MATCH REPORTS
United's Comedy Defense Is No Joke
DC UNITED 2:4 KANSAS CITY
April 14, 2007
By Aaron Stollar
I went to this game with the intention of writing a normal match story. Well, after what happened against Kansas City, I spent maybe eight hours over two days trying to write a report and simply could not. The reason is simple.
As it stands right now, DC United has one of the worst defenses I have witnessed in MLS. And, more importantly, I have no idea how they are going to fix it without making some kind of deal very quickly. The current strategy of three defenders is clearly not working and the other options don't seem to fit the roster.
While some fans will see going to a 4-4-2 as the great panacea, I don't. That's because, in a weird twist of roster strategy, United does not appear to have the players to play with either three or four at the back.
Here are the defenders we currently have on the roster:
Erpen - Hideously inconsistent and burned not once, but twice on Sealy's first goal
Boswell - Doing the best he can considering who is around him
Namoff - Doing the best he can with the limited goods God gave him
Wilson - Hurt, and as anyone who remembers the RSL disaster last year, prone to stupidity as well
McTavish - Not really a defender though he might make a decent outside back
DeRoux - Terribly limited as an actual soccer player, sort of the reverse of Namoff - with great speed and athleticism and no actual skills or savvy to speak of.
Do you see four defenders you'd want to start for DC amongst that bunch? I don't even see two central defenders I'd want to start. I see Boswell, and that's it. I don't think Namoff is tall enough to be a central defender in MLS and at this point I am not sure Erpen could stop a slow-moving elderly woman in his path (though he would bicycle-kick her Rascal). While I think it would be possible to improvise a solution to the two outside defenders in a four-across arrangement, as long as it has a grand total of one central defender, DC has a serious, serious problem.
That, my friend, is the defensive corps your 2007 DC United decided to enter the season with. If United misses the playoffs, surely Dave Kasper will have to address this in the offseason. But all is not doomed yet.
First off, at least now United's staff and players seem to be in agreement there is a serious problem. It is good to see that no one, including Coach Tom Soehn or Ben Olsen, rules out moving to a four-defender formation. But Soehn has to know that there is more to this problem than merely reading press clippings and overconfidence even though he singled overconfidence out on Saturday. There is a bigger, more structural problem here, enough that one wonders what good even a move to four defenders might do.
We are talking about the kind of problem that could ruin a season. This isn't hyperbole; this is how bad DC's defense is. Taking matches from all competitions into account, DC is giving up two goals a game. That is more than half-a-goal per match worse than last year's MLS-worst defenses from Colorado and Chivas. Sure, comparing CONCACAF matches to league matches is apples and oranges. But the point remains that it doesn't appear to matter who DC is playing against, it cannot stop hemorrhaging goals. Right now, who doesn't see DC joining the six past sides who have surrendered more than two goals over an entire season?*
The problem isn't that there are a lot of guys underperforming, it's that the team doesn't have the manpower to do what it wants to do. If this were mere underperformance, I'd say wait it out and let the coaching staff do its job. But it's worse than that.
United and all of its fans want to pressure and attack and score goals. Here in DC we don't accept Gansler-esque boredom, and that's fine. To those ends, we play with three defenders - which means that they all have to pull their weight. If you have an outside back in a 4-4-2 who doesn't defend well, it can be covered up. If you have a central defender in a 3-5-2 who can't defend, you have a serious problem. That means you, Facundo. Add to that Brian Carroll's total dip in form to begin the season, and suddenly things look very, very bad.
So what can we do?
Put on our dealing hats (mine's a yarmulke, but you can be creative about yours) and make a trade. I am willing to wait until after the match in Columbus to declare total imminent doom. But DC needs to show that they can at least defend against the Crew, who hasn't yet actually scored a goal. Not only that - while DC will not have played any matches for two weeks going into the game in Ohio, the Crew will be playing their second in six days. If DC cannot defend against MLS' traditional laughingstock, especially a tired laughingstock, then it's deal-making time.
That means we need to select someone who we'd not only be willing to part with but one who actually has some value to someone else in the league. After staring at our roster for at least 10 minutes, I have found our man.
Brian Carroll
That's right, I think ole Brian of Springfield would have to go, at least if we want to salvage our season. Carroll is struggling, true, and other teams surely know that. But he's a US National Team-capped guy who works hard and isn't bad in the locker room.
If our season is to be saved, Carroll and probably a first or second round draft pick would have to be sacrificed for a quality defender. We have Clyde Simms to replace Carroll and Bryan Arguez to back up Simms.
This isn't a fit of panic. The fact is that DC has yet to stop an opponent from scoring in its first seven matches. That feat hasn't occurred since 2000. That season ended with United missing the playoffs.
Is anyone prepared to let that happen just to preserve the purity of our preferred playing style?
*The others are: Chivas-2005, RSL-2005, TB-2001 (MLS' worst defense ever, giving up 2.52 gpg), NY-1999, NE-1998 and MIA-1998.
PAST REPORTS
DC UNITED 3:2 CD OLIMPIA - 03.02.07