Righting The Ship

I'm really struggling with the phrase "the New York Red Bulls are the class of MLS."

Really.

Pre-season, I figured that, for all Bruce Arena's tinkering, there is still no suck like Metrosuck, and we'd still be left with an underachieving side.

But that was before Juan Pablo Angel.

This colors my view of Thursday night's Fire loss to this very same Red Bulls team. Angel totally took the Fire's two most veteran defenders to school, beating CJ Brown to the end line to assist on the first, and then making an insane cutback move to fake captain Chris Armas out of his shorts on the third.

So we lost to the best team, and arguably the best player, in the league. Does this make the Fire's four-game skid somehow less of a cause for concern?

Not really.

At the end of the day, this Fire squad is prone to defensive breakdowns, and our scoring opportunities aren't quite good enough. On the surface, this continues to remind me of the 2004-2005 Chicago Bulls. That's basketball for you soccer purists who don't follow any other sports. When that team went 0-9 to start the season, it was because they weren't playing good defense for the entire game, and their shots just weren't falling. They were getting good looks at the basket, but they just weren't dropping. They figured those two parts out and made the playoffs for the first time since Michael Jordan left the building.

So, the big questions for the Fire are, can the defense tighten up enough, and are the scoring opportunities good enough but for a lack of finishing? The bigger questions are, do we have the players capable of fixing the defense and improving the finishing?

Regarding the first, I'm still worried that the pace of play has improved this year in MLS, while the Fire have not kept up that pace. And it's not just the speed of the actual ball movement, it's the speed of thought, and this manifests itself in defensive decision-making. That opening minute goal in the Meadowlands is a good example, as the Fire had something like four or five guys inside the 6-yard box when Angel cut the ball back, leaving Jozy Altidore wide open inside the penalty box. Somebody -- and it probably should have been Chris Armas -- should have had the wherewithal to realize that the goal line was defended sufficiently and the other bodies in the box needed to be picked up.

This is the same lack of tactical awareness that killed the Fire in Toronto, when guys were unable to react quickly enough to support their teammates on defense. And as much as I hate to throw players I genuinely like -- particularly Jim Curtin and Chris Armas, and to a lesser extent, CJ Brown -- under the bus, they're the ones who seem to think the slowest on defense. That has to change, or they've got to all grab some bench while the younger guys get a shot.

Offensively, speed of thought is part of it, as I've been exhorting the team to just move the ball more quickly through the midfield. But given the shot totals for the last couple of matches, are we getting the opportunities we need? I honestly can't tell right now. In previous years, when Nate Jaqua would shoot and miss, it seemed like he had the right ideas, and that the goals would come. Now, I don't get that feeling with Chad Barrett and Calen Carr. While I like the idea of throwing the ball toward the net whenever possible, the quality of the chances doesn't seem quite right.

Fixing that is going to be harder, but some of it may simply be committing more bodies forward. The absurdity of the Red Bulls match was that New York had at least three proven goal scorers and one up-and-coming scoring machine on the field, while the Fire had a lot of unproven potential. New York even had guys who normally attack from the midfield playing in their backline, while we typically end up with defenders playing in the midfield, so the result maybe wasn't so surprising.

So the easy fix is just to get more attackers on the field, which probably starts with getting Thiago back in the middle and moving Justin Mapp to his natural left wing position. This means Ivan Guerrero also grabs some bench, which may need to happen right now given his recent form.

Putting all of this into a lineup for Sunday's win-or-fire-Dave match with Salt Lake gives me something like this:

G Busch
D Russolillo Brown** Robinson
M Monteiro Soumare Thiago Plotkin Mapp
F Barrett Carr

** I'd rather see Osei Telesford, but apparently he's been ruled out with an injury.

Granted, this is quite a lot of pressure to put on quite a lot of untested players in order to save the coach's job, but desperate times and desperate measures and all that. We need to see if we have the players who have quicker instincts than those we've been putting out on the field, otherwise we're going to need to make some very hard personnel decisions from top to bottom.