Official San Jose Earthquakes @ DC United POST Match Thread [R]

The ref tonight had a pretty good match. That said, I take a pretty jaundiced view of dissent calls in this league given the rather pathetic quality of the officiating on most nights. I'm a pretty firm believer in the baseball rule of thumb that you can say anything about the official so long as you don't use the pronoun "you" in what you say. Unless Boswell crossed the "you" line, I would be willing to chalk it up to thin skin of the ref's part.

 

I can agree with that. When it comes down to it though, it's just a pain when players are missing games because of card accumulations that to at least some extent stem from yelling at the ref.

 

I dont know what it was tonight, but the Quakes were dreadful tonight, these guys no exception. Mullan in particular is not showing the workrate or explosiveness he had prior to the injury.

It's like our guys had never played the game before.

 

Mullan is one of several MLS players who have a smidge more talent but when placed against superior physical talent disappear. Fortunately for him that's not often.

 

I thought that about 3/4 of the match was fairly boring, but there's no way to argue iwth a 3-0 win. I was particularly impressed with two things about the game:

1) The defense didn't make any mistakes and was very efficient with its passing. I particularly remember one play in front of La Norte where Boswell (I think) could have passed the ball back to Rimando but realized he had a lot of space in front of him so he turned around and played the ball up the field.

2) The humidity was hard enough to stand around in for two and a half hours, much less play soccer in. So that makes it even more impressive that our players did not fatigue late in the game.

 

I'm pretty sure that Boswell's yellow was for the foul on Cerritos; the ref played advantage, and after that there was no break in play for a minute or two.... when there finally was a break in play, the ref immediately showed the card to Bos....

 

The boxscore on MLSnet has it as dissent.

 

To follow this up:

Kuykendall with D.C. is a family affair

 

Fair enough, I'm not gonna argue with MLSnet. However, an esteemed colleague of mine (who was standing next to me in section 134) predicted, shortly after Bos took out Cerritos, that Bos would receive a yellow card for that action; I hoped the ref would forget that it occurred. But the ref immediately showed a yellow card at the first break in play.

If Bos was sassin' the ref, I say good on him, because I think (with the thinkin' help of my esteemed colleague) he was going to get the card anyway.

 

Plus, I seem to recall that the ref actually turned and pointed to the area of the foul when he was giving the card.

 

I was watching my TiVo of the game, and I had to laugh when they were showing United in their huddle prior to the 2nd half. Rimando reached over and appeared to wipe Gomez' nose with his gloved hand.

Now THAT's a teammate for ya.

 

I was thinking about this at first but the I realized something which may be what Nowak was thinking.
Moreno was avoiding going into dangerous situations because of his injury so he stayed out of harms way through most of the match. Gomez and Adu were in the heat of the attack, and were getting taken out left and right. When your best finisher(Gomez at the moment) is in danger of being taken out and you are up by 3 take HIM out and replace him with another attacker who happens to have played quite well in an exhibition match earlier in the week and leave in the "server"(Moreno) who is purposely avoiding dangerous situations and ripping open the defense while setting up the attackers. Moreno was all service last night aside from his one goal and he was doing it brilliantly. I think the substitution, although probably annoying to Gomez, was a smart move. If we were up by only one goal I highly doubt Nowak would have made that call.

Either way this team played up to expectations top to bottom. I was very happy with that match. Now, if they can only keep some sense of consistency.

 

I laughed heartily at the very same thing. Glad I wasn't seeing things.

 

A great showing for Gomez, Moreno and United. Beautiful goals. I watched the net broadcast and Ray Hudson was the announcer. He actually shut up for long periods in the second half. He took credit (probably due him) for finding Gomez though. Ray is still a classy entertaining guy.

 

Then you've not been listening.

GM

 

I hear you, Jimbo, but I gotta agree with the policy. The players must get out of the habit of talking back to the ref. When I played rugby, you could get sent off for just talking to the ref, let alone letting some expletives fly. Given that most of our refs lack the stones to do so on their own, the fed has to step in and give them a directive. Thus the weak-kneed ones can be made stronger by not permitting any discussion, let alone dissent. Too bad the players pick up cards, but (and that's a BIG but) the refs damn well better be consistent.

The next step is to make public the referee ratings and game evaluations.

Vaughn was not tested by iffy calls tonight, the play for the most part was quite clean and there was no diving in the box that I saw. Vaughn is egregiously weak at buying dives.

Great game by the guys tonight, helped by a weak performance from the clash.

GM

 

I love it when we win.

Was it just me, or did the field seem to be in better shape than past games - less crap in the seams, etc. Maybe it was all the rain, maybe I was just seeing things.

Although the timing is a little off, this game reminded me of the 3-0 game against the Crew last season - seemed to be a bit of breakout - hope it's the same for this one.

Gomez - what can you say - the guy is a 10 on a 10 scale.

 

Yes, I remember at the time Ray saying he was eager to get "that hairy-chested Argentinian" into his midfield.

 

I thought the heat/humidity combined with our offensive aggressiveness were what made SJ look so timid this match. The entire team just seized the game by the scruff of the neck and made it their own. This DCU team is very much a case of the sum of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts: when the team executes the game plan, we look wonderful out there.

This was also a good example of a Nowak gameplan--going after Kelly Gray (who has played well so far for SJ but clearly has limitations as an outside back, something I noted in the pregame thread). Remember, this was a SJ defense that for the past 7-8 games has been on a roll. Also, this is (I believe) San Jose's first loss of the season by more than 1 goal.

I think this was also Adu's best game ever in terms of moving off the ball, getting separation, creating space for teammates with runs. He may not be Brian McBride or Josh Wolff yet but these were positive signs on his part.

What do you want to bet that being named for the all-star team, having a chance to play Fulham, that Gomez is on an emotional high right now. If I'm playing DCU in the next couple of games, here's my game plan: kidnap Christian Gomez. If that isn't viable, than take my best man marker and have him go introduce himself to Gomez on the sideline before the National anthem and stay with him until the match is over. Gomez is en fuego!

Last of all: Start Shawn Kuykendall Now!

 

Just to add a couple of points to this:

The game was in hand, and we were sending players against a frustrated Calliff and Robinson. There's no reason to risk Gomez against those guys. And we ride on Gomez for running out of gas late in games. There was no reason to run him into the wall for an unnecessary goal, when we've got a rematch against KC on Wed night.

 

wonderful. had to watch via internet, but still wonderful. could have been 4 or 5 - 0. anybody up for starting a "walkers army?"

 

There was a lot more of the sod trays, or at least new sod on the field. The entire infield and (at least) the third base side in front of the north goal was new sod yesterday. Doing it that way eliminates a lot of the seams between permanent and temporary, but requires a lot more sod trays (if that's how they're doing it). Usually, it's just the dirt part of the infield that is sod trays. We'll see if that was a one time fix, or whether they do that everytime now.

I also noticed that the north side seemed to have held the water much more. In the first 20 minutes, there was several times when the ball noticably slowed rolling in the hidden puddles. By the second half, I didn't notice it at all. Anyone know, what time did the last downpour pass through the stadium??