Schmid Already Has Postseason in Mind
Having steered his team safely into Major League Soccer’s playoffs, Galaxy Coach Sigi Schmid is not about to ease up.
With six regular-season games remaining, including tonight’s 7:30 match against the defending champion Chicago Fire at the Rose Bowl, the Galaxy is in first place in the Western Conference.
Schmid wants it to stay there, and beating the second-place Fire will help.
“That’s where we want to be [in first place],” Schmid said after the Galaxy’s 2-1 victory over the Miami Fusion in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., last Saturday. “If we’re this close, we might as well take it.
“It means bigger rewards for the players, it’s a feather in our cap to be Western Conference champions and it means home-field advantage [in the playoffs].”
The Galaxy has gone 8-2 in its last 10 league games, a surge that has lifted its point total to 45, two more than the Fire and the Colorado Rapids, who had lost three in a row before beating Kansas City, 1-0, in a shootout Friday night to move into a tie for second place.
With the conference semifinals and finals both best-of-three series, Schmid is getting the team into a playoff frame of mind.
“Whenever we play three games, we want to win [at least] two out of three,” he said. “If we keep winning two out of three, we’ll be there [in the MLS championship game Nov. 21 in Foxboro, Mass.].”
The Galaxy’s offense is nowhere near as potent as it was last season, when the team scored an MLS-record 85 goals. So far in 1999, it has netted only 40. But the defense, and goalkeeper Kevin Hartman in particular, has been the big difference.
In 26 games, the Galaxy has allowed opponents to score as many as two goals only five times and has not allowed any team more than two.
Hartman, who made his U.S. national team debut in the 2-2 tie with Jamaica in Kingston on Wednesday, leads the league with an 0.85 goals-against average.
If he yields fewer than 16 goals in the final six games (a 2.66 average), he will break the MLS single-season record of 1.17 goals a game set by Chicago’s Zak Thornton last season.
Thornton and Hartman split time in the U.S. game against Jamaica, in which the Fire’s leading offensive threat, former UCLA forward Ante Razov (12 goals, seven assists) was red-carded. Another Fire striker, Josh Wolff, (10 goals, two assists) made his national team debut in that game.
