Real Salt Lake 3 – Columbus Crow 2 (4-2 aggregate)
I got some good advice last night, “let the haters hate”. That same sentiment was expressed earlier in the day by RSL midfielder Andy Williams who posted “If u have never done anything in ur life you will never have any haters, fortunately I have tons and I expect to get a bunch more tonight, hahaha. Kiss Da Baby” and Is feeling like “The Bomma” from St. Georges days. 1 outta di CANNON tonight. Oh yea and 1 assist too. Trust me peeps, it’s on” on Facebook earlier today and the reality is that I am sure Andy does have more haters today, not sure I could call that a CANNON shot but hey it was enough to give Real the win and that is a mighty good thing.
So Columbus went out and were selling Eastern Conference finals tickets since the playoffs started, but now they are stuck eating crow and issuing refunds. I wonder if Michael Lewis still thinks “After all, the team really hasn’t done anything yet.”? I wonder how many of those who have spent most of the season calling for Jason’s head will finally cut him some slack? I am sure we will still find a lot of haters, cynics, and critics, heck winning the Cup would probably not change some of their minds.
So as I have been thinking about the match last night and to be honest I think we got lucky, now before you jump up and down and call me a hater, let me explain my thoughts. We knew Columbus would be attacking and that we didn’t want to play defensive but we also didn’t want to get behind in the match, but that is exactly what happened and for me it is a bit of a question of why. So we battled fairly evenly for the first 15 minutes, but then we started breaking down bit by bit, our passes got a bit sloppier and we started turning the ball over, when we created offensive chances some guys looked a bit sluggish or tentative.
Wait, names, I am not going to play the toss it over the fence game, I thought early on some of the passes from Andy looked a bit off and at least twice it looked like Javi was going to be able to break away from a defender and score but each time he was either too slow (I know better) or a bit tentative. More than once in our effort to push forward in attack we left ourselves open to Columbus to counter and got lucky they couldn’t convert, they ended the match with 10 shots on goal from 19 shots. That is far too many to allow and thankfully GBS and Hejduk weren’t passing the ball very well, I thought Wingert was pushing too far forward for his ability to get back into defensive position and his passes and crosses were off target as much as they were on target. Go back and watch the highlights and look at the fact that nobody attacked that ball played in by GBS, well one RSL player( I think it was Wingert) half jumped at it but other than that Nick was hung out to dry despite us having 8 guys in the box to just 5 for the Crew. It was horrible, but it was going to get much, much worse:
Why when you have so much room would you chose to kick the ball towards the guy attacking you? Perhaps one of the biggest RSL defensive blunders of the year was followed by Olave playing too far off GBS who made us pay dearly for the mistake to give Columbus the 2-0 lead in the match and the overall 2-1 lead in the series. If you simply watched the first 35 minutes of the match you would not have been impressed by the results, after 15 minutes you likely wouldn’t have been impressed by the effort and at this point I almost did what I rarely have done over the last couple years, I almost doubted.
Then something I had been critical of for some time, the RSL habit of making too many passes in the final third and often not getting off a shot paid off it was the series of short passes in close quarters by Javi, Andy, Robbie and Kyle that allowed a ball into Javi who got beyond the defender and made Hesmer pay the price to even the series at 2-2 and get back into the match. As stoppage time in the first half was about to end RSL had a free kick from distance but a shove to the back of Espindola by Hejduk was enough to get the attention of Toledo who pointed to the spot, and despite the chants of “BS” from the Crew fans you notice Frankie didn’t argue about it too much as he knew he had been caught. It is interesting that Hesmer hadn’t faced a PK all season (1700 plus minutes), and there was no debate about it as Robbie Findley took the ball to the spot and buried it as Hesmer guess wrong and all of a sudden the team that had looked “mediocre” for 35 minutes, was tied 2-2 with the “best team in MLS” and once again held an edge in the series. The confidence level of RSL improved after Javi’s goal just minutes after Columbus got their second goal, but after the goal by Robbie they seemed that maybe they finally believed that they weren’t just capable of winning at home but that they can also play this game on the road.
The second half started with a Columbus team that was desperate to get another goal and they tried and tried again but Nick Rimando made his case as being the RSL keeper for as long as he wants. In the 74th minute RSL had a corner kick but they played it short which hasn’t really been successful for them in the past but this time they caught the Crew defense napping and just like the GBS goal in the first half, Andy played a ball into the area and nobody seemed interested in it until it was in the back of the net. Andy had again called his shot on facebook earlier in the day. Columbus would try and try to get even but in the end it was great work by Rimando and much better defending than in the first half that saw RSL pull off the upset that very few saw coming before the series began. In the end RSL not only won the series but won the match 3-2, considering they only scored 9 goals in 15 regular season road matches this year, that was an impressive effort. I didn’t think we played up to our capabilities we allowed too many chances, made too many mistakes, and failed to take advantage of several scoring opportunities, but in the end winning is what matters and last night that is exactly what RSL did.
I will do a much more complete look at the match but wanted to get up my thoughts.
So I asked the question of who would you like to see RSL face in the Eastern Conference Final and here are the results so far:
Show a very slight edge to New England, I will be posting tomorrow who I want to win between those two sides and why.
OFF MY SOAPBOX
win 1 go to Seattle, win 2 make history
This entry was posted on November 6, 2009 at 3:35 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.
November 6, 2009 at 4:55 pm
As thrilled as I am about the performance (well, 55 minutes of it anyway) last night, I’m still not sure that Kreis is the right guy to be head coach. I’ve said for a while that I think he would make a fantastic GM–he’s good at building the core of a team, getting people together, scouting–but he’s pretty weak tactically and evidently motivationally. Am I as frustrated with him now as I was following, say, the Dallas match? Of course not. But a couple good performances doesn’t make up for an overall lack of tactical acumen and good motivation of the team throughout most of the season. I want Jason to stay as part of the organization, but I don’t think that head coach is the right place for him.
November 6, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Good review. I agree with most of the points made, but I’m very proud of the boys for not giving up. It was an amazing night for RSL. And what about that news that’s gonna shake us to the foundation?
November 6, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Very proud of the team tonight. I will say it was the best game I have seen from Beckerman in a long time. Despite 1 or 2 passes back while we were attacking (my wife calls him a play killer) he was great. Not solid, great. He passing was crisp (a rarity) and his effort was outstanding. It allowed Will more flexibility and it kept some good space and pressure of the backline. Great game, here’s to RSL.
November 6, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Just a question, when RSL beat Dallas 4-2 and came back from being two goals down I remember reading that that was only the second time in league history that a team had come back from being two goals down and winnig the match? So would this be historic for them to have done the same in the playoffs? And to do it twice in the same year?
November 6, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Charlie, I believe taht was the only time in RSL history that we have come back from two down. Yes this would also be the first time that we have come back from two down in a playoff match, I can’t find any league wide data on the mls website to verify if it has happened in the playoffs before or not.
November 6, 2009 at 8:21 pm
I don’t want to pick who I want to play next. Every time I have ever done that in my life it has come right back to smack me in the face. So be careful what you wish for. Everybody on the postgame was saying New England didn’t have the talent and was due for a letdown, etc. etc. That is the same thing we heard about the NY Pink Cows last year, and look what happened there.
I won’t take an “I’d rather” approach. I am just glad the team gets the chance and I HOPE they make the best of it.
The announcing crew (I believe it was Foudy) made a good point on Chicago, in that they have a lot of weapons who are seasoned vets and are bound to (or at least able to) rise up to the occasion and are the types that just find the back of the net (McBride, Blanco, etc.). But on the flipside, there is also a tendency on teams like that for others to expect those guys to make all of the plays, and if it gets shut down early then they kind of go into freakout mode.
I think we saw a good example of the “star” mentality last night. Schelotto played his rear off and did score 2 goals, but everybody else almost seemed to play less hard defensively and seemingly tried to stay out of his way a bit (and Moreno to a lesser extent) than they had when they weren’t on the field in the previous game. Were they just all sort of taking it easy in a sense and expecting those two to bail them out? Or is the team really that much worse defensively when they’re on the field? Or what?
I think there are a lot of ways you can analyze the “who do you want to play?” game, and I think that basically it doesn’t really matter. I have seen RSL kick the crap out of New England this year, but then I saw them get the crap kicked right back out of them at New England.
I saw RSL play Chicago to a draw and hold McBride in check and look like every bit as good of a team as Chicago, but the only guy who could get on the score sheet was Jamison Olave, which is scary when you think about it. The only guy who scored for us on Chicago this season was our central defender on a freakishly crazy play…. a perfect ball…. amazing breakaway speed, and just totally catching a team off guard with one of the best and most athletic plays you’ll ever see in the MLS. That doesn’t make me think that it would be a cakewalk against either team. So let’s see what happens and either way… I know who I’ll be cheering for. RSL!
November 6, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Just wanted to throw this out there for you RSL fans to read. Read what the Crew fans are saying about the game. They feel the officiating cost them this series. Interesting…… Even if Andy is called for a handball and they convert the PK then RSL still wins 4-3 on aggregate. Correct? They are acting as if they were robbed. I am not a big fan of MLS officiating, but they seem to be going a bit overboard over there.
http://blog.dispatch.com/crew/2009/11/playoff_game_2_real_salt_lake.shtml
November 7, 2009 at 12:03 am
Jason has my support. Overall I thought our boys did a great job on the road, they dug deep and brought it back when they could have laid down and no one would have thought otherwise. As for officiating…its consistently inconsistent, get used to it. Every MLS club suffers from it, so Crew fans can blame it any where they want, but if you look at the two goals they scored they weren’t team efforts, they were Ski-Lo, no one else. It took a team effort to bring it back and make a stand. Anyway, I’m exhausted from nitpicking the play all season, and instead am just going to take it for what it is…. the beautiful game.