Welcome back offense?

By: Robert | June 19th, 2007

I’ll be honest it’s hard to post material after a 4-0 beating. Even though I just became a Hoops fan this season I feel like I have invested a lot emotionally into this team, and a beating like that takes a lot out of you. I admit it, I’m drained. But I gotta re-focus, we gotta re-focus, and most importantly the team has to re-focus because while the Toronto game demonstrates the defensive problems I’ve chronicled here, one loss no matter how lopsided is only 3 dropped points, we can make that up. In baseball they say “momentum is only as strong as the next day’s starting pitcher,” and while baseball is not exactly a parallel comparison I think you see where I’m going with this.

The first thing I have to admit is how wrong I was about our offensive abilities without Carlos Ruiz and Kenny Cooper (I know someone is going to say Roberto Mina as well but he’s been out all year so I don’t count him.) I honestly thought that the offensive midfield trio of Arturo Alvarez, Ramon Nunez and Juan Toja would have been able to create enough opportunities for themselves and Abe Thompson and Dominic Oduro but boy was I wrong. Now the Nunez groin injury didn’t help matters but in the two games without Claudio, I mean Kenny Cooper and Ruiz we just did not create enough quality goal scoring chances.

A sky is falling pessimist might claim the midfield which has held the team up so far this season has fallen out of form. They could easily point to the lack of ability to take/create chances at Rice-Eccles and BMO field (the only goal scored during that time was off a longball where Oduro fought off a tired Real Salt Lake defender.) But I tend to believe (and I hope I’m right about this) that the absences and the consequential drop-off in talent of our forwards (no disrespect to Thompson and Oduru but they are not Carlos Ruiz or Kenny Cooper) allowed opponent’s defenses to focus on Toja et al. coming out of the midfield. I think the fact that the only goal scored since we lost both our starting forwards did not involve the midfield adds credence to my point. As I’ve said before Carlos Ruiz is MLS’ most influential player and without him teams can and do play defense against us differently. His presence keeps teams honest and opens up space for Toja, Alvarez and hopefully an injury-free Nunez to create. We are going to need to score goals because unfortunately our defense is never going to be mistaken for the black hole of opposing offenses so welcome back number 20, because this is Dallas where the FC stands for “Find Carlos.”

HOOPS PRIDE!

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