Instant (Over)Reaction: Galaxy

Apparently I am having a hard time getting going this morning as evidence by having erased my opening paragraph four times (and it's not even 8am yet). Basically the story is this: Sounders were back in action last night. Before the game the team released Blaise N'kufo. During the game a lot of rain fell. After the game we left disappointed with the loss, but very surprised with the ride home. I want to offer my thoughts on the game as well as give you comments from both The Wife and Irish Mike. It's an attempt to give you, my JerseySounder readers more analysis on the team we all love (well, unless you're here solely to read The Crappy One's posts on the Devs (who won again last night)).

First, let's start with Irish Mike, who apparently made someone at Google mad having his comments rejected three times (sorry Mike!):

• Am a little worried about the Sounders, no striker = no championship for us I'm afraid. Hard to understand the Nfuko situation, I mean what the hell, could we have any worse timing than 90 minutes before our season opener? I blame Blaise, the front office and Sigi for this mess. Its what the f’ing pre-season is for, find out who we are and what we need. Roy Keane was a gifted player but a mindless yob most of the time for Ireland and Man U, but he had one nugget of wisdom “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”. I think the management team have not prepared us right, to not see this situation coming is amateur at best and leaves us with little options. Anyway, too tired after that to rewrite a full synopsis of what I think our probs are, there were some positives tonight but we still have issues, and need to sort them out if we want to be serious about a title run.

Now on to The Wife who had these comments in the car this morning:

• I need O'Brien White to be stronger. I can't have him being weaker than Fredy. He needs to hit the gym because he was getting knocked off the ball very often. He's not rolling around like Fredy used to, but he is not holding on to the ball either way.
• I think Fredy might need to be pulled back a little into more of an attacking midfield role. White looks to be faster than Fredy, so let White roam around up front and let Fredy distribute to the wings more.
  
• Along with having Fredy move back a bit, we need more overlapping runs. I saw a few from Riley and Zakuani last night and each time they resulted in good crosses. There was a little too much kick and run last night and it's just not effective with the size of our players. Our distribution out of the back needs improvement.
• Our defense didnot look sharp. But then again, nothing about the game was particularly sharp. It was a bit ugly out there.
• White, Montero and Friberg were all in each others business. They had no chemistry out there.
• Having Fredy is a blessing and a curse. He is highly skilled and does a lot for this team, but it seems like players take a while to get use to playing with him. By giving him the DP designation you basically are telling any incoming players that he is going to be the focus. If you are going to bring in a veteran, he needs to be humble and secure with himself. Right now we have a really young team and no experience. It's built around Fredy so picking the right players is crucial to our success.
• We kept getting chances and Sigi is right - they will be worried once the chances stop coming.
  

And finally my comments:

• I want to start off by saying that we shouldn't rush to panic quite yet. There were some good and bad things from last night, but we need to remember that we played one of the best teams in the league in our opening match. They are going to make teams look bad, even if they didn't play at a high level. Sometimes you look bad because your opponents make you look bad. LA is simply making us look bad recently - I credit a lot of it to the fact that they are a veteran team that has seen it all. they are not going to be afraid of Steve Zakuani because most of them have faced tons of players like him overseas. And I'm not sure next game will be a fair assessment of where we are either as we have to travel to Red Bull Arena and take on NY on Saturday. Sure a statement win would have been nice, but I don't want to panic yet.
• With that being said, let's talk about this whole N'kufo mess. Look, I was one of N'kufo's biggest supporters last year. Many perceived him as a failure because he didn't score for like 10 games, but I thought it was the little things he did that made us better. Then something happened this pre-season where I started to get down on him. The accounts varied...some say he was hurt; others said age finally caught up with him. Something just seemed fishy. Then over the course of 6 hours we found out that not only was he not going to start but that he was gone from the team altogether. According to Kiro710, Nkufo and Sigi apparently had an incident at practice in which Nkufo made it known how unhappy he was with the team's style. He asked for a trade and while it seems crazy that his release happened 90 minutes before gametime, in reality it was a blessing as it would have cost them had it lingered and flared up later in the season. NOw we can move on and hopefully sign Mauro Rosales with some of the leftover money.
• That brings me to my point: I agree with Mike in that the Front Office and Sigi are to blame on this one. We have had two big name players in our existence and both left the team unhappy. The Ljungberg signing seemed like an epic fail the minute that I saw him on the field. The hoopla surrounding him was great -he did a ton to help grow the support of the team, but in the end, he never fit Sigi's style (not surprising since Sigi was not coach when Ljungberg was brought aboard.) I expected him to leave town early, but I really thought N'kufo was different. He seemed a lot more humble at first and I had not heard any rumblings about him ever being a problem. Yet at the end of the day, he never seemed to fit. So what's the story? Do we need to blame scouting? Are Hanauer and Sigi not on the same page in terms of vision? Did we simply get sucked in by the big name? Something needs to change. Someone has blood on their hands.
• Now in terms of the team, it wasn't like this was their first rodeo of the 2011season. They have been in preseason for a month. A month and yet they lacked chemistry. It wasn't like White had never played with Montero. To have them look so out of place, even with the news about Nkufo is a little concerning.

A few final notes:

• The crowd was a bit off for some reason
• The uniforms don't look horrible from our seats, but on tv, they look hideous.
• Friberg had a really solid night except for the one turnover that led to the Galaxy goal.
• Besides the faux-breakaway, Donovan did nothing last night. Kudos to James Riley for effectively shutting him down.
• Great having El President back out there.
• Zakuani certainly looked like he was just coming back from a week off.
• Finally, I can't believe how thin we are all of a sudden. In pre-season I thought we had an amazing chance to win at least one trophy because of our depth, but after injuries to Fucito, Evans, Jaqua and the release of Nkufo, we had Lamar Neagle and Miguel Montano as our 2nd and 3rd guys off the bench. Congrats to Neagle for making his debut -he is a great story, but not once did I think he would make the difference. As for Montano, the guy didn't even play in the pre-season game against Vancouver (and we played our entire second team!).

We need to shake this one off and be prepared for another tough game against the Red Bulls this weekend. In the past the team has shown the ability to bounce back on the road after a tough home defeat and we are going to need a little of that magic this weekend. Come On You Sounders!!!