By J Hutcherson – WASHINGTON, DC (Aug 27, 2012) US Soccer Players – Call it the pull towards mediocrity. Major League Soccer's odd version of parity calls good teams into question while making sure there's no gap at the top of the table. With the top three even on games played, there's five points between first and third. There are also no obvious contenders.
Last season, we had the juggernaut of the Los Angeles Galaxy slowly losing traction and making the Supporters' Shield race seem like just that, a competition. Instead of walking away with the regular season title, other teams get back in. Namely, Seattle, who finished four points behind LA. The gap between 2nd and 3rd last year was substantial (10 points), but ten points was all that separated 4th through 11th. In MLS, there's very rarely a runaway winner.
This season, that same plot holds. Seven points is the difference from being top of the table in the East and holding onto the last playoff slot. In the West, it's 13 points but seven of those is the gap San Jose has built at the top of the table.
Now wait a minute. Here we are talking about the lack of a runaway club piling on points and San Jose appears to be doing just that. Indeed, they are, but only relative to the Western Conference. Their Supporters' Shield lead is three points. There's also the nagging feeling that it's not clear which San Jose team will show up. Is it going to be the one with the League-best +19 goal differential, or the one that loses to teams like Montreal and Vancouver?
It's an open question at the start of the 26th week of the MLS regular season. San Jose has been good more often than not, great on occasion, and unexplainably bad as well. It's that mix normally preventing teams not just from creating a gap, but increasing it, over the course of the season.
There have been no late arrivals in the Supporters' Shield race. These are the teams that separated themselves early, but all have lacked the ability to create distance. Sunday night's showdown between Sporting Kansas City and the New York Red Bulls was on everybody’s mind. This was a top of the East clash with the opportunity for Kansas City to put more than a point between them and the rest of the Conference along with pulling to within a point of San Jose for the Shield. Instead, it was an odd game with Sporting credited with both goals in a 1-1 draw.
Once again, the highlight game wasn't the highlight. Once again, MLS hinges on whether or not good teams can consistently beat bad ones. This is business as usual in this League.
"Every game is important, right?," Sporting's coach Peter Vermes said after the draw with New York. "So situations are going to happen throughout the course of, not only this game, but the next games that we have ahead of us. At the end, we just have to go on to the next game. Yeah, it’d be great to have the three points, but at the same time, I feel that the dominating performance that we had in regards to being all over them – never really letting them have any of the run of the play – it says a lot about our game. And, these are what the games are going to be like when we hopefully get into the playoffs. It’s going to be the same way – we’re going to play with the same kind of performances."
Too much can be made of 'statement games,' the ones where a club makes their intentions obvious and performs to a standard that leaves the opposition out of ideas. That's especially true when the statements are brief. One-off performances that leave the rest of us wondering what happened to that team that is now struggling for points. Short of losing six consecutive games like Colorado, there's normally enough of a safety net to keep those disappointing clubs from sliding toward irrelevance. The other clubs enable this with a week-by-week inability to take full advantage. Nice of them, no?
We see it when Real Salt Lake turns the possibility of nine points into one but remain in third-place in the West. We see it when New York splits games with Houston and can't beat Montreal. We see it whenever clubs get back in.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
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