 |
| All was right in New England the next season... |
“The 2007 season was often cited as the first season in the modern-era of Major League Soccer.”
This claim is currently under investigation…but the phrasing begs a question: did another season replace this one as the season “often cited as the first season of the modern-era of Major League Soccer”? Also, is that hyphen necessary?
Grammatical/verb tense cheap shots aside (to think, what someone else could do with any of my posts), Major League Soccer saw a handful of changes going into the 2007 season that stake the claim. For one, MLS allowed jersey sponsors for the first time that season (one of the sponsors hints at what might have nudged them over the line: “The international recognized brand, Red Bull became the shirt sponsor of New York Red Bulls, whom they owned.”). The long, uneven path toward standing up an international club competition in the CONCACAF region got a boost as well; while they wouldn’t switch to the CONCACAF Champions League until the 2008 season, MLS and Liga MX ran the Superliga up the flagpole – and, holy shit, the New England Revolution won the 2008 edition, beating the Houston Dynamo on penalty kicks. Turns out pigs can fly, man…
…but if I had to name the one thing that finally made these regional tilts worth playing, I’d go with the magnificent duels Houston played against La Liga’s Pachuca CF. They played the first during the 2007 season, back when it remained the CONCACAF Champions Cup. Houston, those beautiful bastards made it possible to believe a North American team might one day one it all.
This claim is currently under investigation…but the phrasing begs a question: did another season replace this one as the season “often cited as the first season of the modern-era of Major League Soccer”? Also, is that hyphen necessary?
Grammatical/verb tense cheap shots aside (to think, what someone else could do with any of my posts), Major League Soccer saw a handful of changes going into the 2007 season that stake the claim. For one, MLS allowed jersey sponsors for the first time that season (one of the sponsors hints at what might have nudged them over the line: “The international recognized brand, Red Bull became the shirt sponsor of New York Red Bulls, whom they owned.”). The long, uneven path toward standing up an international club competition in the CONCACAF region got a boost as well; while they wouldn’t switch to the CONCACAF Champions League until the 2008 season, MLS and Liga MX ran the Superliga up the flagpole – and, holy shit, the New England Revolution won the 2008 edition, beating the Houston Dynamo on penalty kicks. Turns out pigs can fly, man…
…but if I had to name the one thing that finally made these regional tilts worth playing, I’d go with the magnificent duels Houston played against La Liga’s Pachuca CF. They played the first during the 2007 season, back when it remained the CONCACAF Champions Cup. Houston, those beautiful bastards made it possible to believe a North American team might one day one it all.
Two new soccer-specific stadiums opened – one of them hosting a new expansion team (welcome aboard, Toronto FC!); the other was the Colorado Rapids’ Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, aka, The Dick (tell me they still call it that) – and MLS made some tweaks to the rules of competition (again; more below), but it was the arrival of the designated-player (DP) rule that really puts a spine into that “first season in the modern-era of MLS” claim. I think just about everyone likely to find this lonely post knows how the DP rule works (short version: “permitting one big-ticket foreign player to play for each team without going against the team's salary cap”), but it’s fun to look at who showed up in that inaugural class:
David Beckham (Los Angeles Galaxy)
Juan Pablo Angel (New York Red Bulls)
Cuauhtemoc Blanco (Chicago Fire; impressed I still remember the spelling)
Guillermo Barros Schelotto (Columbus Crew)
Luciano Emilio (DC United)
While only Blanco and Beckham counted as household names, three of those other players – Emilio, Angel and Schelotto – did big things for the teams that signed them, despite their comparative anonymity. People searched high and low for evidence that Beckham, especially, wasn’t worth the price and profile, but the rule worked overall, not least because it had multiple purposes; even if, say, Blanco posted Eddie-Gaven-esque numbers over his three seasons in MLS, he served the no less important purpose of putting butts in seats and giving fans something to get excited about. And fans all over the league really did make a public special effort of seeing Beckham; the man was a draw, no question. Close observers (or just someone who bothered with the link), will notice I left out one of the DPs. That's because he doubled as a punchline:
Denilson (FC Dallas)
Denilson answered the question of why 1998’s most-expensive player in the world would sign to MLS in spectacular fashion. He lasted just eight games and scored just one goal (with no assists); he didn’t even make the team when Dallas squared off against (and lost to) New England in the 2007 U.S. Open Cup final. The rest of his career makes for sad reading – see a pay-for-play season in Vietnam - and I am sympathetic to that (even if it doesn’t sound like), but I also value the direct relationship between truly great failures and truly great (dark) comedy. With MLS on hold due to the ‘Rona, the league has tried to keep people talking by asking fans to name the players they’d put on the local team’s own personal Mount Rushmore. I’d love to see the anti-Mount Rushmores (say, the four faces you’d put on your sewage water treatment facility), both for each team and an all-time shit-squad for MLS as a whole.
As for the season itself, it saw a familiar ending – DC United won the Supporters’ Shield again and Houston beat the Revolution in MLS Cup again – but they traveled a slightly different road to get there. Toronto knocked the conferences out of balance when it joined the league – the Eastern Conference now had seven teams to the Western Conference’s six – and that forced some changes to the rules of competition. For the only time I can remember (not saying much), the league reduced the number of regular season games from 32 to 30; they also reverted to the 2002 playoff format of making everything under the two two spots in each conference a free-for-all (my notes on that season here), but the reason given bears noting: they wanted to make the regular season matter more…an argument that remains a live one even after all the recent expansion. Because every team played all the others home-and-away (plus six more games against “regional” teams), the travel must have been hell, and maybe it’s still hell, but that’s still a lot. Anyway, those were the ground rules.
Staring at this stuff last night (after a combination of too many and too much), I’d talked myself into believing that the 2007 season saw the first big divide between haves and have nots. As it happens, that falls somewhere between dubious and inaccurate based on a random sampling of the final standings from past seasons (let’s go with 1996, 1999, 2002, and 2004). Instead, the evidence suggests that 2002 and 2004 were outliers from the norm, anomalies that followed from the league shedding the two Florida teams after the 2001 season. In other words, 2007 represented a reassertion of the rules that existed before contraction and that would continue going forward. Like any league around the world, teams adopt different strategies to either get the most out of their budgets or to expand the budget’s size. The latter was what the DP-rule was all about and, later, the all the TAM, GAM, and Generation Adidas stuff that I just can’t bring myself to care about. (To put that directly, I’ll get the team they give me no matter what I say or do, so knowing that stuff feels like majoring in Philosophy with minors in calligraphy and philately. No offense intended to anyone with an interest and/or career in any of those.)
At any rate, by the time the 2007 regular season wrapped up, only four teams looked like they had a real shot at MLS Cup: DC, Houston, New England and…get this Chivas USA. Given how the honors got sorted by season’s end – e.g., who won what trophy (all of which has been noted above) - that held up exquisitely. I do, however, want to briefly linger on Chivas USA, because they became something of a Denilson-esque punchline by the time they folded. They became a competitive team after one (1) shitty season: after making the playoffs in 2006, they finished just two points behind DC United in the Supporters’ Shield race in 2007. Once they got over the “Chivas Junior” mind-set, and brought in players who made their reputations playing for Chivas USA – e.g., Sacha Kljestan, Brad Guzan, Jonathan Bornstein, Jason Hernandez (and useful Mexican veterans like Claudio Suarez) – and when they hired Bob Bradley as head coach, they became one of the most entertaining teams in MLS. They sure as hell owned the Galaxy’s ass during this period (and, related, these were wilderness years for the Galaxy).
One last thing, looking at the 2007 Chivas USA roster reminded me of Maykel Galindo and the wave of defections from any Cuban soccer team that set foot on U.S. soil during the mid-2000s. Galindo kicked ass (12g, 5a) – and he paired nicely with Ante Razov (11g, 8a) – but that pipeline handed a couple aces to the MLS teams they joined. Osvaldo Alonso came from the same. That’s just in case anyone tells you, Cuba can produce good soccer players…they just don’t tend to stay in Cuba. OK, digression over…
The reason I argued that only those four teams looked anything approaching serious shows up in the goal differentials. 2007 saw another low average for goals - 39.8, the second lowest average in league history to that point – so it’s worth detailing where those four top teams landed against the rest of the playoff field: DC United, +22; Chivas USA, +18; Houston Dynamo, +20; and New England +8 – and, golly, did that last number wind up mattering. By contrast, here’s where those same numbers landed for the rest of the playoff field: New York Red Bulls, +2; Chicago Fire, -5; Kansas City Wizards, 0 (the East sent three of the four teams to the playoffs); FC Dallas, -7. Now, in tried-true-and-ingrained MLS tradition, none of that really mattered when the playoffs arrived – e.g., Chicago knocked out DC (their second first-round exit in as many seasons), while Kansas City slipped Chivas into a sleeper hold – but real, steady quality came through in MLS Cup. As Eric Wynalda noted it in his comments during the MLS Cup broadcast, Houston and New England reached the finals because they were the best teams at that time.
For the record, this MLS Cup saw my favorite all-time player introductions in any sporting event. Whoever decided to let the players clown around deserves a raise and a permanent job, starting with Ryan “Keep It Classy” Cochrane, and Brad “24 credits” Davis for Houston, and ending with a little cheer routine between New England aces, Pat Noonan and Taylor Twellman. My personal highlight, though, was New England ‘keeper Matt Reis dead-panning, “Matt Reis, Mission Viejo, California. We’re just trying to win one. That’s all.” I loved this team for a reason, dammit. (Here's a link to the full game; for the intros, start watching at 2:14 fro Houston's and at 3:38 for New England's).
They didn’t, obviously, and Houston won it 2-1 in regular time. Despite changes to the line-up – losing Daniel Hernandez mattered – circumstances favored the Revolution: Houston was missing its “star forward, Brian Ching (look, it was a weird season), but also Ricardo Clark, who was suspended for nine games before the playoffs for doing what every player and most fans wanted to do – e.g., kick Dallas forward Carlos Ruiz (ah, such a moment). New England even opened the scoring when the Dynamo left Twellman open for a cross inside the six for some damn reason. They could have added another, but Noonan skied another great Steve “MLS original” Ralston set up over the crossbar.
Houston survived and won and for a couple reasons. First, they had the second best defense in league history, with just 24 goals allowed; their ‘keeper, Pat Onstad, who had a 726-fucking-minute shutout streak during the 2007 season, kept out everything else that came his way that afternoon. The Dynamo also rode a score-by-committee system that saw utility forwards like Joseph Ngwenya and Nate Jaqua basically match Ching’s numbers for the season. In other words, losing Ching didn’t matter a whole lot when it came to scoring; it was Ngwenya who forced Houston’s equalizer over the line in an appropriately hideous manner. Finally, they had Dwayne DeRosario, arguably the greatest big-game player during the 2000s, cap it off. His headed goal was big, but this free-kick (actually had another one in mind, dammit), which still rates among the greatest all-time in MLS history, gets at how special he was.
To get back to the Mount Rushmore thing, DeRosario belongs on the final, all-time list. In his prime, he was a rare player who made you sit on the edge of your seat every time he got the ball in a certain place/circumstance. He was capable of greatness in a way that MLS sees in just two or three players every season. To give another great his due, Ralston belongs in the same category, a reality underlined by everything he did in MLS Cup 2007. Twellman deserves some major ups as well, because he just kept producing. When you look at who scored in the playoffs during the Revolution’s glory years, you keep seeing his names. The whole New England/San Jose/Houston rivalry defined a half decade of MLS soccer. It was a clash of titans, really, and one that belongs in the league’s history when it’s finally written. I was lucky enough to back one of the teams as it happened, and I’m grateful for all the few good choices I've made.
And, that’s it. To continue a tradition, I’m going to close with a round-up of the rest of the league and what each team looked like in the 2007 season (and, this time, I embedded a link to each team's stats in their name, so I don't have to think about where I placed the damn link). This time, I really will confine myself to one (perhaps run-on) sentence for each team. In the order in which they finished…
DC United, (16-7-7, 55 pts., 56 gf, 34 ga (+22), 1st in East, Supporters’ Shield)
Luciano Emilio posted league-leading numbers in 2007 (20g, 1a), but they followed the score-by-committee formula as well as anyone (Christian Gomez, 10g, 9a; Fred, 7g, 8a; Ben Olsen, 7g, 7a; and Jaime Moreno, 7g, 6a), but their defense made them MLS’s best team in 2007; DC had such good teams in the mid-2000s.
Chivas USA (15-7-8, 53 pts.; 46 gf, 28 ga (+18); 1st in West)
Covered above; again, this was a fun team.
Houston Dynamo (15-8-7, 52 pts.; 43 gf, 23 ga (+20), 2nd in West)
It’s actually shocking to look at where they got their goals (a quick breakdown: Ngwenya, 7g, 3a; Ching, 7g, 2a; DeRo, 6g, 4a; Jaqua, 6g, 2a; Holden, 5g, 5a), but the real story was a solid defense staying healthy all season: Craig Waibel had the fewest starts, but he still hit 21; Eddie Robinson and Cochrane played/started 25.
New England Revolution (14-8-8, 50 pts,; 51 gf, 43 ga (+8), 2nd in East)
Yet another score-by-committee team, but I think I finally have my answer for why the Revolution never won MLS Cup: they never had a league-elite defense – and that’s even after grinding their way to MLS Cup 2007.
FC Dallas (13-12-5, 44 pts.; 37 gf, 44 ga (-7), 3rd in West, playoffs)
With a defense/transition built around Clarence Goodson, Drew Moor, and Dax McCarty, they had a solid foundation, but they attack died when Carlos Ruiz’s numbers fell off (he lead the team with 7g, 2a).
New York Red Bulls (12-11-7, 43 pts.; 47 ga, 45 ga (+2); 3rd in East)
After a year (or two?) off, they returned to a familiar, “we’ll-allow-as-many-goals-as-we-score” formula for 2007, and it carried them about as far; Angel crushed it (19g, 5a), and they had Jozy Altidore (9g, 4a) and a last-gasp Clint Mathis (6g, 4a); they had a playmaker (Dave van der Bergh, 2g 8a), plus a useful fullback (Dane Richards, 2g, 6a), but they lacked the defensive midfield spine that tends to make a team great.
Chicago Fire (10-10-10, 40 pts.; 31 gf, 36 ga (-5), 4th in East, playoffs)
Their defense hauled their asses into the playoffs; any time Chad Barrett is your leading scorer (as he was for Chicago), you’re going to struggle; as noted above, the quality fell off pretty fast in ’07.
Kansas City Wizards (11-12-7, 40 pts.; 45 gf, 45 ga (0); 5th in East)
Eddie Johnson probably saw his best club season in 2007 (15g, 6a), and Davy Arnaud became one of MLS’s all-time great second bananas, but the defensive solidity that carried them to their prior success started to breakdown, and in spite of having most of the same players available.
Columbus Crew (9-11-10, 37 pts., 39 gf, 44 ga (-5), 6th in East)
A number of players did their part – Schelotto (5g, 11a), Alejandro Moreno (7g, 7a) and Gaven (5g, 7a), but they just didn’t have the quality of the league’s better teams and all over the field (e.g., Moreno, a player I admire, isn’t a forward who’ll win you trophies).
Colorado Rapids (9-13-8, 35 pts.; 29 gf, 34 ga (-5), 4th in West, no playoffs)
This team spent more time in the doldrums than I remember; the attack was fucking awful (e.g., these are their leading scorers: Jovan “Musk” Kirovski, 6g, 1a; Herculez Gomez (4g, 2a); even Terry Cooke faded down to just seven assists in 2007).
Los Angeles Galaxy (9-14-7, 34 pts.; 38 gf, 48 ga (-10); 5th in West, no playoffs)
Bluntly, this was a bad rehash of the Landon Donovan show (8g, 13a) dragging around the corpse of Cobi Jones.
Real Salt Lake (6-15-9, 27 pts.; 31 gf, 45 ga (-14); 6th in West)
Just one season after coming close to the playoffs, RSL slid back into the shit, mostly because they relied on Robbie Findlay (6g, 0a) and knock-around journeyman Chris Brown (5g, 0a) to carry the offense; that said, the cavalry arrived in the fall with the arrival of Fabian Espindola, Javier Morales and Kyle Beckerman.
Toronto FC (6-17-7, 25 pts.; 25 gf, 49 ga (+24), 6th in East)
Their first season was extremely expansion team; they relied on a Queens Park Rangers reject named Danny Dichio and an aging Jeff Cunningham to generate offense (at 6g, 1a and 4g, 1a, respectively, nope!); the only guy to stick around from there was Maurice Edu.
And that’s another year in the books. Hope you enjoyed it!
Denilson answered the question of why 1998’s most-expensive player in the world would sign to MLS in spectacular fashion. He lasted just eight games and scored just one goal (with no assists); he didn’t even make the team when Dallas squared off against (and lost to) New England in the 2007 U.S. Open Cup final. The rest of his career makes for sad reading – see a pay-for-play season in Vietnam - and I am sympathetic to that (even if it doesn’t sound like), but I also value the direct relationship between truly great failures and truly great (dark) comedy. With MLS on hold due to the ‘Rona, the league has tried to keep people talking by asking fans to name the players they’d put on the local team’s own personal Mount Rushmore. I’d love to see the anti-Mount Rushmores (say, the four faces you’d put on your sewage water treatment facility), both for each team and an all-time shit-squad for MLS as a whole.
As for the season itself, it saw a familiar ending – DC United won the Supporters’ Shield again and Houston beat the Revolution in MLS Cup again – but they traveled a slightly different road to get there. Toronto knocked the conferences out of balance when it joined the league – the Eastern Conference now had seven teams to the Western Conference’s six – and that forced some changes to the rules of competition. For the only time I can remember (not saying much), the league reduced the number of regular season games from 32 to 30; they also reverted to the 2002 playoff format of making everything under the two two spots in each conference a free-for-all (my notes on that season here), but the reason given bears noting: they wanted to make the regular season matter more…an argument that remains a live one even after all the recent expansion. Because every team played all the others home-and-away (plus six more games against “regional” teams), the travel must have been hell, and maybe it’s still hell, but that’s still a lot. Anyway, those were the ground rules.
Staring at this stuff last night (after a combination of too many and too much), I’d talked myself into believing that the 2007 season saw the first big divide between haves and have nots. As it happens, that falls somewhere between dubious and inaccurate based on a random sampling of the final standings from past seasons (let’s go with 1996, 1999, 2002, and 2004). Instead, the evidence suggests that 2002 and 2004 were outliers from the norm, anomalies that followed from the league shedding the two Florida teams after the 2001 season. In other words, 2007 represented a reassertion of the rules that existed before contraction and that would continue going forward. Like any league around the world, teams adopt different strategies to either get the most out of their budgets or to expand the budget’s size. The latter was what the DP-rule was all about and, later, the all the TAM, GAM, and Generation Adidas stuff that I just can’t bring myself to care about. (To put that directly, I’ll get the team they give me no matter what I say or do, so knowing that stuff feels like majoring in Philosophy with minors in calligraphy and philately. No offense intended to anyone with an interest and/or career in any of those.)
At any rate, by the time the 2007 regular season wrapped up, only four teams looked like they had a real shot at MLS Cup: DC, Houston, New England and…get this Chivas USA. Given how the honors got sorted by season’s end – e.g., who won what trophy (all of which has been noted above) - that held up exquisitely. I do, however, want to briefly linger on Chivas USA, because they became something of a Denilson-esque punchline by the time they folded. They became a competitive team after one (1) shitty season: after making the playoffs in 2006, they finished just two points behind DC United in the Supporters’ Shield race in 2007. Once they got over the “Chivas Junior” mind-set, and brought in players who made their reputations playing for Chivas USA – e.g., Sacha Kljestan, Brad Guzan, Jonathan Bornstein, Jason Hernandez (and useful Mexican veterans like Claudio Suarez) – and when they hired Bob Bradley as head coach, they became one of the most entertaining teams in MLS. They sure as hell owned the Galaxy’s ass during this period (and, related, these were wilderness years for the Galaxy).
One last thing, looking at the 2007 Chivas USA roster reminded me of Maykel Galindo and the wave of defections from any Cuban soccer team that set foot on U.S. soil during the mid-2000s. Galindo kicked ass (12g, 5a) – and he paired nicely with Ante Razov (11g, 8a) – but that pipeline handed a couple aces to the MLS teams they joined. Osvaldo Alonso came from the same. That’s just in case anyone tells you, Cuba can produce good soccer players…they just don’t tend to stay in Cuba. OK, digression over…
The reason I argued that only those four teams looked anything approaching serious shows up in the goal differentials. 2007 saw another low average for goals - 39.8, the second lowest average in league history to that point – so it’s worth detailing where those four top teams landed against the rest of the playoff field: DC United, +22; Chivas USA, +18; Houston Dynamo, +20; and New England +8 – and, golly, did that last number wind up mattering. By contrast, here’s where those same numbers landed for the rest of the playoff field: New York Red Bulls, +2; Chicago Fire, -5; Kansas City Wizards, 0 (the East sent three of the four teams to the playoffs); FC Dallas, -7. Now, in tried-true-and-ingrained MLS tradition, none of that really mattered when the playoffs arrived – e.g., Chicago knocked out DC (their second first-round exit in as many seasons), while Kansas City slipped Chivas into a sleeper hold – but real, steady quality came through in MLS Cup. As Eric Wynalda noted it in his comments during the MLS Cup broadcast, Houston and New England reached the finals because they were the best teams at that time.
For the record, this MLS Cup saw my favorite all-time player introductions in any sporting event. Whoever decided to let the players clown around deserves a raise and a permanent job, starting with Ryan “Keep It Classy” Cochrane, and Brad “24 credits” Davis for Houston, and ending with a little cheer routine between New England aces, Pat Noonan and Taylor Twellman. My personal highlight, though, was New England ‘keeper Matt Reis dead-panning, “Matt Reis, Mission Viejo, California. We’re just trying to win one. That’s all.” I loved this team for a reason, dammit. (Here's a link to the full game; for the intros, start watching at 2:14 fro Houston's and at 3:38 for New England's).
They didn’t, obviously, and Houston won it 2-1 in regular time. Despite changes to the line-up – losing Daniel Hernandez mattered – circumstances favored the Revolution: Houston was missing its “star forward, Brian Ching (look, it was a weird season), but also Ricardo Clark, who was suspended for nine games before the playoffs for doing what every player and most fans wanted to do – e.g., kick Dallas forward Carlos Ruiz (ah, such a moment). New England even opened the scoring when the Dynamo left Twellman open for a cross inside the six for some damn reason. They could have added another, but Noonan skied another great Steve “MLS original” Ralston set up over the crossbar.
Houston survived and won and for a couple reasons. First, they had the second best defense in league history, with just 24 goals allowed; their ‘keeper, Pat Onstad, who had a 726-fucking-minute shutout streak during the 2007 season, kept out everything else that came his way that afternoon. The Dynamo also rode a score-by-committee system that saw utility forwards like Joseph Ngwenya and Nate Jaqua basically match Ching’s numbers for the season. In other words, losing Ching didn’t matter a whole lot when it came to scoring; it was Ngwenya who forced Houston’s equalizer over the line in an appropriately hideous manner. Finally, they had Dwayne DeRosario, arguably the greatest big-game player during the 2000s, cap it off. His headed goal was big, but this free-kick (actually had another one in mind, dammit), which still rates among the greatest all-time in MLS history, gets at how special he was.
To get back to the Mount Rushmore thing, DeRosario belongs on the final, all-time list. In his prime, he was a rare player who made you sit on the edge of your seat every time he got the ball in a certain place/circumstance. He was capable of greatness in a way that MLS sees in just two or three players every season. To give another great his due, Ralston belongs in the same category, a reality underlined by everything he did in MLS Cup 2007. Twellman deserves some major ups as well, because he just kept producing. When you look at who scored in the playoffs during the Revolution’s glory years, you keep seeing his names. The whole New England/San Jose/Houston rivalry defined a half decade of MLS soccer. It was a clash of titans, really, and one that belongs in the league’s history when it’s finally written. I was lucky enough to back one of the teams as it happened, and I’m grateful for all the few good choices I've made.
And, that’s it. To continue a tradition, I’m going to close with a round-up of the rest of the league and what each team looked like in the 2007 season (and, this time, I embedded a link to each team's stats in their name, so I don't have to think about where I placed the damn link). This time, I really will confine myself to one (perhaps run-on) sentence for each team. In the order in which they finished…
DC United, (16-7-7, 55 pts., 56 gf, 34 ga (+22), 1st in East, Supporters’ Shield)
Luciano Emilio posted league-leading numbers in 2007 (20g, 1a), but they followed the score-by-committee formula as well as anyone (Christian Gomez, 10g, 9a; Fred, 7g, 8a; Ben Olsen, 7g, 7a; and Jaime Moreno, 7g, 6a), but their defense made them MLS’s best team in 2007; DC had such good teams in the mid-2000s.
Chivas USA (15-7-8, 53 pts.; 46 gf, 28 ga (+18); 1st in West)
Covered above; again, this was a fun team.
Houston Dynamo (15-8-7, 52 pts.; 43 gf, 23 ga (+20), 2nd in West)
It’s actually shocking to look at where they got their goals (a quick breakdown: Ngwenya, 7g, 3a; Ching, 7g, 2a; DeRo, 6g, 4a; Jaqua, 6g, 2a; Holden, 5g, 5a), but the real story was a solid defense staying healthy all season: Craig Waibel had the fewest starts, but he still hit 21; Eddie Robinson and Cochrane played/started 25.
New England Revolution (14-8-8, 50 pts,; 51 gf, 43 ga (+8), 2nd in East)
Yet another score-by-committee team, but I think I finally have my answer for why the Revolution never won MLS Cup: they never had a league-elite defense – and that’s even after grinding their way to MLS Cup 2007.
FC Dallas (13-12-5, 44 pts.; 37 gf, 44 ga (-7), 3rd in West, playoffs)
With a defense/transition built around Clarence Goodson, Drew Moor, and Dax McCarty, they had a solid foundation, but they attack died when Carlos Ruiz’s numbers fell off (he lead the team with 7g, 2a).
New York Red Bulls (12-11-7, 43 pts.; 47 ga, 45 ga (+2); 3rd in East)
After a year (or two?) off, they returned to a familiar, “we’ll-allow-as-many-goals-as-we-score” formula for 2007, and it carried them about as far; Angel crushed it (19g, 5a), and they had Jozy Altidore (9g, 4a) and a last-gasp Clint Mathis (6g, 4a); they had a playmaker (Dave van der Bergh, 2g 8a), plus a useful fullback (Dane Richards, 2g, 6a), but they lacked the defensive midfield spine that tends to make a team great.
Chicago Fire (10-10-10, 40 pts.; 31 gf, 36 ga (-5), 4th in East, playoffs)
Their defense hauled their asses into the playoffs; any time Chad Barrett is your leading scorer (as he was for Chicago), you’re going to struggle; as noted above, the quality fell off pretty fast in ’07.
Kansas City Wizards (11-12-7, 40 pts.; 45 gf, 45 ga (0); 5th in East)
Eddie Johnson probably saw his best club season in 2007 (15g, 6a), and Davy Arnaud became one of MLS’s all-time great second bananas, but the defensive solidity that carried them to their prior success started to breakdown, and in spite of having most of the same players available.
Columbus Crew (9-11-10, 37 pts., 39 gf, 44 ga (-5), 6th in East)
A number of players did their part – Schelotto (5g, 11a), Alejandro Moreno (7g, 7a) and Gaven (5g, 7a), but they just didn’t have the quality of the league’s better teams and all over the field (e.g., Moreno, a player I admire, isn’t a forward who’ll win you trophies).
Colorado Rapids (9-13-8, 35 pts.; 29 gf, 34 ga (-5), 4th in West, no playoffs)
This team spent more time in the doldrums than I remember; the attack was fucking awful (e.g., these are their leading scorers: Jovan “Musk” Kirovski, 6g, 1a; Herculez Gomez (4g, 2a); even Terry Cooke faded down to just seven assists in 2007).
Los Angeles Galaxy (9-14-7, 34 pts.; 38 gf, 48 ga (-10); 5th in West, no playoffs)
Bluntly, this was a bad rehash of the Landon Donovan show (8g, 13a) dragging around the corpse of Cobi Jones.
Real Salt Lake (6-15-9, 27 pts.; 31 gf, 45 ga (-14); 6th in West)
Just one season after coming close to the playoffs, RSL slid back into the shit, mostly because they relied on Robbie Findlay (6g, 0a) and knock-around journeyman Chris Brown (5g, 0a) to carry the offense; that said, the cavalry arrived in the fall with the arrival of Fabian Espindola, Javier Morales and Kyle Beckerman.
Toronto FC (6-17-7, 25 pts.; 25 gf, 49 ga (+24), 6th in East)
Their first season was extremely expansion team; they relied on a Queens Park Rangers reject named Danny Dichio and an aging Jeff Cunningham to generate offense (at 6g, 1a and 4g, 1a, respectively, nope!); the only guy to stick around from there was Maurice Edu.
And that’s another year in the books. Hope you enjoyed it!
No comments:
Post a Comment