By Ridge Mahoney, Senior Editor
Soccer America

TACTICAL REWIND: Credit goes to Coach Steve Sampson and his Galaxy players for adapting their tactics to the vastly different environments for their games with the Quakes at Home Depot Center and Spartan Stadium.

On the 80-yard-wide surface at Home Depot, wide outside midfielders Cobi Jones and Ned Grabavoy tucked inside often, allowing outside backs Chris Albright and Todd Dunivant to overlap into the corners and overwhelm left back Wade Barrett and right back Kelly Gray, who were often stranded without sufficient support.

With Landon Donovan and Herculez Gomez in constant motion, on and off the ball, central defenders Eddie Robinson and Danny Califf had difficult situations to untangle. Holding midfielder Ricardo Clark also had to contend with Donovan starting his runs from deep as well as Peter Vagenas occasionally sneaking forward; Clark and Dwayne De Rosario weren't nearly as cohesive as they'd been in the second half of the regular season.

With a two-goal lead in the second game at cozy Spartan and Tyrone Marshall back in the lineup, the Galaxy tried to compress the space in the final third, win the majority of the battles for the second ball, as they'd done in the first game, and hit on the counter. They nearly scored on a long ball to Donovan in the second minute, which would have been a carbon copy of his 86th-minute goal in Game 1, but his shot just missed the post.

At Spartan, games are often decided on set plays and goalmouth scrambles. San Jose scored on two set pieces to beat the Galaxy, 2-1, on Aug. 27, but last weekend Quakes rarely hit the frame with their free kicks or corners, the few knock-downs that resulted were hacked clear, and Kevin Hartman saved whatever did come his way. Once the deficit reverted to two goals when Grabavoy scored in the 67th minute, the Quakes needed a slice of luck or a good bounce to get back in the game, and it never came.

Over the two legs, Los Angeles was the sharper, fiercer team, and a couple of close referee's calls that went its way in the first leg at home might have been the payback for a pair of dodgy Dwayne De Rosario handballs that didn't get called when the Quakes beat the Galaxy, 3-1, at Home Depot in the regular-season finale.

MAKE-UP? Did Brian Hall ''atone'' for not calling a penalty kick when Jim Curtin tripped Jaime Moreno by disallowing Chad Barrett's stoppage-time header to keep D.C. United and Chicago tied at 0-0 in the first game of their Eastern Conference semifinal?

There was certainly some pushing and jostling when Barrett rose to meet Chris Armas's corner kick, but nothing either Barrett or his marker were doing seemed out of the ordinary. Just beyond Barrett was a cluster of several players all tangled up, but nobody got bloodied or drop-kicked or flattened. And none of them touched the ball.

Moreno fooled Curtin as he's fooled dozens of defenders throughout his MLS career. After stripping Gonzalo Segares of the ball at midfield, he dribbled into the box, enticed Curtin into leaving his feet and as Curtin slid in Moreno nicked the ball forward gently. Curtin crashed into his ankle, didn't touch the ball, Moreno went down, and Hall signaled for a corner kick.

Eh?

Either Hall missed the call and believed Curtin played the ball, or he saw it correctly but chickened out and rather than make the right call, a penalty, he compromised with a corner kick. It was a penalty or a goal kick, but never a corner.

Maybe this is what Fire midfielder Jesse Marsch meant when he called the decision to disallow Barrett's goal as ''spineless.''

MANAGING RESOURCES. Not incidentally, the Moreno-Curtin incident was all clearly revealed by a camera behind the goal, which few MLS telecasts use, presumably, because of cost. The league will pay to churn out hundreds of inane articles and vacuous columns per season on its Web site, but add more cameras that would enhance its telecasts? Never!

And the league is really cutting its own throat along with the costs. One of its Web site's best features are the video clips, but with many important games not televised, and limited replays for many of the games that are, its resources are being poorly managed.