Preview: DC United at LA Galaxy
A coachless DC travels to face what was the league's worst team
DC crashed out of the US Open Cup on Wednesday after taking an early two goal lead, ending both any hope for a trophy and Troy Lesesne’s tenure as DC United manager. Apparently DC is about to hire René Weiler to replace him, but in the meantime they’ll be taking on LA with academy director Kevin Flanagan serving as interim coach.
I’ll have a separate post soon about the coaching change. Suffice to say, I think it was definitely time for a change.
The Lineup
Look, usually I go with the lineup I think we’re most likely to see, and I think that’s probably just the Nashville lineup rolled out again. Despite the disastrous defense, two goals against Nashville is a good offensive performance. And maybe Benteke can go a few more minutes?
But the defense was disastrous. Again. So why not try to do something different? If I was the interim coach, I think I’d say, you know what, let’s put the best eleven players on the field and roll out a 4-4-2. Not whatever the heck Lesesne was doing with four at the back where pressing left the backline constantly exposed to counterattacks, just the plain ol’ 4-4-2 that every professional soccer player ought to be able to do in their sleep.
Backup goalkeeper: Kim Joon Hong
Backup defenders: Brandon Servania, Conner Antley, Jackson Hopkins, Garrison Tubbs
Backup attackers: Dominique Badji, Randall Leal, Jared Stroud
Not selected: Derek Dodson, Rida Zouhir, Jacob Murrell, Jordan Farr
Injured: Lukas MacNaughton, Kristian Fletcher
The Opposition: LA Galaxy
LA Galaxy are the defending champions, but apparently they won last year’s MLS Cup in part through some very aggressive short-term moves that forced them to ship out players to become salary cap complaint for this year. They also lost their best player, Riqui Puig, to an ACL tear just before MLS Cup and he’s still out. Early this season, another of their DPs, Joseph Paintsil, also missed a number of games due to injury.
That’s a lot of headwinds, but even so, they were shockingly bad for the early part of the season, setting various poor performance records as they started with 16 winless games (12 losses and just 4 draws).
They still lead the Wooden Spoon race with just 12 points (DC United, at 17, are also in contention, but believe it or not besides LA there are four other teams with fewer points than DC). Recently, however, the Galaxy have been in a decent run of form. They have two wins and two draws in their last five games, including a win in their most recent game against high-flying Vancouver Whitecaps. The Whitecaps were missing some key players, but it still shows LA is a lot more competitive now than they were earlier in the season.
Despite the injuries to their offense, LA has scored a bad, but respectably bad, 22 goals (whereas DC has scored just 17 and Austin has the league’s fewest at 15). No team has given up more goals than the Galaxy, however. They’ve allowed 42 goals, three more than DC United. Both of the Galaxy’s two wins were shutouts, but in the other three games of their most recent five, they gave up six goals.
Marco Reus, 36-year-old midfielder who played almost 300 games for Dortmund and then came over last summer for a pre-retirement stint in LA, leads the team in G+A with four goals and 6 assists. Their healthy DPs Joseph Paintsil and Gabriel Pec each have 3 goals, as does MLS veteran Diego Fagundez.
34-year-old Christian Ramirez had four goals early in the season, but with more attackers healthy, he’s just been getting sub minutes lately.
They’ve had some goalkeeping drama after unexpectedly benching their starting goalkeeper from the MLS Cup season, John McCarthy, on opening day, but then giving him the job again after his backup, Novak Mićović, had some rough outings. But in shotstopping numbers while Mićović hasn’t been great, McCarthy has been terrible, so they are back to starting Mićović.
There’s one familiar face on the roster, former DC forward Miguel Berry. That’s MLS-Cup-winning forward Miguel Berry, since he was on LA last season as well. He actually has two assists this season, not bad considering the team has been terrible, but he hasn’t played since May and is unlikely to feature.
What I’m Looking For
Although LA is still lower in the standings, DC hasn’t done well against teams who are weighed down by bad defenses. DC’s offense just hasn’t been able to exploit them. The good news, I guess, is that while a loss will be embarrassing, it won’t be nearly as embarrassing as it would have been a month ago before LA got their first win against RSL.
Anyway, win or lose, what I’ll find most interesting is whether the team looks any different. It will take weeks for the new coach to get integrated and sort out what he wants to do, but teams sometimes immediately improve when a coach is fired. I think there are two possible reasons.
One is that players play harder when it’s time to impress a new coach. Until recently, I didn’t think effort was a problem, but in the last few games…yeah, maybe something has been left on the table by many of the players.
The other reason is that an interim coach will often go “back to basics” with a very simple scheme that frees players from the galaxy-brained adjustments the previous coach was attempting. The change also (initially) prevents the opposing team from dialing in specific tactical ideas based on film study. That was the spirit of my lineup above.
I could see either or both of those helping DC in this game. Of course, when players really like a fired coach, there can be a negative effect. That’s also possible here, but the results have been bad enough lately I doubt there can be any hard feelings.
With a new coach and the transfer window about to open, no player should feel safe. Let’s see if they play that way.