Pack Showing No Sympathy for Its Fallen Leader
In a moment of anger earlier this week, Galaxy Coach Sigi Schmid blasted Major League Soccer for exacting too high a price in exchange for giving the team Mexican striker Luis Hernandez.
Forcing the Galaxy (5-0-5) to trade away three starters to land Hernandez has, in effect, weakened a strong team, Schmid argued.
“Maybe we’re back to the pack and that’s what they wanted,” he said after Wednesday’s 0-0 tie with the Earthquakes at San Jose. “Maybe everybody’s happy.”
Maybe Schmid should talk to Washington D.C. United Coach Thomas Rongen.
D.C. United, which plays the Galaxy at the Rose Bowl in Hernandez’s MLS debut tonight, not only has been caught by the pack but overtaken by it and left way behind.
The defending MLS champion, the same team that beat the Galaxy in last year’s title game, is an astonishing 2-8-1 and in free fall. It has lost three games in a row and four of five.
D.C. United, a three-time MLS champion, has the worst record and the fewest points in MLS a third of the way through the 2000 season.
The rot began with the season opener, when the Galaxy gave D.C. United a 4-0 spanking at RFK Stadium. Washington has yet to recover.
The excuses have been many and varied, but the team’s troubles are simple to understand: Its forwards, with the exception of Jaime Moreno, are not scoring goals and its defense is perceptibly porous.
Seventeen of the 26 goals D.C. United has yielded this season have come off free kicks, the most recent in a 2-0 loss at Kansas City on Wednesday night.
The D.C. United defense, despite featuring U.S. national team players Eddie Pope, Carlos Llamosa and Jeff Agoos, is woefully susceptible to set plays, which should come as good news to Mauricio Cienfuegos and Greg Vanney, the Galaxy’s free kick experts.
After Washington gave up its latest free-kick goal, players talked about there being “confusion” in the back line and about missed assignments by certain players. That confusion already has led to two own goals this year.
There appears to be little chance that MLS will come to the rescue any time soon. During a visit last week to Washington, which will host this season’s championship game on Oct. 15, MLS Commissioner Don Garber predicted that things would turn around for the club.
“This is a great team,” Garber told the Washington Post at a National Press Club gathering. “They’ve been very, very successful. They are a great part of the community. They’re winners. They’ll get it right. You can’t expect to be top of the table forever. Even the Yankees didn’t win, or make, the World Series every year.”
Of course, the New York Yankees haven’t been forced to trade away significant players, as D.C. United has had to do over the last few seasons. Among those it has shed because of salary cap limitations are Roy Lassiter and Raul Diaz Arce, the No. 1 and No. 2 leading goal scorers in MLS history.
And that’s where D.C. United is hurting most this season.
Moreno, who along with fellow Bolivian Marco Etcheverry forms the heart of the team, has eight goals, tied for best in the league with the Chicago Fire’s Ante Razov. But no other forward has scored a goal.
Chris Albright, the U.S. Olympic team striker, is struggling. The others, A.J. Wood, Michael Burke and Sergio Salas, are simply out of their league.
Kevin Payne, the team’s president and chief executive, is searching for replacements, but he received a setback Thursday when the team’s second draft choice, Stephen Butler, a South African who scored 43 goals in 77 matches at Butler University, elected not to sign and to pursue a career in Europe instead.
Still, Payne knows--as Schmid is now finding out--that the name of the game in MLS is parity.
“I understand there are a lot of interests around the league that don’t believe we’re the worst team in the league regardless of our record at this point and aren’t terribly inclined to help us in any way,” he told the Post.
And so D.C. United struggles.
Rather than being too confident going into tonight’s game, however, the Galaxy would be wise to listen to the comments made in Kansas City Wednesday after the Wizards’ victory over D.C. United.
“You look at them individually and you know it’s a matter of time before they turn it around,” said Wizard Coach Bob Gansler, whose team is in first place, six points ahead of the Galaxy in the Western Division. “They are the defending champions. They and L.A. are at the level we want to reach.”
Wizard and former U.S. national team winger Chris Henderson echoed the thought.
“They have the same players that won three championships,” he told the Kansas City Star. “They’re a good team that’s been unlucky.”
And as Schmid would be the first to acknowledge, luck can change.
