One Or The Other, But Not Both

Everybody's a critic when a team loses a match, but the new guy over at Soccer By Ives is pretty bad.

Poor Chicago finishing also played a role, as the Fire narrowly missed multiple chances to extend their lead to 3 goals.

One has to give the Wizards credit though; despite a very rough start Kansas City never quit and their play in the last 15 minutes was very impressive. Wizards goalkeeper Kevin Hartman enjoyed a stellar performance in goal, keeping KC in the match even as the Fire pressed for a third goal.

So, which is it? The Fire could have missed their chances, or Kevin Hartman could have been stellar in goal. The two are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. A lot of the missed chances Samuel Stejskal alludes to here were, in fact, well taken, except for the small matter of Kevin Hartman having that stellar performance. If the Fire were missing, Hartman could just, you know, stand still and the ball wouldn't go in the net. I think it was Blanco that put a ball low and to the corner, right where you're supposed to, but Hartman stretched back and kept it out. There's really not much you would even want to do differently there if you had another chance at it. And the boss drank that Kool-Aid, too, in his power rankings.

Of course, somebody commenting on Luis' blog thinks Jon Busch is the problem, but you don't need to pass some sort of soccer literacy exam to become a fan, so whatever.

Two things happened on Saturday night in Bridgeview. One defender who doesn't often make mistakes let his man get free, and another defender who makes quite a lot of mistakes hung his goalkeeper out to dry by not clearing a ball out when he had the chance, unless Jon Busch called him off of it, but given how unprepared he was to deal with the ball once it bounced in front of him, I sort of doubt that. And we've seen poor communication between Conde and Busch before, mostly because it looks like Conde doesn't always pay attention to his goalkeeper.

If you want to get a bit deeper, taking Patrick Nyarko out may have allowed Claudio Lopez more freedom, as Nyarko was tracking back a lot and making things difficult for the Kansas City midfield, but I'll have to go back to the tape to see if that mattered.

At the end of the day, I'd rather have a team that is very good but prone to occasional lapses than one that's not very good and has occasional moments of good play (see wins from New York, Dallas), and I'd definitely rather expose problems and inconsistencies without actually losing matches -- much like the U.S.-El Salvador result. Any doom, gloom and/or gnashing of teeth is entirely premature at this point. I'll still take this team over anyone else in the Eastern Conference, and maybe over Seattle and Chivas USA, too.

A good team learns from its mistakes and improves. Clearly, mistakes were made. Let's see if the Fire can improve the consistency of their defense over the next couple of weeks, now that it's abundantly clear that it's a problem. Fundamentally, the rest of their play has been sound, so if it's just a matter of a full ninety minutes of concentration, I think most of the Fire defenders can handle that. Three guesses as to which one I think can't, and the first two don't count.