Well, there goes our season. With all three of our DP’s starting for the first time ever, Lampard started brightly, but ultimately failed miserably, Pirlo looked at a loss, and our team succumbed to another loss to our neighbors.

Season Of Discontent 

We’ve mentioned this before, but this is our inaugural season. Add onto that the fact that we constructed a practically new lineup in June, and it makes sense that we’ve had some trouble this season. After that 11 game winless streak, the additions of superstars was supposed to kickstart our season, and in certain ways it has, but we looked really out of sorts against Red Bulls.

Despite a bright start, we failed to take our limited amount of chances and lost to a team that’s just plain better than us. Maybe not in individual quality, but certainly in team play. We’re just not there yet. It’s the sad, sad truth.

Where’s The Pace?

Villa, Pirlo, Lampard, Mix, McNamara. Those are all our players who are meant to score goals, or be directly involved in doing so. The fact is, most of those guys are slow, and not one possesses any real pace. ‘Balance’ is a term that is thrown around in European football for good reason. You can’t have a team of only pacy tricksters or only playmakers. Our attack not only lacks pace, it’s depressingly void of it. Our counterattacks are simply too slow, but it’s not their fault. Who is Pirlo supposed to aim for? He kept overhitting passes to Villa, but maybe it wasn’t entirely either of their faults. Villa simply doesn’t have the pace to catch those long balls, but Pirlo has literally no other options. Pirlo is used to playing on teams that know how to posses the ball, on teams where you’ve got 20-something-year-olds future Balon D’or winners sprinting to get on the ends of your passes, rather than 33-year-olds and whatever Tommy McNamara is.

It’s at times like these where we miss the presence of a player like Khiry Shelton, or even Poku in a more advanced role. Yet, this entire season we’ve hypothesized over who should be starting and who Kreis is leaving out, but we’re nearing the end of this season and the plain fact that it really wouldn’t change that much. The team we fielded was pretty good, and we need more time, and hopefully a different manager, to take us into the new season. But, in that new season, someone who can actually run would be a welcome addition.

We have a long end to this season ahead of us, but we’ve gotta stick by them, and who knows, something might click. The positive from having our playoff chances diminished every game is there is more liberty to experiment. Often times when teams have nothing on the line, no threat of relegation but no chance of anything else, they let their young players get a run out, experiment with different lineups, and plan for the next season. It would be well advised for us to partake in some of those activities. With Kreis, we never really know, but maybe with nothing on the line he’ll loosen his tie, grow some nuts, and give us some reason to trust him.

On To The Next One

We play DC United on Thursday. Did we mention DC are top of the league and in stellar form? Yeah, that’ll be fun.

(on to the next one)