Robbie Keane called the LA Galaxy's 1-0 defeat at Colorado “probably one of [our] worst performances, certainly for a long time,” and teammates lined up to echo his disgust.
The Galaxy (2-2-2) were sluggish, struggled to move the ball, lost midfield battles they counted on winning, and were quite poor in the attacking third, but what they found most frustrating Saturday night was their inability, despite these problems, to snag the three points.
“That's a game we should never lose. Never lose,” head coach Bruce Arena said on his club's postgame telecast. “We should score goals in this game, win this game. We've got to accept the fact that we executed poorly. ... We just blew this game. It's a minimum one point, but we should have won this game today.”
Keane fired wide on a second-half penalty kick, Landon Donovan and Stefan Ishizaki were blocked at the right post in the opening seconds, a Keane pass for Donovan was cut off and hit the post, and Donovan -- still seeking his record-setting 135th MLS regular-season goal -- fired just wide with an open shot from 12 yards as LA were shut out for the first time since their opener.
“We just disappointed, really,” Keane, who fired past the right post in the 62nd minute -- his second miss on as many PKs this year -- after Rob Friend drew a highly questionable penalty kick against Drew Moor, said on the telecast. “Me, myself, had a bad game, and I think [among the starting] 11, you could say that.
“I think more of it was down to our own doing. We can crawl under the tree and hide, or you can stand up and be a man and face the consequences that it wasn't good enough and bounce back from it as soon as possible. No point standing here and making excuses and saying this, that and the other. It wasn't good enough from me, from anybody. I'm holding my hand up. It was a poor performance from me, and I fully accept that.”
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Friend, who played alongside Keane with Donovan dropping into injured Marcelo Sarvas' spot in midfield, decried that the Galaxy “just didn't show up today. We were bad today.”
“It was frustrating to see,” Friend said on the telecast. “We weren't working together, we weren't working as a team, we weren't helping each other out. We just weren't a team out there. We looked sluggish, and we weren't at our best. It was one of the worst games, I think, this season from us.”
Not everybody thought LA was all that bad, though.
“It's frustrating because I don't think we played poorly," said Donovan. "We didn't give them many chances, and we had quite a few. It's frustrating. Soccer can be cruel. It's the type of sport where you can play really well and still lose. That's the way it went tonight.”
