Faced with a depleted squad due to suspensions and injury, D.C. United Coach Peter Nowak had a dilemma on his hands, one that should be familiar to most college undergrads (at least most that I knew):

It’s dinner time, and you’re hungry, but your dickhead roommates ate most of the good stuff. The hot pockets? Gone. The bread? Moldy. That Greek seasoning stuff that you put on everything? Spilled in some late-night culinary escapade. But you’re determined to fix yourself something tasty, damnit, and you’re going to improvise with what you have. So you throw a freezer-burnt burger on the Foreman, put some waffles in the toaster, grab the Tabasco sauce from the back of the cupboard, and hope for the best. You assess the result as fair, and just about what you expected — not your ideal dinner, but given the circumstances, an adequate meal.

Nowak had a similar assessment of his similarly makeshift squad’s performance, a 1-1 draw with Real Salt Lake Saturday at RFK.

I think they played a very good game. We need to be a little bit smarter… we had enough chances to win the game. [There were] a couple of mistakes we made, and of course the goal was unnecesary, but the performance was pretty good.

The recipe turned out to be decent. Of course, some of the ingredients worked better than others.

All photos by Kyle Gustafson. More photos at the match photogallery.