For a while there it seemed that Sebastian Giovinco was unstoppable – literally unstoppable. You could have lumped his teeny-tiny feet in concrete, or piled the CN Tower on his back, and he still would have dribbled in off the wing with a sudden swivel and arrowed a fearsome drive from distance into the net. But New York City FC might have finally found the only way to stop the Italian Antman – kick him. Kick him lots.
It might have gone against the grain of why Jason Kreis was hired as head coach of the expansion franchise in the first place, but in targeting Giovinco with a game-high five fouls and general hassling strategy, NYC FC stopped Toronto FC – claiming a 2-0 win at BMO Field with a double from David Villa. Dignified and wholehearted, perhaps not – but it was certainly effective as NYC FC extended their winning streak to three games. Their season, all of a sudden, has taken on a completely different complexion, although maybe not in the way Kreis envisaged.
Giovinco – who had scored three goals in his last three outings – still managed three shots, but only one of them was on target. He was only afforded one successful dribble, with NYC FC and their midfield destroyer Andrew Jacobson bringing the 28-year-old down before he could build up any sort of momentum. And that’s if the ball actually made it to Giovinco before being tagged.
“[NYCFC] stalled and killed the game at every opportunity, which was clearly a tactic,” an irked Greg Vanney said afterwards. “The referees allowed that to happen.” The TFC coach also highlighted a need for his side to move the ball more quickly through the field, but he must be concerned by the success of NYC FC’s campaign against Giovinco. Toronto, heading into the play-off crunch, need to be about more than just their Italian playmaker.
Of course, TFC shouldn’t necessarily take the moral high-ground over the outcome of Saturday’s game. If opposition teams can stop them from playing by stopping Giovinco as an individual, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise when such an approach is taken. As captain Michael Bradley noted after the defeat, “everybody’s free to go about it any way they want.” Vanney might believe that Kreis’ strategy was a crude one, but in a results industry like soccer that is often necessary.
This was never the identity Kreis imagined for his NYC FC team, though – even in their expansion season. It’s not so long since the former Real Salt Lake man spoke of his insistence on attractive and dynamic soccer – with the club’s owners backing that up with talk of the ‘City Way.’ Whatever that truly means, their performance against TFC almost certainly wasn’t it – but they might have set a precedent for how to stop the best player in the league. GR
For LA, the bigger picture is more important than a big scoreline
Independence Day, 2012. An LA Galaxy team that had been slumping for long stretches of the season, in the wake of their MLS Cup win in 2011, hosted a Philadelphia Union team showing signs of the institutional drift that’s continued to this day.
LA had already begun to slowly revive, but were about to experience yet another hiccup as Philadelphia earned a surprise last-minute road win. Yet it was a good night for the Galaxy, because it marked the return from long-term injury of Omar Gonzalez. That hole in the defense fixed, the Galaxy would lose only one more regular season game all season en route to back-to-back MLS Cups.
Since then LA have beaten Philadelphia 4-1 in consecutive years, then 5-1 on Saturday night, in a team display that saw five different goalscorers for the hosts.
The pick of the goals was probably the one that saw the Galaxy break on a raking crossfield ball from Gyassi Zardes to Robbie Keane, who held up the ball before sweeping the ball across the box for Zardes to complete his run by smashing the ball high into the net.
But beyond the scoreline, one of the main sources of encouragement was the lineup for the defending champions. Zardes and Keane haven’t started an MLS game since April (though they did start the midweek 6-1 bullying of the amateur PSA Elite team in the Open Cup). With injuries and call ups, the Galaxy have been missing their most potent version of a strike force. Having them back together should put the rest of the league on notice.
And after the game, Galaxy coach Bruce Arena was treating this 5-1 triumph as as much of an imposter as, say, the 2-1 “disaster” back in 2012: “I think the score does not indicate the game correctly. I don’t think we were as dominant as the score would indicate,” said Arena, who acknowledged his team’s finishing, but called them “sloppy in the game.”
But this was as close to a first-choice line up as we’ve seen from the Galaxy in months - one that can only get stronger. And as Arena implied that was perhaps more of a meaningful sign to take from this game than the scoreline.
So are the Galaxy embarking on yet another midsummer surge that will end with the title? Well, with Steven Gerrard arriving in a couple of weeks to add to the mix (and on Juninho’s current form the thought of that sort of distribution potential to Keane and Zardes should frighten any MLS defense), it certainly looks that way.
But there’s an important caveat to this, that may also have something to do with Arena not getting carried away by the result - the Galaxy have not won a game on the road all year. As he put it in the same set of post-match remarks, “We’ve a ways to go.” And points to pick up when they get there. GP
Seattle might want to leave this one out of the notebook
The shockwaves from Seattle’s Open Cup loss to Portland continued to reverberate this weekend. A Sounders side missing Obafemi Martins (injured against Portland) and Clint Dempsey (your pun here against Portland) endured the indignity of San Jose doing to them what Seattle teams featuring that deadly duo usually do to other teams - score swaggering goals.
Michael Azira was last seen accompanying Clint Dempsey off the field in that Open Cup game as they prepared to compare red card experiences with Brad Evans. On Saturday night his most remarkable contribution was in cautiously stepping out of a tackle outside the penalty area, during Matias Perez-Garcia’s slalom towards the box before scoring San Jose’s second.
It was a beautifully taken goal, as was Sanna Nyassi’s first, while at the other end Lamar Neagle had a much tougher time leading the line than he does with his runs from deeper when Dempsey and Martins are pulling defenders all over the place. He had one first-half shot from distance that almost came off but, like the rest of the Seattle team, he had to deal with the reality of building attacks without the two best attackers on the team.
He may have plenty of time to figure out a solution. Seattle’s 4-2-3-1 was also missing the injured Ossie Alonso and didn’t have the still recovering Chad Barrett to draw on either.
But it’s the absences of Martins – out for an indeterminate time with a groin injury – and Dempsey, that hit the Sounders the hardest. In tearing up the referee’s notebook the other night, Dempsey may also have torn up the Seattle team sheet for much of the summer, if US Soccer decide to compound his three match MLS ban for “assaulting” the Open Cup referee.
Even with those players, the Sounders might have found San Jose to be difficult opposition - while the Earthquakes hadn’t won a lot recently, they hadn’t lost a lot either and had picked up a host of draws in the past couple of months. And despite Seattle’s place in the standings at the start of this game, San Jose have historically been a difficult team for them - this victory took the Earthquakes to an 8-2-1 record against Seattle since 2012 and completed a league double at CenturyLink Field this season.
It’s rare that a team beats the Sounders twice at home in a season, but there was a lot more than statistical encouragement for the Earthquakes, in a performance that suggests Dominic Kinnear is beginning to get his team on track to keep pace through the summer and into the playoff run-in - as Dominic Kinnear tends to do. The win saw the Earthquakes leapfrog his former club Houston Dynamo, who lost in Portland, and has them sitting just a point behind a stuttering Dallas in the final playoff spot, and with a game in hand. LA Galaxy next. GP
Vancouver still haunt the Red Bulls
New York Red Bulls have never beaten Vancouver Whitecaps, in what’s now six attempts.
But with five minutes gone of their game on Saturday night, they could have been forgiven for thinking that this might just be their night, as Sal Zizzo was bundled over on the edge of the box to give New York an early penalty.
Up stepped goal machine Bradley Wright-Phillips, placing the ball on the spot to the accompaniment of a greek chorus of Vancouver defenders and goalkeeper David Ousted complaining about his placement of said ball. After what seemed like an age, Wright-Phillips stepped up and hit the ball at waist height into the path of the diving Ousted.
And then things began to unravel rapidly.
Within three minutes the Red Bulls were down to 10 men, as Sacha Kljestan senselessly tangled with Kendall Waston in plain view of the referee, to pick up a straight red; then with the Red Bulls still settling into their new formation in the 15th minute, Steven Beitashour beat Damien Perrinelle for pace down the right and sent in a perfect cross for Kekuta Manneh to touch home first time past Luis Robles. It concluded one of the most demoralizing 10 minutes of the Red Bulls season so far, and set the tone for their fourth consecutive league defeat.
New York tried to rally in the second half in particular, as they took the game to Vancouver, but when Wright-Phillips had another poor penalty saved midway through the half, they may have wished they hadn’t bothered. A well-organized Vancouver eventually broke the Red Bulls pressure to counter and score a second through Manneh’s replacement Kianz Froese.
A distraught Wright-Phillips was subbed out immediately, and while Anatole Abang would briefly give the Red Bulls hope with an 82nd minute goal, in truth they looked like a side who had let the Whitecaps get inside their heads early.
The Whitecaps are on a five-game road stretch and just a month ago might have been delighted with a point in this game, let alone a win. The Whitecaps are often remarked upon for their speed and the creativity of Pedro Morales, but even in his absence, that pace, and a greater mental toughness than a demoralized Red Bulls side, was enough to see an impressive Vancouver home, and see them go joint top with Seattle.
The limited good news for New York is that they get to try and put things right immediately, against RSL on Wednesday, and if Kljestan’s suspension isn’t extended he’ll be back for the derby visit to NYCFC. Speaking of the latter, at almost the same moment Wright-Phillips was missing his first penalty, David Villa was scoring one for their rivals against Toronto.
It’s a symbolic juxtaposition. If the first New York derby marked a high and a low point for the respective teams, next week could see the reversal of fortunes completed, with NYCFC, now level on points with the Red Bulls, overtaking them in the standings. A bad day could soon be a bad week. GP
DC United might be out of sight, but the Revs are close to being caught
Both DC United and the New England Revolution, perhaps for the first time in a few weeks, went into a game not peering nervously over their shoulders – because they were staring directly at each other. The East’s two table-topping teams clashed Sunday night, with a Chris Rolfe double giving Ben Olsen’s side a 2-1 win to prevent their two-game losing blip from becoming a three-match slump. The result puts the capital club seven points clear in the East – and ahead in the Supporters’ Shield standings – but it could have bigger implications for the general complexion of the conference.
The Eastern Conference seemed to take an established order very quickly in the season, with DC United and New England challenging at the top, the New York Red Bulls somewhere close behind and the rest falling in behind as the chasing pack. It was a disposition that lasted all the way up until the start of the summer months, but the past few weeks has seen that order shuffled.
Since derby glory over NYC FC, the Red Bulls have yet to pick up a single win from five games as Mike Petke’s side continue their slide down the standings. That downturn has only been accentuated by Orlando City’s surge, claiming three wins and two draws from six matches to take them into third place, swelling their chances of becoming the first expansion team since the 2009 Sounders to make the play-offs. Then there’s the Montreal Impact, who are now reeling in their games-in-hand having endured such a staggered start following their continental exerts – claiming victory in four of six games. Toronto FC might have cooled off with defeat to NYC FC, but they too have highlighted their candidacy as a play-off outfit. Even New York City FC – MLS’s whipping boys not so long ago – have found a vein of form recently, picking up three successive wins.
And all this while DC United and the Revolution have stuttered and spluttered. For the most part, their patchy form has been masked by the jostling for position that had been happening behind them – but New England now find themselves closer to the chasing pack than they do to top spot. The rest of the East probably wanted Jay Heaps to take something from DC – simply to keep them in sight – but Sunday’s outcome at RFK only served to tighten up the table behind the leaders, with just nine points between second bottom and second top.
Both Olsen’s and Heap’s sides have benefitted this season from teams cannibalising themselves in the scrap-pack below, with DC United and New England far from convincing for a number of weeks. But a new order seems to be becoming apparent in the Eastern Conference, although going on the way 2015 has transpired so far that is certainly subject to change. GR
