Up And Down Match On Saturday

A whole bunch of highs and lows from this week's game.  Colorado started on a hot foot with a quick goal from the captain in the 6th minute.  A mishit cross led to a bloop goal and body language from Keegan that clearly said "well, I didn't mean to do that!".  Maybe we'll call it a Bob Rossenbery happy little accident.  Colorado doubled the lead in the 39th minute with a Rafa header from point blank range off a Larraz cross (officially no assist for Oli since it took a slight deflection). Based on our defense so far everyone was feeling fairly good about our chances.

Then the last 5 minutes of the half happened.  Rosenberry, Murphy, and Cannon all got pulled away from their men in quick succession and even that would have been survivable if an unlucky deflection from Steffen's save hadn't fallen to Pedrinho, Cannon's man.  Credit to Dallas for pulling apart our defense but Murphy in particular was just spinning in circles covering nobody.  Then 3 minutes later Acosta played a nice give-and-go with Musa, beating Awaziem, and suddenly we're going into halftime all tied up.

Coming out of the locker room Dallas scored a third unanswered goal, this time in the 68th minute.  After some chaos in the box Cannon managed to pop the all straight up but went to the ground to do it.  Nobody stepped to the ball to cover for him which left Musa a clean shot as the ball dropped.  Steffen would have had it saved though had it not deflected off of Fredrick.  The Rapids didn't wait long to get that one back though.  4 minutes later Larraz once again found Navarro right in front of net and this time the assist counted.

In total the teams combined for 11 shots on goal and 6 went in.  And I can't say the keepers had bad games.  It was a combination of deflections and easy shots that led to the high-scoring.  Obviously the Rapids have to, once again, focus on defending in the 5 minutes either side of half and the end of the game.  Both of LAFC's goals and 2 of the 3 Dallas goals came in those periods.  On the plus side we got away from that lack of offense, scoring 3 goals from the run of play.  The key now is to find a balance between lock-down defense leading to 0-0 games and no defense leading to 3-3 games.

A final nte, I'm celebrating my 50th birthday on Sunday so there will likely not be a preview or recap for the Austin game this weekend.  We should be back to normal operations for the San Jose game on the 15th.

Man of the Match: Rafael Navarro.  2 goals make it an easy choice.