The LA Galaxy’s Dignity Health Stadium sounds as though it is sponsored by a corporation who specialize in ensuring your aged loved ones are ushered from the the realms of the living in a tasteful and thoughtful fashion.
Grandma not quite able to climb the stairs anymore? Let Dignity Health make her final few breaths on this earth as meaningful as the long (but not quite as long as she was hoping for) life she has lived.
But it’s not. Dignity Health are a fine upstanding company who run excellent hospitals and health centres and no doubt have access to some very good lawyers.
It did however seem as though the Vancouver Whitecaps were seeing the lights extinguished from their season during a first half in which they failed to attack, defend or midfield successfully.
This wasn’t helped by the absence of Dajome and Gutierrez, nor the decision to replace them with White and Nerwinski respectively.
Nor was it helped by the performance of Lucas Cavallini who, once again, ambled around the pitch with little interest in contributing other than berating a teammate or two for not working hard enough.
Although he did show commendable courage by, immediately after declaring himself unfit to continue, producing an overhead kick which grazed the post.
In Cavallini’s absence the Whitecaps were much better in the second half.
Whether that was correlation or causation is unclear, but once White was moved to his more accustomed central role the Vancouver forward line pressed the Galaxy into mistake after mistake and probably ended the game with a vague sense of regret that they didn’t take all three points.
Obviously it would be remiss not to comment on the late introduction of the player we have all been waiting to see and, thankfully, he did not disappoint.
Leonard Owusu was immediately involved in the game, wanting the ball and looking to push forward whenever the opportunity arose.
Hopefully that is just a taste of what is to come.
Yet there still remains the sense that the Whitecaps are getting better without ever quite doing enough to win games they should be winning and the likelihood is that they will die the death of a thousand ties in terms of making the playoffs.
Playing well for both halves of a game would also be a good tactic to employ.
Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings!
Crepeau 5, Brown-5.5, Nerwisnki-5.5, Godoy-5.5, Veselinovic-5.5, Metcalfe-4, Alexandre-2, Bikel-5.5, White-5, Caicedo-5.5*, Cavalini-2 (Raposo-4, Teibert-5.5)
Soccer Shorts (The Director's Cut) 