Money for nothing, and your kicks for free

After getting over the intial "wow, we sucked" reaction to the Fire's effort in Our Nation's Capital over the weekend, I went back and watched the 2-0 defeat at, well, the feet of the previously winless DC United.

Now, I know I come across as a relentless optimist a lot of the time, but it wasn't really quite so bad. Facing a team that was desperate to get three points, playing in miserable conditions, and missing some key players, the deck seemed just too stacked against us. Personally, I didn't think DC had enough fight in them to pull out the win, but I've been wrong before, and certainly will be again.

Strategically, with a team that's going to be going all-out for the win, the Fire actually looked to execute their strategy pretty well. It was a page out of the old Bob Bradley book, even, with a fairly sustained attack for the first ten minutes or so, before the team settled down and focused a bit more on defense. They weren't clear-cut chances, but Chicago made some fairly ambitious attempts in that opening stretch of the game, and obviously, had one of them panned out, everything changes.

And on a day when USMNT standout DaMarcus Beasley was invisible for long stretches of time, his imminent replacement on the left, Justin Mapp, picked up a heck of a lot of slack for an 18-year-old. Mapp was one of two or three Fire players who actually looked good in spite of the scoreline. Another was Zach Thornton, who was on such a roll early that I had him figured to stop Marco Etcheverry's penalty kick. CJ Brown also looked good, except maybe for one spot where a United attacker was able to split him and Jim Curtin for a breakaway that Thornton smothered. Overall, the defense had one breakdown and one bad break. I am a little concerned that, while serving balls into the middle hasn't been effective against our preternaturally tall central defense, flighting a ball over the 'D' worked pretty well. Hopefully, no one else noticed.

Offensively, it's been interesting to watch Ante Razov at work lately. In theory, he's playing the same role that he, and Rodrigo Faria before him, played in the 3-6-1 formation, as a target forward distributing to attackers on the wings. But for some reason, it looks like the spacing of the 4-4-2 allows him to be more effective at it. Obviously, not so much in this game, but he's definitely finding a rhythm in this role over the last three weeks. And rookie Damani Ralph had a good start, but ultimately turned in a disappointing performance. Given that two out of his three starts have been fine efforts, he's already doing better than the Grateful Dead. Or was it every third night that they sucked? I'd say every night, but that would get me in trouble, and you don't want to have a confrontation with those uppity Dead fans. If the smell of the pachoulli doesn't overpower you, they'll hypnotize you with that ridiculous arhythmic wiggle dancing and steal your wallet.

But I digress. One of the keys to this match, though, was that the Fire had, if I counted correctly, sixteen free kicks in DC's half of the field, eight in each half. And only one of them resulted in anything remotely dangerous. When the offense was struggling early in the season, it looked like the return of Razov would maybe help in this aspect of the game, but it hasn't happened yet. With all the big bodies the Fire can get into the penalty box, it's damn near ridiculous that we haven't gotten a goal off a restart this far into the season. Of course, the San Antonio Spurs may very well win the NBA Finals with one of the worst free-throw percentages in the league, so who knows?

Moving on, now it's a matter of which side is more depleted as the Fire face the MetroStars and the aforementioned Bradley this coming weekend. A lot of Metro's early success has been the super-solid central defensive column of goalie Tim Howard, defender Eddie Pope and noted ankle-biting midfielder Richie Williams. Now two-thirds of that trio are out, and the Metro defense will struggle. In front, they're missing Clint Mathis (US team), Jaime Moreno (injury) and John Wolyniec (suspension), which creates a big void on the offensive end as well. The Fire at least have some guys that, while they're not quite Beasley, Armas and Bocanegra, can get by in those roles. Metro will have to rely on a lot of rookies and recently acquired internationals, so you have to imagine their chemistry will take a serious hit. This is another game the Fire should be able to win, but I said that last week, and we see where that got me.