Worst MLS Game Ever

Dave Sarachan may be -- absolutely is, actually -- a much better coach than his detractors would have had you believe. If you needed any proof, I'd like to enter last night's dire 0-0 draw with Colorado into evidence.

As much as fans hated his coach-speak, Sarachan was never too far off the mark when he would talk about how the team did certain things right, but the breaks didn't go their way. Or they only made a couple of (catastrophic) mistakes. Or they were missing too many key players. Or the planets weren't properly aligned.

Last night, the Fire did nothing well, save for shutting down an admittedly impotent Colorado attack, and even that almost didn't work in the final moments of the match. There was no direction, no rhythm, no indication that any of these players had actually played together before. Chad Barrett kept getting caught offside not because he ran too early, but because he didn't know when his teammates were going to make the pass, and because they didn't know when he was going to make his run. And why did will.i.an Oliveira stop taking corner kicks? I like Brian Plotkin -- don't get me wrong -- but I like Oliveira better.

And I think it's meaningful that Chris Armas came off the bench for only the fifth time ever in Hamlett's first game. In the past, if Armas was fit, he started. Period. So I'm not sure exactly what it means, only that it's meaningful.

It's still only one Denis Hamlett data point, but the knee-jerk conclusion from one match is that Sarachan was actually doing a pretty good job of wringing performances out of a sub-standard roster. Of course, you can also make the case (and I think I did when the 'Chan got canned) that Sarachan did not do enough to improve his roster so that we wouldn't find ourselves in this predicament.

In any event, I support a lousy soccer team right now. There's no getting around that. I can only hope the U.S. and Mexico fall out of the Copa America sooner rather than later at this point, and that a healthy Chris Rolfe and a healthy Thiago -- and even a healthy Logan Pause -- can make a difference.