San Jose 0-2 United

Davey and Bowtie--who I believe were watching the game from Comcast Regional Sports HQ in Bethesda--couldn't STFU about several things last night:

Steven Lenhart, who is a fucking freak, missed the game for "personal reasons." If I had a hooker for every time Davey gave us this news, I'd have a whole lot of diseases. Lenhart was a pain in the ass when he wore yellow for Columbus, and he's a pain in the ass now--he got his ginormous blonde 70s-porn-curly-permed body in front of three lucky ricochets back in June, during Bill Hamid's Big Nervous Breakdown, a game the Quakes won 4-2 in RFK, coming back repeatedly to show us that yes, no matter what doesn't suck, DCU does.

DCU had never previously beaten the Quakes in San Jose, although in 1998, they beat the Clash there, during Saint Benny's rookie season, in a game in which Saint Benny had a goal and an assist. From the 67th minute on, I believe Davey said something about this every 52 seconds.

Dwayne DeRosario has played for every football team in the world. He would now like to score DCU goals against every stinking one of them. Furthermore, every single DCU player is connected to every single other San Jose player or coach in some bizarre love triangle (go!) that Davey and Bowtie couldn't STFU about, including...

Frank Yallop. They didn't say anything particularly meaningful or insightful about old Frank, but they sure like saying "Frank Yallop." I don't think I can begrudge this. I like saying "Frank Yallop" too, and he's certainly a good MLS egg.

Oh, the game? Hmm. Let's see. You start a tinkered-up crapheap of a lineup (of necessity), with Dwayne Fucking DeRosario at the top, and there's a pretty good chance that, if anyone in the crap heap is over the age of 14 and the people on the back line have ever defended before, you're going to put up two on a team as appallingly bad as San Jose. Why are they so appallingly bad? Well, for one thing, they're worse than us. That's right. No lie. As much as I bitch and complain, the Quakes, the Fire, the Original Canucktards, and the New Canucktards are all far worse than our beloved Black and Red. Duh on that last bit, by the way.

Possession was mostly pointless except for the sequences where Pontius, Najar, and DeRosario got it cooking. Pontius provided lovely, but mostly accidental service to DeRosario in the middle. Najar's ball on the first goal did have a real purty mouth, but that all got spoilt later on in the desperate race to allow the Quakes 32 minutes of possession in our half. Given the quality of possession and defense from the 75th minute on? We're lucky San Jose didn't equalize.

Let's be absolutely clear, here; while Najar's red card was a little harsh under the circumstances, he had it coming, and MLS referees can't be relied upon to work out the fine detail on that kind of play with any reliability, even with an assistant. Najar fouled, he fouled from behind, and while he wasn't last, he was damn close to it. He was also too busy badgering for an offside call to do his fucking job. So he launched himself into a tackle, got tangled up with Joey Gjertsen, and took the red.

Najar's been begging for this card for two fucking years. Begging for it. He is an insane rabid mechanoid on defense, lacking only a robot voice chanting "Destroy all humans" as he launches back on defense at light speed, paying no fucking attention to what he's doing, bent solely on revenge for the sixty-two times this game he's been punked at high velocity into the earth because he's an 18-year-old midget whose growth has been, apparently, stunted by the effort of keeping up at DCU Academy, where the houses are named "Harkesclaw" and "Etcheverryer" and "Soehnerin" and he didn't even have the prospect of staring at Emma Watson's ass to keep him focused on eating adequately to grow past four feet eleven or whatever ridiculously doomed height he stands.

Wow, that got totally out of control. Lemme breathe for a sec. Okay, the point is that Najar is a wild punkass bitch on defense, and it finally caught up to him. Independent of his behavior in general? He deserved a yellow. Given context and history? Yeah, he earned that red in spades.

Comcast never gave us the right angle to tell whether Gjertsen was offside. I think he had to have been--there's no way in hell Joey Gjertsen gets that far clear after staying on. But--and this is how we learned, definitively, that Davey and Bowtie were in the studio, because they admitted they didn't see it--Comcast (and presumably the San Jose broadcast folks who are also, I believe, Comcast) didn't show it during the broadcast.

Anyway, yeah, I'll take the result, but it's sort of a pinball thing. Against pathetic enough opposition, even incompetent possession will work out for you some percentage of the time, and when the opposition's that pathetic, it makes all your possession look competent.

Pre-publish update: Oh. He posted. He told me to do it. And I obey. Y'know, I only have so many keystrokes in my lifetime, dood. Oh well, I reckon he'll take up the pointless challenge herein and we'll be even.