Galaxy’s Effort Takes a Turn for the Worse
Dang!
Isn’t that what they say around these parts, especially when the Texas State Fair is in town?
It might have been the mildest expletive on Coach Sigi Schmid’s lips Sunday afternoon after he watched the Galaxy self-destruct spectacularly at the Cotton Bowl.
Leading the Dallas Burn, 3-1, at halftime and with home-field advantage throughout Major League Soccer’s playoffs virtually in the bag, the Galaxy let the game and the opportunity slip away, losing, 4-3.
Schmid was livid.
At the final whistle, he stormed off the Galaxy bench, avoiding contact with his players. He spent several minutes staring blankly at the fireworks exploding at one end of the stadium.
Then he turned around and stared in the other direction. The view was no better. The scoreboard said it all: “We Win!!!”
The three exclamation marks might have stood for the three goals Dallas scored in a 12-minute spell in the second half, each one exploding like a land-mine in the middle of the shell-shocked Galaxy defense.
Coming into the match, the Galaxy was 45-1 in games in which it led at halftime. So much for that statistic.
“It’s tough to win a game when you get two penalties called against you,” Schmid said, tight-lipped. “When you’re up, 3-1, you’ve got to be able to preserve it. We just dropped back too much, we didn’t maintain possession of the ball any more. We gave them chances.
“It should have been our game. We gave it away. There’s not much to say right now.”
Not so, countered Burn Coach Dave Dir.
“We know L.A.’s a good team,” he said. “We happen to think we’re a pretty good team too. Sometimes we don’t feel we really get the respect from everybody.
“So from that standpoint, it was important that the guys made a statement in the second half, that they were here to play. We weren’t worried about winning or losing.”
The “statement” began when Galaxy defender Steve Jolley knocked Ariel Graziani to the turf in the 65th minute and Jason Kreis stepped up to score his second goal of the game on the resulting penalty kick.
That cut Los Angeles’ lead to 3-2 and gave the crowd of 13,208 hope.
Eight minutes later, the lead vanished, this time courtesy of an unstoppable 25-yard shot by midfielder Chad Deering that flew into the upper right corner of Kevin Hartman’s net. In the first half, a similar Deering shot had rattled the crossbar.
There was worse to come. In the 77th minute, Richard Farrer made a surging run through the Galaxy defense, exchanging give-and-go passes with Kreis along the way, and finished the move by burying the ball in the back of the net for the winning goal.
The assist made Kreis the first player in MLS history to record 15 goals and 15 assists in the same season. The striker leads the league with 17 goals and 15 assists.
“It really was a bizarre game,” Kreis said, “but also a very positive situation for us. We really rallied around each other. This should be a tremendous momentum-builder for us.”
The Burn (18-13) moved into a second-place tie with the Colorado Rapids in the Western Conference, three points behind Los Angeles.
It was a Kreis penalty-kick goal in the seventh minute that got the game off to an explosive start. Referee Noel Kenny ruled that the Galaxy’s Paul Caligiuri had tripped Kreis.
“I got in behind Caligiuri and he just took my feet out from under me,” Kreis said. “They can complain as much as they want, but when they make dangerous tackles like that in the box, that’s going to happen.”
The Galaxy recovered to take apparent charge of the game on goals in the 25th and 44th minutes by Carlos Hermosillo and an own goal by Dallas’ Brandon Pollard, who deflected a shot by Clint Mathis past his own goalkeeper in the 30th minute.
The loss was the Galaxy’s third in the last four games. Los Angeles (19-12) still can clinch first place in the West and home-field advantage in the playoffs with a win at Kansas City in the regular season finale on Saturday.
Around the MLS
Edwin Gorter scored two goals and the Miami Fusion (12-19) remained in contention for an MLS playoff bid with a 4-1 victory over the Columbus Crew (19-12) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The victory moves the Fusion into the fourth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference with 26 points, one more than New England. Miami closes its season at home Saturday against Colorado, while New England finishes at D.C. United on the same day.
