Z/Web

The Houston Dynamo have won Major League Soccer for the last two years. After a slow start where they played well but had trouble scoring and therefore weren’t winning matches, they turned it on mid-season and ended up as the best team in the West and the second-best team in the whole league. Unfortunately, that cursed them, as for the past five years, the team that’s won the conference has been knocked out in the playoffs. Houston drew away in NY last week and it seemed a lock for them to win at home today: they’d only lost once all season and NY only won once away. NY also just squeaked into the playoffs, getting in on a wild card slot only because D.C United lost their final game. NY was missing some key players and Houston had their full line-up, and this was a home game with 30,000 fans dressed in Orange. But nothing went Houston’s way. After early pressure created tons of chances but no goals, a NY counter with speedster Dane Richards got through the back line and Dane beat Onstad for an early goal. A minor setback for the champs, right? Unfortunately, moments later NY was awarded a penalty kick. The call was questionable: the ref claimed a cross hit Richardo Clark’s hand in the box. But it wasn’t deliberate and the rule is that handballs are supposed to be intentional. Be that as it may, being two goals down in the first half was not good, and even worse, the Dynamo were cursed at the other end as they just could not score. They possessed the ball well, attacked as a team, created tons of chances, and sure have scored half a dozen goals. In any other match, they would have. But like at the beginning of the year when they couldn’t finish, they just couldn’t get the ball to cross the line. Rookie goalkeeper Ceparo for NY was brilliant, making a number of fine stops and showing no playoff nerves at all. His reclaim of the ball from Brian Ching after initially dropping it was amazing, and a couple other times he took hits but got right up and grabbed the ball showing no fear. Very impressive. Meanwhile, Dane Richards was awesome, using his speed to torment Houston, and he assisted on a third goal late as the Dynamo were pressing forward to score. Really, I can’t say that much critical about Houston: they did everything right except for finishing their chances. There’s always a bit of luck in that (in this case bad luck), but other than the first goal, Houston didn’t make that many mistakes. NY only had a few chances and capitalized. Houston had tons and didn’t. The end result: Houston is out of the playoffs and the chance to be the first team to ever win three championships in a row is gone. Sometimes it just happens like that. And lowly NY will now take on Real Salt Lake for the Western crown and the chance to be in MLS Cup on Nov. 23. I’m now a big RSL fan, as I love rooting for the underdog. This is their first playoff qualification ever, so good luck to them. Either way, though, we’ll have someone new in the final: neither NY nor RSL has made an appearance there, so this will be historic. On the East, it’s either Chicago or Columbus — Chicago won it in their first year in 1999, but Columbus has never won the Cup, so I’m hoping for a Columbus-RSL final (though Columbus-NY would be interesting, too).