Crew Lose: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…

By: Jeff | May 7th, 2007

“How to read the Crew’s 22 fouls and four yellow cards? An impassioned effort from a side with just one win so far, or frustration boiling over? Either way, the league might look at Ricardo Virtuoso’s aggressive jump that absolutely flattened K.C. defender Jimmy Conrad.”
- Steve Davis, MLSnet.com, 5.7.07 (LINK)

I find it simultaneously gratifying and unsettling that Davis took away precisely the same talking point from the Columbus Crew’s heartbreaking loss to the Kansas City Wizards; gratifying because it means I didn’t imagine it and unsettling due to a deepening suspicion that my brain seems to be slowly merging with a collective “Super-Mind” of national soccer pundits.

Whether or not I’m becoming a “pod-pundit,” dubbing the Crew’s Saturday road-trip disappointing seems fair. But the disconcerting piece to the game follows from the “pressure point” Davis noted. It seems that, as the team struggled to score, a desire to “be active,” to make a “positive contribution to the game,” and to “fire up the team,” expresses as a kind of “over-eagerness” in the tackle. Less euphemistically, the prospect of another scoreless 90 minutes caused some Crew players to lurch to the reckless side of desperate. It wasn’t quite, “If you can’t beat ‘em, maim ‘em,” but that was more a matter of intent (i.e. they didn’t play dirty) than effect.

Cards followed bruised shins nearly as surely as this loss, which seems nearly inevitable given the overall situation, followed from the Crew forward line’s impotence; small wonder seemingly implausible rumors the Crew looking to sign Carlos Ruiz get started (oh, that would be sweeter than a barrel full of candy bars). The hard reality is, the Crew presently has only 2/3 an MLS-caliber team and my preseason pick of them in the playoffs seems more tenuous today than it did Friday.

The carnage aside, Saturday also marked the debut of Guillermo Barros Schelotto. While he didn’t score, he did manage to lead the team in actual “positive contributions” - e.g. shots on goal - and he showed great close control on a couple occasions. So, it’s to be hoped that he’ll help get this team on track offensively - to use an analogy started in the paragraph above, hopefully, Schelotto will be the “boner-juice” to repair the Crew’s flaccid offense. Contrary to the phrase, hope doesn’t spring eternal; it only lasts till the latest experiment proves its worth.

Now, I had intended to pass on links to other reports - y’know, throw out links to the observations of others to support or refute allegations of my ignorance. But like the Crew’s attack that effort stalled: neither Sensory Overload not Hunt Park Insider have anything up yet and I can’t even find the Columbus Dispatch online at time of writing. As such, I’m left recommending Davis’ commentary, MLSnet.com’s (no offense to the author; he’s under editorial/style restraints) boring, boring write-up, and, to pad this to the furthest extent possible, to link back to the Week 5 wrap I posted on It’s a Simple Game.

Perhaps more chatter will come tomorrow; I’ll pass it on if it does.