Hopes All but Over for Galaxy
The Galaxy’s reign as Major League Soccer champion is all but over.
The team’s 10-year record of never having missed the MLS playoffs is hanging by the most slender of threads.
All because it could not do what it absolutely had to do on Saturday night -- defeat the Colorado Rapids.
Try as it might, the Galaxy could not break down the Rapids’ packed defense. In four league games, the Galaxy has yet to score a goal against Colorado. It lost the first three matches, all by 1-0 scores, and Saturday’s “improvement” only earned Los Angeles a 0-0 tie.
The crowd of 20,849 let the team know its displeasure. There were loud boos coming from all corners of the Home Depot Center when referee Brian Hall blew the final whistle.
Cobi Jones sat on the turf, exhausted. Chris Albright had his hands on his knees, head bowed. Landon Donovan trudged tiredly off the field. All three -- and their teammates -- had done all they could, but the one goal that was desperately needed never came.
The closest the Galaxy came to scoring was when defender Ante Jazic fired a shot that screamed just wide of the left post after Colorado had only partially cleared a Donovan corner kick.
Earlier, Rapids’ goalkeeper Joe Cannon had made the only difficult save he had to make all game when he punched the ball away just before Galaxy midfielder Paulo Nagamura got to it.
Donovan had sent the ball to the far post on a corner kick. Galaxy defender Tyrone Marshall redirected it back in front of the net, but Cannon was alert to the danger and fisted the ball clear as Nagamura suddenly loomed in front of him.
The tie left the Galaxy in last place in the Western Conference with only four regular-season games remaining. It has 33 points, and victories in those final four matches will produce only a dozen more, or 45 in all.
That means Los Angeles cannot catch FC Dallas, which already has 46.
And with the Houston Dynamo and the Rapids on 39 and Chivas USA on 38, overtaking them seems unlikely.
Not impossible, merely unlikely.
Houston plays Chivas today, and the winner of that game, if any, also will be close to moving beyond the Galaxy’s reach.
Making matters even worse for Coach Frank Yallop’s team, Real Salt Lake, the team ahead of the Galaxy in the standings, did what it had to do Saturday night to stay in the playoff hunt.
Real Salt Lake twice fell behind to goals by Dallas striker Carlos Ruiz, but twice came back to tie the score and then scored the game-winner with about 18 minutes left. It has 36 points.
The Galaxy (9-13-6) ended up outshooting Colorado, 7-6, but only three of those shots were on target, and the Rapids (11-11-6) left Carson with a point.
