Revolution v. L.A. Galaxy, 5.28.11 (and Barcelona!)

I’ve had this date circled on my calendar for weeks: Champions League final at 2:45 p.m. and Revolution at home against the L.A. Galaxy at 8:00 p.m. And so . . .

Far greater pens than mine have expounded on the merits of this year’s incarnation of FC Barcelona, which some put in the company of best-ever sports teams. The club’s season-punctuating thrashing of Manchester United will of course support those arguments. I was lucky enough to watch Barcelona play about a dozen times this year and I was always rewarded by amazingly good, some would say artistic, soccer. Here are a few observations about Barcelona that have been made before, but which may be worth laying out in a bureaucratic bulleted format, even by someone with my pedestrian knowledge of the game:

·      Messi virtually never leaves the field, even in garbage time of meaningless games. This might be the most amazing fact about Barca, given Messi’s diminutive size, the amount of talent around him, his importance to the team, his high salary, and the strength and speed of opposing players and attendant threat of physical harm. How cool is it that probably the best athlete now walking the planet refuses to rest?

·      Barca players rarely cross the ball in the air for headers in front of the goal, preferring instead to patiently pass in incredibly tight spaces in the offensive half of the field, biding their time for a shot. They even play most of their corner kicks short.

·      For large stretches of their matches, Barca effectively plays with only two defenders—its outside backs (particularly Dani Alves) almost constantly making offensive runs.

·      Barca players are tenacious defenders, pressing all over the field. In other words, they aren’t just more skilled than other teams' players, they outhustle them too.

To move from great teams to small, the Revolution lost another one today, 1-0 to the Galaxy. Despite getting blanked, the Revs had their chances. The first opportunity came early, in the second minute. Benny Feilhaber took a pass from Rajko Lekic and sprinted up the left wing. He then made a deft pass with the outside of his right foot, curling the ball back to a charging Zak Boggs, who had gotten in behind the L.A. defense. Boggs’s finish from close range was horrible, high and wide of the goal. The Revs wouldn’t actually get a shot on the frame until the 53^rd minute, which is one measure of their performance. Another is corner kicks: the Revolution took 0, the Galaxy 10.

Still, New England came tantalizingly close to tying the game in the final minutes. In the second minute of stoppage time, they had three—count ‘em three—excruciating near-goals in the span of about 20 seconds. It wasn’t the surreal end-of-game surge that Ghana laid on Uruguay at the end of that amazing 2010 World Cup match-up, but it was reminiscent of it.

The Revolution’s first shot of the sequence came off a ball ineffectively punched by the Galaxy’s lanky Jamaican keeper, Donovan Ricketts. Zack Schilawski stormed into the picture while Ricketts was laid out and made an accurate shot on goal. Schilawski was running laterally to celebrate his equalizer when L.A. defender A.J. DeLaGarza cleared the ball at the goal line. Sainey Nyassi eventually got that rebound and crossed the ball into the center from the right wing. Schilawski again charged onto the ball, elevated, and hammered a half volley off the cross bar. (The poor sap.) The shot caromed into the ground and bounced up to Shalrie Joseph, who seemed to tie the game himself for an instant with a header until Landon Donovan came out of nowhere to clear that ball off the line and preserve the Galaxy victory.

So the Revs came on late but again failed to finish. And after starting the same lineup for the third straight game (not including the sorry-excuse-for-a-soccer-match against KC on Wednesday), the Revs will now lose Feilhaber and (probably) Joseph to the Gold Cup. New England’s prospects of picking up points against Dallas and New York in the coming weeks don’t look good, but after their furious comeback attempt against L.A., I can’t write them off yet.