For a while on Saturday afternoon, it looked like D.C. United might do something that they haven’t done in nearly eight months: win an MLS league match.
United were the better team for long stretches of Saturday’s game against the Chicago Fire, moving the ball at will and playing a brand of free-flowing, creative, attack-minded soccer that hasn’t been seen on East Capitol Street since, well, 2012.
Their back line, unfortunately, had other plans. A series of defensive miscues handed the Fire a pair of goals, enough to salvage a 2-2 draw in front of an announced crowd of 9,445 at RFK stadium.
“It’s still a step forward,” an optimistic United head coach Ben Olsen told DCist after the match. “In this process that we knew was going to take some time, this was another step forward. All of the things we’ve worked on in the past couple of weeks, we’ve gotten better at. If we had just a bit more class in the final third, we could’ve won that game.”
United wasted little time in getting to work on Saturday. Fourteen minutes in, United midfielder Nick DeLeon played fullback Sean Franklin through on the right flank. Franklin’s driven cross found Luis Silva eight yards out, but the midfielder failed to convert.
Three minutes later, DeLeon combined with Eddie Johnson on another quality chance, a lovely one-two exchange that saw Johnson’s attempt at goal pushed away from goal by Chicago keeper Sean Johnson. Silva was again dangerous just two minutes later, serving a corner kick to a wide-open Perry Kitchen in the box, but Kitchen’s powerful header found its way into Johnson’s hands. Silva left several minutes later with an apparent ankle injury.
Despite United’s dominance, Chicago would find their equalizer. Midfielder Harrison Shipp struck a well-placed corner kick toward the far post into the path of Jhon Kennedy Hurtado, who was left unmarked by Franklin and D.C. left-back Cristian and made no mistake with the chance, heading it home.
Undeterred, United soon found the equalizer. After Eddie Johnson was brought down just outside the box, DeLeon and Fabian Espindola relied on a bit of trickery on the ensuing free kick, with the former initially stepping up to hit it goalwards but instead rolling a deft touch back towards his teammate. Espindola’s low, pacey strike leveled the match.
D.C.’s second goal arrived in the 73rd, again on a dead ball. Bobby Boswell found himself on the end of an Espindola corner kick. Boswell’s header was cleared from the goal line, but found its way right back to him. A second attempt struck the near post, and the rebound fell directly into the path of Kitchen, who converted from close range.
It was, of course, too good to be true. Chicago found the game’s final goal less than ten minutes later. Second-half sub Patrick Nyarko collected the ball on the right flank, nutmegged Cristian and centered into the path of an onrushing Amarikwa, who hammered it home and celebrated with a cheeky kiss of his biceps.
Though disappointing, the result marks a bit of progress for an anemic United side that entered the game with three shots on goal over their previous two matches — a total they tripled on Saturday. There was chemistry and rhythm present in their play against Chicago, which was also heartening. It was, however, a game they should have won, and D.C. fans have already grown weary of measuring progress in fractional improvements in secondary statistical categories. They want goals.
Perhaps United head coach Ben Olsen — the man at the helm of the team that now owns the third longest winless streak in MLS history — put it best after the match, reflecting rather simply on his club’s woes:
“It’s not easy to get a win here.”
