..b team madness..
well, it is no longer a mystery to me why certain people on the earthquakes have been relegated to the reserve squad or further (seattle sounders, etc.). last night's melee vs deportes alavés started with a bench-clearing brawl that saw red cards shown to the earthquakes' reserve squad goalkeeper, jon conway (!), and one of the alavés defenders. russell, whose somewhat incidental shove caused a defender to trip up his own goalkeeper, also saw a yellow card for his part. the ref called a really tight match from there on out, but it didn't stop typical hot-heads like russell, dombrowski, etc from playing dirty. some of the dirty play held due consequence-- tighe (dombrowski) had a foul in the box that led to alavés' lone goal, russell got warned every other time he touched the ball, and so forth.

incidentally, the quality of play shown last night makes it clear why some players have been called up to the big team and others have not. julian nash was the one bright spot of the team (besides brian mullan, of course, who outclassed every other person on the field last night... but i don't consider him a b-team member), scoring a lovely deflect goal and generally proving his capability as a ball-handler. on the other hand, it was made quite clear why certain players are where they are, like o'rourke (has good quick ball skills, but his passing is weak and inaccurate; also a dirty, high-elbows player), levesque (has speed but ball skills are extremely lacking), dombrowski (has taken up the resident thug persona but does not have the ball skills to back it up), fulton (way too quick to come out of his net; may have been nervous because of the nature in which he was thrown into the game, but his timing was off a lot), and ramirez (had lots of space to run but played scared, always waiting and dumping off the ball as soon as possible). wondolowski has been doing well with this team but they didn't make much use of him last night. aloisi actually had a pretty decent game, too. no complaints there, although when he's been pulled up to the big team, he hasn't been all that great.

at any rate, it was an interesting game. bry, sorry you had to miss it. wish you could come to more games :(

on another note, the discovery has landed safely at edwards afb. hopefully that clears the way for me to take a trip to florida in september! :D