Wow, two in a row
In a year that has seen a whole lot more bad things, last nights come from behind road victory, is by far the best thing this season for me. The reason why is easy, no one can claim that we are the best team in the league, but LA is by far the worst. You can blame it on the Beckham hype, silly scheduling, too many matches, but having watched their play both before those things started and after, they have looked bad all year. They can score but their new defense and move to steal Cannon away from the crapids, have proven to be a disaster for them all year long. For RSL, the turnaround will be when we beat the teams we are supposed to, victories over DC United and Houston are nice, and I relish in them, but we need to beat the teams that are in the bottom and middle of the pack. Teams like LA, Columbus, Colorado, Toronto, and even KC, which are almost all improving their play this year, but still are not in the elite teams in the league, those matches we have to win. Big teams will look past the bottom teams, and be ripe for a upset, just look at what happened in Ann Arbor this weekend, but you have to do two things to move up the standings, one is win matches against teams in your division, and beat the teams in the middle and bottom of the pack. This is as important as getting points at home, another thing RSL needs to improve on.
So we go to Houston (a team we have already beaten once), next weekend and I would love another road win, but would pleased as well with a point from the road, the Dynamo have been in a funk lately only winning once in their last 5 MLS matches. Then we are of to the nation’s capitol for a mid week match against a team with six straight MLS victories, let’s hope that we keep them under 4 goals a feat that F*C* Dallas could not do this weekend. But then our road trip takes us north of the border, and a chance for some revenge for our July, 4th home loss. We should be able to pick up a victory against a squad that has only scored one goal in league play since they left Salt Lake City, two months ago. They have already done RSL a favor by removing our name from the MLS record books for the longest scoreless streak, they actually have shattered our record by over 90 minutes and if they do not score in Dallas next weekend will be moving close to having 800 minutes of league play without a goal.
So while things appear to be improving if we can bring back 4 more road points from this trip away from RES, I think it would make a statement that things have turned the corner at RSL. No I think we are still in need of some help and I really hope that with our salary cap money available that we make an offer to the Revolution’s unhappy midfielder Shalrie Joseph, who would give us a real boost in the midfield. I also hope that many European players will open their eyes to the chances that exist here in MLS, the performance of Angel, should let them know that this may be the place to get a second chance. I will be excited to see what happens when the transfer window opens again in January.
For those of you who thought I was stretching the truth a bit in my last post about the local media coverage, it sure looked to me that Findley wasn’t lacking for ability or confidence last night. Jason put him in at the right time and it paid results for the team. If you look closely at the Deseret New online coverage today, you might notice a considerable error in the coverage (With the win, RSL improved to 4-11-6 (18 points) on the season and moved four points clear of the Galaxy (3-11-5) at the bottom of the Western Conference standings. The win also ended RSL’s 14-match winless streak dating back to last year.), either they do not read their own articles or they need a much better proofreader. I believe they meant to say it ended our 14 match road winless streak dating back to last year, but with their misquoting of salary numbers earlier in the week, is this a trend of sloppy work, or just hoping you get away with trying to paint a negative picture?
I also find great humor in the fact that other blogs would rather focus on what color jerseys teams were supposed to wear, and the recent change in equipment managers, than the fact that RSL won the match. I do love the irony that happens when you spend every minute bashing a team, who actually start doing better on the pitch, you have to dig deep to find your dirty laundry.
OFF MY SOAPBOX
This entry was posted on September 2, 2007 at 6:40 pm and is filed under The soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.