More MLS Week 10: Games Watched and Unwatched

Starting with the unobserved game (though I did watch the highlights)...

Chicago Fire 0 - 1 Chivas USA
- Having not watched this game, I can't judge the evening authoritatively, but...if those were the highlights, this one wasn't much.
- Based on what I saw, though, Chivas deserved the win. And it looked like Maykel Galindo, again, shined for the California side.
- Has Dave Sarachan been fired yet? Is he preparing a letter to the front office about "wanting to spend more time with his family?" If not, is there perhaps someone who can write this for him?
- Seriously, after starting the season 3-0-1, Chicago has gone 1-5-1, adding only four points over - wow - seven games. Four points out of 21 sucks.
- Worse, apart from a couple decent turns in dangerous places by Chad Barrett, they simply didn't look all that threatening.
- Grim, grim times in Chicago.

Turning now, to what I endured this morning...

FC Dallas 3 - 1 Los Angeles Galaxy
- Speaking of hot seats, I'm betting blisters are building Frank Yallop's ass.
- While neither team looked sharp - especially in the first half - LA was downriight DIRE. By the second half they were FEEBLE, TIRED...just awful.
- What separated Dallas from LA, though - or, rather, who - Juan Carlos Toja. His ability to shield the ball, keep his head up and make passes that maintain possession and switch the attack all at once just stood out on a men among boys level.
- Returning to LA's second half, the rot is growing fatal. Either this team is utterly demoralized...or they just plain suck. How many passes went miles off target, and how many straight to Dallas players? With their players rarely connecting, LA got steamrolled by opposition doing quite a bit of misfiring of their own.
- A real mystery to me came with why Yallop didn't sub out Tyrone Marshall, who was clearly hobbling, far sooner. In a sense, the clumsy and brutal tackle that wiped out Kenny Cooper was an accident waiting to happen. Limping and straining for twenty minutes prior - at least - Marshall knew he couldn't keep up...and so he fouled him. Cooper paid an awful price for that.
- Oh, the irony of the Joe Cannon trade. It's not that the talk of him being the "missing piece" for LA hasn't proved accurate; it's only that, instead of helping the team maintain wins, he's preventing LA from suffering blowouts.
- After Cannon, if there was a man of the match for LA, it was - sadly - Nate Jaqua. Martino might get honorable mention, but he was largely anonymous. Jaqua could at least hold up the ball in Dallas' third.
- On the Dallas goals, even if the first might have been offside (I didn't think it was) and call for the PK that made the second was harsh, Dallas was simply the better team.
- To be clear, though, that's not saying much. Dallas had their share of high, searching (read: wayward) balls.
- At least Dallas improved as the game went on. Pablo Ricchetti, especially, pushed into the attack to great effect in the second half - so maybe Steve Morrow deserves some credit for making adjustments at the half, I don't know. One sequence in the second half, though, where Dallas just danced through the LA midfield and rushed onto their defense - this was the sequence that ended with Kenny Cooper running onto a pretty back-heel from Michael Saragosa - revealed the extent to which one team improved as the game progressed, while the other collapsed.
- I feel sorry for David Beckham. Really. The English press may be piping a lot of bullshit about MLS hurting Beckham's game, but, badly as LA is playing, they may yet have a point.