Thoughts on Week 7; sporadic posting explained

By: Jeff | May 21st, 2007

I won’t pretend I watched the Crew’s flame-out against Red Bull; I’m finding watching the Crew harder and harder lately. But I did catch the Quick Kicks highlights and that showed me enough. The four goals conceded says enough about the defense - though that howler of a pass that led to Juan Pablo Angel’s goal was something special. But the more striking thing about this game - assuming I can make such judgments based on highlights chosen by someone else (possibly even a Red Bull sympathizer) - was the Crew’s offensive cohesion. Here’s what I’m about to post on that on my home site:

I’ve got a theory on the Crew’s offense: the players are not pulling the same direction. Put another way, different players have different ideas about the way to get their team scoring goals and that plays out on the field with errant passing, mistimed runs - just a general grabasstic mess with too many generals freelancing it. Mmmm….”generals” doesn’t correctly communicate the level: let’ go with corporals.

I can’t link to the full piece ’cause I haven’t posted it yet; call this a sneak peak. In any case, that’s a half-polite way of saying the Crew looks as lost on offense as a rec team running at full professionals. It’s not so much to say they can’t score; they can and have. It’s more along the lines of, with the way they’re playing now, it’s more likely that they won’t than they will. Maybe this will improve when the old guys get used to the new guys. I’ll tell you this, though. It’s damned hard to watch the Crew as they roll up that learning curve.

A person or two might have noticed I didn’t post much last week. Blame life, etc. and life has been a nasty little bitch lately. A very real share of the blame, however, must go to the Crew. Yeah, I perk up when they do well, but, honestly, this is not an easy team to watch as a half-interested neutral. To say motivation is hard to come by, well….that’s not half the story.