Goals galore, some of them glorious

Unsettled MLS defenses are being sliced up

Perhaps the scoring explosion in Major League Baseball is imbuing some insight to certain honchos at Major League Soccer.

Those honchos, you’ll recall, wanted bigger goals, so terrified were they of boring, sterile, barren games. They may not understand offside or why people wear Carlos Valderrama wigs, but sure as shooting they know bigger goals means more scoring means a better product means more fans.

Not necessarily, as per developments in the other American summer pastime.

Baseballs are flying out a major league parks at an alarming rate, triggering inquests about livelier baseballs and comatose pitching arms. And, funnily enough, few observers are raving about the deluge of NFL scores on baseball diamonds, which hasn’t boosted attendances.

Plain and simple, scoring doesn’t mean excitement if it’s too easy. The rarity value of home runs, and goals, heightens their appeal. Ten homers a game doesn’t translate to 10 booster shots of adrenaline, unless they occur amid tension or in majestic fashion.

Which brings us back to MLS. Thirty games into the season, MLS teams were scoring 3.3 goals per game. Most of the games have been close, one-goal affairs, and more important, many of the goals are worthy of classification as golazos by Univision pundits Norberto Longo and Andres Cantor.

Bicycle kicks, rockets from outside the box, sweet combinations polished off by even sweeter strikes, wicked free kicks — each week, the league has produced several goals of true highlight quality, goals that stand out when they follow soaring home runs and thunderous dunks on nightly sportscasts.

Of the more memorable moments are these:

o Kansas City’s incredible 6-4 win over Columbus on ESPN2 on May 2 produced spectacular long-range blasts by Mike Sorber and Mark Chung, a flying side volley by Mo Johnston, and a masterful slice of finishing by Preki to close out the goalfest — and that list doesn’t include any of the four Crew goals.

o Giovanni Savarese tied the MetroStars-Mutiny match May 4 with a bike, matching the Uche Okafor overhead kick that opened the scoring of the Clash-Wiz match two weeks earlier.

o Washington Rodriguez has hit two free-kick gamewinners for Dallas: Against Tampa April 28, his insidious left-footer utterly bewildered Tampa keeper Mark Dougherty, and he struck again in Kansas City May 11 with five minutes left. He also hammered in a long-range blast against Kansas City April 18.

o The Columbus Crew’s Brian McBride, the MLS’s top draft choice, was the early leader in league scoring with five goals. In the Crew’s opener, a 4-0 romp over Washington, he finished off D.C. United by running under a punt from keeper Bo Oshoniyi, heading it over a defender, and volleying it into the net with his left foot. Gooooolllazzzoooo!

Unfortunately, the league has dropped its plans to select the best goal of each week or month, although it will have a — sponsored, of course, — goal of the year.

Skeptics may scoff that many stunners resulted from loose marking, clumsy defending, poor goalkeeping, or all of the above. In some cases, they’re right.

Both goals in the MetroStars-D.C. United match nationally televised by Univision May 12 were farcical: Defender Andrew Restrepo fell over to provide John Harkes with a bulls-eye view, and Harkes’ bouncer to the near post found Tony Meola, as usual, cheating the other way; the MetroStars equalized when Jeff Causey, while falling to his knees, inexplicably fumbled a Giovanni Savarese shot he had caught with both hands, and Savarese slid in to poke the loose ball into the net.

The horror, the horror.

Yet such goals have been exceptions, and fears that too many rinky-dink goals would mar the league’s image have as yet been unfounded. The MLS posture of signing as many attacking players as its budget permits has born fruit, at least in the first month of play. The creators are creating, the finishers are finishing, the defenders are panicking.

And let’s not forget those memorable contributions by defensive stalwarts with an unerring knack for their own net. The MetroStars’ Nicola Caricola set a high standard in Week 3 with his delicate lob over Meola in the dying seconds, punching the ball over his own keeper after Meola had pushed away a low drive.

Yet it took less than two weeks for Tommy Reasoner to make Caricola’s masterpiece look like a run-of-the-mill deflection. Again, we go back to that Wiz-Crew 6-4 classic, during which the unlucky Reasoner had a shot ricochet off him into the Kansas City net while he was stationed on the goal line. That was just the warmup.

His oggie will be talked about for years. A bending cross came over from McBride on the left wing, and Reasoner, facing in that direction, swung his right leg to prevent the ball from reaching Crew attacker Adrian Paz.

However, Paz was five yards behind Reasoner, and had a teammate shouted this information to him, he could have simply tapped the ball to the ground and then cleared it. Instead, his mighty volley skidded off the outside of his foot and screamed past goalkeeper Pat Harrington. Breathtaking stuff.

Mistakes, of course, lead to goals, and when 10 goals hit the cords, some comedic element is at work. Of some concern to certain MLS head coaches, however, is the tendency for some teams to score — or allow — goals in bunches.

In Week 6, both New England and Kansas City were rolling along with 2-1 leads late in the game. Both not only allowed equalizers, but promptly surrendered another goal to wind up 3-2 losers.

It certainly makes for better entertainment when a team is unable to lock up a lead and ride out the final minutes to preserve a win, but it can be hell on the psyche for those directly involved.

“Part of it is the nature of the game, that’s why sometimes we can’t sleep at night,” says Tampa head coach Thomas Rongen, a defender in his playing days that included a stint in the NASL. “In that Kansas City-Columbus game, Columbus had three chances to tie the game at 5-5, then Preki breaks away and scores the winner. In our game with New York, the own goal goes in, then they get a goal after a handball, and the fans are going crazy.”

In that MetroStars-Mutiny match, Tampa rolled up a 3-0 lead with three goals in seven minutes, then surrendered three in four minutes. There were mitigating circumstances for the MetroStars’ rally, but all three of Tampa’s goals came fairly: A pair of sitters tucked away by Diego Viera on either side of a Carlos Valderrama penalty.

But the MetroStars rallied on an own goal off a corner kick that bounced off two Mutiny defenders, a Savarese goal set up by a glaring handball by Ruben Dario Hernandez and then Savarese’s belter. How to defend that run of bizarre events?

“A lot of it is being under pressure, and until your players go through it, you have no idea how they will handle it,” says Rongen. “You can work on holding the ball in training, but can you hold a 2-0 lead on the road with 10 minutes left and the home team is coming at you with 40,000 people screaming? Can we hang in there, how tough are we?

“In the NASL, each year maybe you filled in one or two or three positions. In this league, all the players are new. Some coaches haven’t had the same lineup twice. They’re still trying to find the right players. You have miscommunication, you have confusion, and sometimes that’s when the other team scores.”

Let’s hope it persists.

by Soccer America Senior Editor Ridge Mahoney

GOAL WATCH