HOUSTON -- The Houston Dynamo lost a game in which they had the lead.
That sentence is like a broken record player this season for Houston. This season, the Dynamo are 5-4-5 when scoring first and 3-3-3 when leading at halftime.
“It should have been three points for us tonight and it wasn’t,” said interim head coach Wade Barrett. “We’ve found some ways to lose games. Everybody in there [locker room] knows it. You guys know it as well. There’s no hiding from it.”
In a span of two minutes midway through the second half, Houston went from leading the game 1-0 to staring down a 2-1 deficit. The Dynamo would eventually fall 3-1.
“We let a good team stick around too long,” said Barrett. “I’ve talked about when you’re on top of a good team, you have to have an end result. We had one goal. I think we should have had more.”
Barrett wanted three things from his team entering the game: concentration, discipline, and execution. The team did just that but failed to maintain it.
Despite the loss, a positive for the Dynamo is they regain El Capitan for the first time since 2012, but that victory is bittersweet. Barrett said that positive doesn’t take away the sting of the loss.
Entering the game, Barrett warned his team about Dallas’ strengths and their counterattacking prowess.
“You can’t get stretched,” said Barrett. “It invites a game that they're good at. We didn’t do a good enough job of [avoiding that] in the second half.”
Ricardo Clark, who now has the second most appearances by a Houston player with 267 in all competitions, lamented the Dynamo's second-half performance.
“I think our level dropped too much for us to maintain constant pressure on them and bring it to them,” said Clark. “They controlled the second half and once they got the second goal I think they were still able to control the game. It was game management after that.”
