Beautiful Night. Horrible game.

By: Herschel | April 24th, 2009

Great night for soccer! The pre-game stuff was great. The B-2 bomber flyover was impressive. The weather could not have been better. The crowd was great. The soccer game itself was horrible. It made me forget our last ESPN game, the 3-3 offensive display at Columbus last year.

Recap: 2nd minute, Johnson was slow to react to a ball and a Wizards player beat him to it; Johnson trips him up with a slide and it resulted in a penalty and harsh red card. Goal Lopez! After that it was a blur where the Wizards could not exert dominance and New York just bid it’s time waiting for a Wizards slip up. Hartman again saved our but on at least a couple of dangerous chances. End of game: 1-0. What a let down on national TV.

These are my rankings: Hartman 6; Watson 5; Conrad 5; Hohlbein 5; Beasler 5; Gomez 5; Jewsbury 5; Hirsig 6; Arnaud 4; Wolf 4; Lopez 6; Harrington 5; Espinoza 5; Kraus 4

Our team is playing sub-par soccer. Yes, we might not be losing, but our quality of soccer is not good; too bad Curt Onalfo can’t see this. Ten man Seattle was better than us most of the game; Chicago outplayed us for 75 minutes. Ten man New York, with only 3 goals in 5 games actually had us on our heels during stretches of the 2nd half. Wake up Curt, I actually heard the Boo-birds out at the CAB last night.

By the way, it might be just me, but if you are a man up and leading the game and you lose your holding midfielder to injury why do you sub him out with a defender/winger. Do you want to hold the one goal lead for another 60 minutes? How about you maybe try and extend the lead? How about some “exciting” soccer? First of all Harrington should be starting over Watson or Beasler in the back. If Jewsbury gets hurt and you are a man up how about you bring in an offensive midfielder or at least another holding mid so Hirsig can still be further up distributing. The moment Jewsbury went out and Hirsig dropped back the quality of play sunk lower.

On a side note I wasn’t impressed with Michael Kennedy’s overall performance, he was very inconsistent. His decision to call the penalty was spot on but it ended there. The red card was excessively harsh. Johnson did foul Gomez, but there was no way KC’s player was catching up to that ball (his first touch was very hard) therefore the “denying of a goal scoring opportunity” red card really do it for me. Plus, although the camera angle doesn’t show it there were 2 NY defenders in the direction the ball was kicked that could have closed in (I was behind the goal where this happened). You don’t make harsh game changing decisions in the second minute of the game unless it’s absolutely clear. I can honestly say that it wasn’t a deserved red card. These things screw up games very easily. It just comes to prove what I’ve believed, that Kennedy is at the bottom of the ref chart in the MLS.

To recap: the early goal could have made the game open up and more exciting, but with a man down NY just closed ranks and it became a game of attrition with a timid KC team trying to score again and NYwaiting for a mistake.

Next up Toronto. We better wake up. Our level of play is unimpressive and doesn’t seem to be improving. Toronto at home is pretty good and we need to get better.