Our game is about time and space, and the game's greatest players are those who know how to conjure both – for themselves, and for others. We worship those players, those timelords who are able to see events unfold in a rhythm and on a spectrum the rest of us can't quite conceive of. They are the ones who make the game beautiful.
And in the roll call of such players in this league of ours, Mauro Diaz is at or near the top of the list. He makes magic, and for most of the last three seasons, he's made FC Dallas go.
Diaz, as I assume everybody reading this column knows, tore his Achilles last week and will be out for at least eight months. That put his team's backs against the wall with 180 minutes of "need a result" soccer staring them dead in the face.
Dallas responded with the greatest week in franchise history. On Thursday they went down to Guatemala and beat Suchitepequez 5-2 to qualify for the CONCACAF Champions League quarterfinals, and then, 72 hours later, dragged an exhausted squad up to LA to face the Galaxy.
It turned out that they didn't need a result (Houston played spoiler in Colorado), but they got it anyway. Of all the ways to carve your team's name into the record books, a scoreless draw has to rank as the most anti-climactic – there were no moments of magic in this one, none of the awe that Dallas can produce when they're flying up and down the field at their very best. According to A.J. DeLaGarza, at least one FCD player knew this:
Beat the offside trap, take a clever touch, finish with a tap-in. Wash, rinse, repeat, and bag 24 goals as well as your second Golden Boot. I still have Sacha Kljestan as the RBNY MVP, but BWP has proven to be one of the single best signings in MLS history.
The question I had about New York before their 2-0 win over the Union, or before last week's 3-2 win over Columbus, however, wasn't about either of those two guys. It was about where the other goals would come from, since no duo can really take a team all the way to MLS Cup by themselves.
Well, last week Mike Grella got on the scoreboard, and this week it was Alex Muyl's turn. When RBNY get that kind of danger from their wingers, they're almost impossible to stop.
And so, they're now winners of four straight and unbeaten in 20 across all competitions. We know about the curse, but this is 2016, and the Chicago Cubs will face the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. So I'm pretty sure curses are just about dead.
A few more things to ponder...
6. Colorado's 1-1 draw against Houston was sad trombone for the home side, which had real reason to hope they could sneak past Dallas for the Shield. Obviously it wasn't to be, but they keep getting answers from Marlon Hairston (great movement off the ball and assist) and Shkelzen Gashi, and Jermaine Jones looked lively in his return.
5. In Sporting KC's last 11 games Benny Feilhaber has two goals and nine assists, including one of each in Sunday's 2-0 win over San Jose.
This team still has too many questions for my taste, but between Feilhaber and Dom Dwyer they have at least a couple of answers. And if Graham Zusi is going to finish like he did against the Quakes, suddenly SKC are a darkhorse team in the West.
4. Another group that may have discovered their third heat is in Seattle. The Sounders were able to get a 2-1 win over visiting RSL, which wrapped up fourth place in the West and means a home game against SKC in the Knockout Round. Jordan Morris provided our Pass of the Week with this lovely backheel:
Seattle haven't been pushing that many men forward since Clint Dempsey's been sidelined, and there certainly hasn't been that kind of combination play in the final third. If Flaco Fernandez can find spaces off of Morris's runs like that, the Sounders are in business.
3. Not in business are the New England Revolution, who ended up dusting off Montreal by an it-wasn't-as-close-as-it-even-looked 3-0 final.
Two things for the Revs: First, Juan Agudelo finished off his most productive year as a pro, adding another goal to bring his regular season tally to seven (along with five assists) in just under 1400 minutes. He's an international caliber player who's been showing it every single week during the second half of the season.
Second, they're now 3-0-0 when Gershon Koffie goes 90 at d-mid in a 4-4-2 diamond, so give Jay Heaps some credit for finding that solution. It came too late to save 2016, but it's definitely not too early for the Revs to start thinking about how they can make this their default set-up for 2017.
As for the Impact, I'm going to give them a mulligan heading into their Knockout Round game at D.C. since they used so many reserves through the front line and midfield. But the central defense has been shockingly bad against the league's better center forwards, and that's exactly what they'll have to deal with on Thursday at RFK Stadium.
2. Ben Olsen, like Mauro Biello, chose to rest the starters and as a result saw his team take it on the chin. United went down hard, 4-2, at Orlando City for just their second loss since July.
Does it matter? Probably not – they got home field anyway. But if Montreal had gotten a result at Foxborough and the game was to be played at Stade Saputo instead, it would've been a pretty big L.
Orlando City head coach Jason Kreis, meanwhile, used the win to send a message to his players:
"My message to the team is that when they do that, when they are fully committed, when there is no sense of complacency within the group, they can be very good. But we are still not a team that can handle any sense of complacency," Kreis explained. "As you saw in the game today, we got to 2-0 and there was a little bit sense of complacency, then we got to 3-1 and there was a little sense of complacency. So that is happening in the games we cannot have complacency, and it is going to happen during the offseason. There is nobody that will be coming back next season that can have any sense of complacency.”
You can look into the lineup – see who played and who didn't – and read into that as you see fit.
1. And finally, our Face of the Week goes to Portlandia:
October 23, 2016
The Timbers had a pretty miserable title defense, and this week was arguably the worst in franchise history. They got knocked out of the CCL midweek when they could manage only a 1-1 draw against Saprissa, and then Sunday's 4-1 loss at Vancouver both eliminated Portland from the playoffs and was enough to reverse the Cascadia Cup standings, handing the 'Caps that particular title.
Caleb Porter was blunt in his postgame presser. The short version? Basically, "everybody needs to defend better, especially the wingers." He's not wrong.
But the whole organization needs to take a long, hard look at their player evaluation and development. They haven't had a significant draft pick since Darlington Nagbe (and before you say "the draft is meaningless!" I'd like to remind you that Dallas just rode a central defense of Matt Hedges and Walker Zimmerman to a US Open Cup/Shield double); they've cycled through multiple academy directors over the past half-decade; and they haven't been able to convert any of their T2 signings into meaningful first-team contributors.
The Timbers need depth, they need two-way players, and they need guys like Hedges or Zimmerman who win a job, and then improve over the course of several years. You can find that type of guy if you shop local, and if they want to see the team that's done it best, all they have to do is look all the way to the top of the standings.
