Galaxy 3-2 RSL … it’s official

By: Ian Rose | June 17th, 2007

That’s right, folks. The waiting is over. We now, officially, have a worst team in the MLS. It was a hard-fought battle for the basement spot, and at times, both sides played like they wanted it, but congratulations to the LA Galaxy … you’re slightly better than the worst team in the MLS.

Chris Brown had both goals for RSL, and a few chances that could have handed him a hat trick. Other than that, the RSL offense was in pretty standard form. Freddy Adu was benched for this match, an excellent call, I think, by Coach Kreis, but he came on in the 60th minute for Danny Torres. Torres had another awful game. He was directly responsible for the first LA goal, badly botching a backpass to Nick Rimando. He also got away with a really dumb foul early in the 2nd half that should have led to a short-range LA free kick. In fact, although RSL has been pretty unlucky in many ways this season, we had some luck today in avoiding penalties. There were two that could very easily have been called against us. Thank you, incompetent MLS officials. Check’s in the mail.

The game could have gone really either way, and both teams missed a few pretty straight-forward scoring opportunities, but the balance of play, I think, has to go to the Galaxy. Rimando once again played well, but his defenders (not only, but primarily, Torres) really didn’t help him out much. Nice game on the LA side from Joe Cannon and newcomer Edson Buddle.

We are now sitting on 6 points in 11 matches. At that rate, RSL will have 16 points at the end of the season, and go down as one of the worst teams in 12 years of MLS history. I wish I knew what had to change to avoid this. Torres needs to be put on the bench, now. Either Freddy Adu or Mehdi Ballouchy might also need to be substitutes, as Adu was in this match, until they start playing with some of the intensity of which they are capable. Mehdi looked pretty anemic, and he’s a big part of why this offense has been so bad.

Adu did manage to get his second assist of the season on Brown’s second goal, and now, sadly, leads the team with his two assists. That stat alone, a player leading the team with two assists after 11 games, is enough to explain why we’re the worst team in the MLS this season, and competing for the worst there ever was.