On Playing Acceptably Wells for Sixty Five Minutes, Then Vomiting On Your Boots

Emiliano Heskey.

See down there, on the right? Underneath (presently) the link to ODB's bloog?

All rightie, then. Bitch.

I tend to leave the DCU writing to bDr. He's more cogent, less simplistically analytical, and, oddly enough, less angry, at least in his writing (he's more the depressive type). Furthermore, I'm just plain superficial. And while bDr's simpering for a post* deserves no more than the two lines above (despite his uberstature in the Very Small Hierarchy of People Who Are Allowed To Give Me Shit And Keep Their Limbs), DCU have deterioriated to the point where I must record my thoughts. My preliminary conclusions are these:

-Gonzalo Peralta is, indeed, important.

-People really need to stop bitching about Gallardo. He's fine, except for the age of his bones, which is not nearly as significant a problem as the age of Jaime Moreno's bones.

-One piece of fair Gallardo-bitching is that Marcello needs to stop bitching. Yes, DPs get the shit knocked out of them. Take your money and your beating.

-But that was his second pretty goal in as many goals. Too bad the team only scores when he's on the godsdamned pitch.

-Yes, Quaranta is fighting. Perhaps D is a better person than I am, since he's all about the cheek-turning and I'm all about the discommodation. But doing the job Quaranta should have done in his first stint here does not equal forgiveness. And putting in the effort he needs to do to get forgiven by about 2010 does not offset the gravity of his punkass disrespect for the best house in the league, which put up with his ineffectual shit for years before he skied off to lick Landycakes' pussy. This is not to say that Quaranta isn't fighting, and that he's not putting out more energy for the hallowed crest than most others on the team. He is and he is. But three months of effort doesn't offset seven years of punkery, topped by one galling day when he gave his home the finger.

-I am pre-empting D's copyrighted prerogative and demoting Zach Wells to semen. D can't do that, because he keeps it clean over there. But trust me, it's what he's driving at.

There were crucial defensive breakdowns in front of Wells' sorry second-string ass, to be sure. The last goal, the one that caused me to slam down the remote, go to bed, and miss D's TV appearance, probably wasn't attributable to Wells, except to the extent that the first goal, caused by Wells' fumble, and the second goal, caused by Wells' shitty positioning and abject failure to communicate with his defense in any meaningful way, had so deflated and panicked his team that the defense collapsed on a pretty routine counter.

Semen Wells. Except, y'see, he'd be blanks. It's time to give Carvallo a real shot at this.

It's also, not at all coincidentally, time to note the major role that awesome goalkeeping has played in DCU's success lo these many years. Great DCU teams had memorable keepers--Scott Garlick, Tom Presthus, Nick Rimando, and it appears all-too-briefly, Troy Perkins. Semen Wells is on a track to be the wrong kind of memorable. Except a keeper doesn't stay on that track long enough to become truly memorable.

Soehn? Yeah, well, I've said I think he's lost the team. I'm not as sure about that now. I think it may have lost itself. When a team is burdened with challenges unrelated to coaching, like Zach Wells, Marc Burch's right foot, injuries to oh, say, half the righteous starting midfield, and the sudden disappearance of the league MVP in a country not widely known for death squads, it may not be the coach's fault. I am most unhappy with some of Soehn's coaching decisions over time, and this dates back to his first season. I agree with others (D, I think, who's getting an awful lot of linkage in this post) that Soehn appears to have an odd notion of the distinction between formation and form, on top of an odd notion about formation itself, and about fighting the last war.

I do think there is an interesting alternative to Soehn, but I'm not sure that alternative is ready to be a coach yet--evidence indicates that he still thinks he's a player, and may or may not have some reason to think that. In the interim? Meh. Soehn will have to preside over this shipwreck, I think. But we're not going to remember his tenure any more fondly than we remember Crazy Ray Hudson's--and Ba'al knows we remember that every time we flip to GolTV.

*I reached an unrelated conclusion on this. One could write this simpering off to simple faux-macho posturing between two bestus pals who wrote off macho and posturing before many of you were out of pull-ups (because we're old, see, not because you're incontinent).

But I think there's a coded cry for help here. bDr often gets longish emails from me, because we're both so bogged in taking seriously our responsibility to our life choices that that's the only way we communicate except on those rare and joyous occasions when we get some time to sit together and giggle over some shared real-life focus. I think he gauges the state of my mental health by the length of my emails. For instance, after the Fire debacle, he got about five grafs from me on what I thought about the team's troubles. After a five-day silence this week and a light prod, he got**, in one day, "Fuck you," "Fuck that," "Splat," "You're boring me," and "Uhm, yeah, sorry I'm a dick."

Hence, bDr simply yearns for a time when commitments were simple, my brain was fried, and he was not the sole focus of 16 column inches of private ranting about my demons. It falls to me to be kind. The rest of you? Fuck you, fuck that, splat, and I'm more-or-less sometimes existentially sorry that I'm a dick.

**Loosely translated.

***Seriously, thanks to D for the fabulous and entirely unfair theme/modus for Wells-bashing, even though he's just doing a slow build on firing that cannon. But really, Wells just fucking sucks.