied the coup de grace, heading in a corner kick by Etcheverry four minutes into sudden-death overtime.

Just like that, in 21 agonizing minutes, a championship was lost. And won.

The victory started a dynasty, D.C. United winning the MLS title again in 1997, losing the final in 1998 and reaching it again in 1999.

Today, in the same Foxboro Stadium and against the same opponent, the Galaxy will try to set matters straight.

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Cienfuegos is the second-oldest of the five.

The Salvadoran midfielder has had enough successes and disappointments in his long career to keep a level head. While training at the Rose Bowl last week, he said he would rather look forward than back.

“I don’t like to look at the past,” he said. “What I remember is everything up until the last 17 minutes of that game, all the positives that happened, that we had the game in hand.

“Unfortunately, the outcome wasn’t what we wanted, but we played well and that’s what we expect to do again.”

Salcedo was traded by the Galaxy before the 1997 season, then reacquired this year. His thoughts on the first MLS final are mixed.

“I have good and bad memories,” he said. “First of all, the fact that we made it to the final in the first year of the league, that’s a good memory.

“I think it was my best game of the whole season. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out the way we wanted. The biggest difference between that team and this team is experience. This team knows how to close out games.

“It was a bad feeling, losing. We want to have better memories of the final and we’re all hoping that it’s different.”

The weather played a huge part in the 1996 game. Heavy rain left the field sodden, even flooded in places. The 44-degree temperature caused Campos to don cotton gloves and to shiver for 94 mostly miserable minutes.

And then there was the wind, gusting at 30-50 mph and driving the rain before it.

“It definitely changes everything, tactically,” Jones said of the wet field. “The ball was in the air a lot more. It was horrible because it was windy too, so when you put it in the air, you didn’t know where it was going to end up. There were puddles all over the field, so you couldn’t dribble. It was just about kicking the ball and running and seeing what happened.”

The conditions negated Jones’ speed and his ability to beat players one on one.

“It really wasn’t conducive to my style of play,” he said. “It changed me into a player who was basically just doing a lot of work, trying to hold the ball and keep the ball.”

The only thing that might have caused a postponement was lightning, but it never struck.

“It seemed like there was a monsoon that passed over Boston, to the point that we weren’t even sure we were going to play the game because it was so bad,” Salcedo said. “But because of the magnitude of the game, we had to.

“You can stand rain and you can stand cold, but when it’s windy, it’s the worst condition for a soccer player. When we woke up, it was all three of those--cold, rainy and windy. So we knew it was going to be tough conditions.

“But from the outset, we established that we were still going to play. We did play well. We scored early, [Eduardo] Hurtado scored on a pass from Cienfuegos, and we knew we could play despite the conditions.”

Indeed, the Galaxy took a 2-0 lead when Chris Armas scored an unassisted goal 11 minutes into the second half. Things were looking good.

Six minutes after Washington cut L.A.’s lead in half, Lothar Osiander, then the Galaxy coach, made two substitutions. Salcedo was one of the players taken off.

“I was on the sideline, thinking there was no chance we were going to lose,” he said. “We were talking about what we were going to do after the game and the feeling of being the first champion of the league.

“They scored their goals from set pieces. All three of them. If you allow one, OK. Two is nearly impossible. But three? It was terrible what happened to us.”

Etcheverry was the cause of the Galaxy’s downfall. Two goals came off his free kicks and Pope’s championship-winning goal came off the Bolivian’s pinpoint corner kick in overtime.

The wind, it seemed, didn’t bother “El Diablo.”

“It seemed to all change when Jorge got substituted,” Galaxy Coach Sigi Schmid said.

“Set plays are a reflection of who’s serving the ball, and you’ve got one of the best in the game serving the ball in Marco Etcheverry. That’s what makes their set plays so outstanding. The key is service.”

Etcheverry will be pulling the strings again today, and Schmid is well aware of the havoc he can wreak.

“We can stop Etcheverry’s service within the flow of the game, but we can’t stop it on set plays,” Schmid said. “So we have to make sure we don’t commit fouls in bad parts of the field.”

In other words, close to the Galaxy net, where the defense does its most important work. Fraser and Vanney are defenders. Both remember 1996 all too well.

“The prevailing memory is of walking off the field,” Fraser said. “I remember where I was when the [winning] goal was scored. I remember walking off the field. I remember walking into the locker room and seeing everything covered in plastic because they thought we were going to win and that we’d be spraying champagne everywhere. Those are my biggest memories of that day.

“Disappointment obviously goes away with time, but I’ve never watched that game on tape. If you’re asking me if I can comfortably watch it, the answer is no.

“I’ve watched the first half, but I could never watch the second half of that game. It’s the kind of thing that sticks in your craw for quite a while.”

The memory haunts Vanney too.

“You get over it eventually,” he said. “You have to if you’re going to continue playing. But it’s always in the back of your mind.

“I was so confident [of winning]. We were so much in control. The crowd [of 34,643] was quiet because it was mostly a D.C. crowd. It was certainly a game that we should have held on to the lead and it’s frustrating that we didn’t.

“There’s five of us left, and we’re going to go back and try to rectify as much as we can what we missed out on in 1996.”

Schmid isn’t making an issue of the first final.

“I don’t think we’re going to dwell on it,” he said. “The guys who were in that game know about it. They know what the score was and I think they remember how it happened. I don’t think I need to remind them or tell them.

“I think that’s motivation right there.”

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GALAXY vs. D.C. UNITED; 10:30 a.m. PST today at Foxboro, Mass., Channel 7