I only caught the highlights to this game. When watching highlights, though, I shield the screen of MLSnet.com’s home page as I click through to the “video/audio” page (which, I suppose, I could bookmark…duh), so the game still, well, “unfolds” to some extent – and that’s significant for what comes below. Even in that chopped-up glimpse of last night’s 2-2 draw between Real Salt Lake and the visiting LA Galaxy, another paragraph in the remarkable, ongoing story of LA’s season was written.
Right around the mid-80-point of the game, the Galaxy offense surged forward in the best possible current circumstance: Landon Donovan on the ball and the RSL defense on their heels. Somewhere about 25, 30 yards from goal, Donovan slipped a simply gorgeous pass against the grain – we’re talking pure class and perfect weight – to a diagonal run by LA forward Gavin Glinton. Given such a top-drawer pass, Glinton couldn’t help but bury the shot that followed, which takes the game to LA 2, RSL 1 with just about 5 minutes remaining.
Leaning back in my chair, I thought to myself, “Hm…wonder how they’re going to fuck this up?”
Sure enough, the Galaxy did fuck it up by giving up a still-later goal off a free-kick. It was the seeming inevitability of events that struck me. Watching the Galaxy these days is like watching a rich drunk stagger out of restaurant with his car keys jingling in his hands and, periodically, dropping to the floor. You don’t know precisely what’s going to happen; you only know it’s not going to end well. And, sure enough, you see it on your way home: a Cadillac wrapped around a big tree on a leafy, prosperous street…perhaps there’s a man-child with a receding hairline pinned between the Caddy and the tree…and he looks an awful lot like Donovan.
Los Angeles Galaxy general manager Alexi Lalas has never, to my knowledge, called his woeful team “the Cadillac of MLS,” but I figure that’s sufficiently analogous to “a gem” and it has the added benefit of lending itself more readily to a metaphor. And, as the futility keeps piling up, describing the weight of it all in new ways definitely requires a broad arsenal of metaphors. So…I went with Caddies.
Whatever one calls it, the never-ending Parade of Misfortune that is LA’s season continues to surprise by being so depressingly unsurprising. There’s the old saying, “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” The completely unprecedented nature of LA’s high-profile failure represents a twist on that: it’s as if they got to the bottom of the hole and not only kept digging, but started digging down and sideways. All that’s left is waiting for the collapse.
If and when someone sits down to write a history of Major League Soccer (MLS), I’m confident that the Galaxy’s 2007 season will find its way in. The air of literature, even legend, surrounds the Faustian bargain that is the David Beckham trade.
Filed under: Landon Donovan, Los Angeles Galaxy, Major League Soccer, Real Salt Lake
Damn. I wish I’d written this.
[...] so perfectly and accurately that there is absolutely no improving on it. My buddy Jeff Bull at Center Holds It has written just such a blog post. It sums up not just last night’s game but the entire [...]
I tried to comment on the LA Offside, Laurie, but the robot over there still views me as some kind of virus. At any rate, thanks for the plug! And the nice stuff you wrote!