The Audi numbers on this game are kind of fascinating. The comment above, not sure what they point of our game was, kind of nail what Audi was showing. We ended up with a pathetic 1894 Audi points. That's commonly what we have when we lose. However, Colorado came in at 644 points, and I didn't know it was possible to be that bad as a team. We've noted that an average MLS performace tends to be in the 220 to 235 point range. We had a measely 4 players beat that (and one was 20-minute Johnny). That means for most of the game, we had just about a full team not doing much of note. But jeebus, Colorado. They had two players (Rubio was one and the impressive Rosenberry was the other) perform at a better than average level, and then they had 9 players in double digits or negative numbers. They were pretty much crap by the Audi metric, which means tying them was not a great feat. Johnny was our best points man, and he looked really good and that's two games in a row, so yeah, he's back. But look at our number 2, Zusi. His 390 is good but not exceptional. He completed 86 passes, missed on 11. he covered a nice amount of ground. He had two balls that the numbers indicate really could have been assists with better finishing. He was good, and coming so soon after CAI that was impressive. Right behind Zusi? Sinovic, at 356. He won 4 aerial battles, made 5 headed clearances. He was quite solid. Following him, Besler. Okay, there's a pattern emerging this year. Thus far, it's our defenders in league play who stand out. I won't go in any deeper this week, because I'm not sure it illustrates anything. We were on tired legs. And our numbers were dragged down by Melia, and we can hope that was a one off, and everybody gets one.
oh it definitely was not muted .. I didn't mind the celebration so much as his over-aggressiveness on the field. In a game whose title should've been "yellow card for persistent infringement", he was the one persistent infringer who got away. (although he eventually did get a - in my opinion unjustified - yellow card for diving). He definitely appeared super motivated, and did not apologize for any of his fouls, which does make me wonder whether there is bad blood between him and skc. I have watched a lot of MLS the last 3 weekends, and this game was by quite a margin the worst game so far, and as mschofield's analysis suggests, the audi numbers do corroborate this. Pretty much all the 'high'lights were negative ones - the constant fouling, the terrible passes, the whiffs and miscontrolls (perhaps the funniest one by Zusi), the blooper by Melia and finally the ridiculous double yellow by Blomberg. Even the one pretty thing - Russell's free kick - was more a function of Howard being afraid of the post than it being an unsaveable shot. A game that should've ended 0-0, ended 1-1. Thats fair i guess. I do hope that performances like this will not happen again once we are done with CCCL.
I didn't feel inclined to elaborate on my "yuck" comment last night. As the posters above noted, this was an ugly, match of poor possession, discontinuity, one-off goals, and lots of fouls. Not a great match to watch. Hopefully Johnny's extra 10,000 miles and another game doesn't further tire him. Nemeth and Barath too, for that matter. I also saw Barath as a bright spot. Zusi has never hit the groove. The diamond really shut down Ilie and we played a bunch of crap over the top. If Colorado could have been anything other than equally terrible, we'd have had a bad night. And not that it was a great night. One point and 4 of 9. This break will be good for the team. Like Peter said, they can finally go see their families.
I dunno, that just sounds like Rubio in a nutshell. Similar to Dwyer, he looked a little bit more angelic to us all while he wore our colors. Put some of our beloved players in another jersey, and suddenly they can look over-aggressive, brutish, or even downright dirty. I think we're just getting some splash-back of that off Diego, who often found himself unable to impact the defense as he'd like, so he'd start chipping away a bit. Learned a trick or two from Dom.
I never cared for Rubio when he was in KC and last nights performance hasn’t hanged my mind. He has always been a flopper and a lot of his dirty play seemed to come right out of the Fanendo Adi play book.
I think through the years we've all had a comment or two that went something like, "yeah, but if he played for anyone else I'd hate him..." about Rubio. He's got a great shot, and good instincts. My immediate thought when he scored was that it was a very Rubio sort of goal, though I can't remember one quite like it. Still, he served us well and i wish him well.