Galaxy Win Is a Whistler
There are referees who know how to control a game and there are referees who allow a game to control them.
Unfortunately for the Galaxy and the Miami Fusion, the two Major League Soccer teams ran into one of the latter Saturday. As a result, the Galaxy’s extraordinary 5-3 victory before 8,212 at Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., will be remembered not so much for the tremendous goals but for inept officiating.
Whistle-happy referee Noel Kenny, demonstrating no feeling whatsoever for the spirit of the game, called 50 fouls--more than one every two minutes--32 of them against the Galaxy.
Not content with repeatedly breaking the flow of game with his calls, many of them for minor or nonexistent infractions, Kenny also handed out four yellow cards, two against each team.
To cap his performance, he allowed the game to get completely out of hand by adding an unnecessary four minutes of injury time, during which a fight broke out. Kenny red-carded Miami’s Pablo Mastroeni, for grabbing Mauricio Cienfuegos by the jersey and throwing him to the ground, and the Galaxy’s Ezra Hendrickson for retaliation.
Throw in a penalty kick that Kenny awarded the Fusion for no apparent reason and it added up to a forgettable afternoon’s work.
That aside, Saturday’s game was a tale of two contrasting halves on a humid, 89-degree afternoon.
The Galaxy (10-5-7) played some of its best soccer of the season in the first 45 minutes, building a 4-0 lead on two goals by Cobi Jones and one each by Luis Hernandez and Sebastien Vorbe.
The Fusion (7-9-4) took control of the second 45 minutes when Coach Ray Hudson sent Roy Lassiter and Andy Williams into the game.
Goals by Williams, Jay Heaps and Tyrone Marshall brought Miami into the fray and knocked the Galaxy back on its heels.
Had Henry Gutierrez not inexplicably fired a penalty kick wide of the right post after Kenny called a nonexistent foul against the Galaxy’s Adam Frye in the 81st minute, the Fusion might have come away with a tie.
As it was, the Galaxy’s Peter Vagenas, a graduate of La Canada St. Francis High, scored his first MLS goal in the 87th minute to sew up a victory that should have been assured by the team’s high-octane first half.
It was Hernandez who started the goal barrage, bending a 20-yard free kick around the Miami defensive wall and just beneath the crossbar.
The 19th-minute goal was “El Matador’s” second in three games.
The next three goals came on Galaxy fastbreaks.
In the 30th minute, Cienfuegos, starting in his own half of the field, led a three-on-two break, beat the hapless Mastroeni, drew goalkeeper Jeff Cassar out of the goal box and then passed to Vorbe, who put the ball into the open net.
Then came two lightning-quick goals by Jones, his sixth and seventh.
The first, in the 38th minute, saw him sprint down the center of the field before beating Cassar with a 25-yard drive to the lower-left corner of the net.
The second, a minute later, came on an angled drive off a superb Hernandez square pass to make the score 4-0.
Led by Lassiter’s two assists, the Fusion came back in the second half as the Galaxy shifted from high gear to neutral. That gave Galaxy Coach Sigi Schmid the chance to assess a defense that was without Greg Vanney and Danny Califf, both suspended.
The Galaxy’s victory, combined with the Kansas City Wizards’ 1-0 loss to the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, leaves Los Angeles only one point out of first place in the Western Division, although Kansas City has played three fewer games.
Earlier in the day, the Fusion traded Eric Wynalda, the U.S. national team’s all-time leading goal scorer, to the New England Revolution in exchange for South African defender/midfielder Ivan McKinley.
