Friday, May 29, 2009

To LA

The Wizards travel to LA this weekend to take on the Galaxy at the Home Depot Center tomorrow night. LA comes into the game on the backs of an 8 game unbeaten run. While that 8 game run might sound impressive, the Galaxy only have 1 win in that time frame, the other 7 games have been draws. In their last game, LA was a man up for 65 minutes against lowly FC Dallas and were only able to grab a draw. Bruce Arena has LA playing a tight game designed to frustrate other teams.

Kansas City comes into the game missing two players after red cards to Josh Wolff and Santiago Hirsig last week against Chivas. Each missing player poses their own problems, Wolff is the team's leading scorer with 6 goals and has been in good form lately as well. Hirsig looks to have almost fully adjusted to the style of play in MLS and has done a good job of being the guy that holds the ball up. The absence of those two will be hard to overcome, but this will be a chance to test the depth that Coach Onalfo talks about quite often. I have a feeling we'll see the same lineup that started the first half against the Brass on Wednesday.
Hartman
Watson - Conrad - Hohlbein - Besler
Jewsbury
Harrington - Arnaud - Souter
Gomez - Lopez

Key Match Up - Jack Jewsbury vs Landon Donovan - Donovan will play withdrawn behind the striker(s) and it will likely fall on Jewsbury to be the man covering him. Not an easy task to mark one of the best players in the league, but it's something that Jewsbury has done in the past so hopefully he'll do well again.

PREDICTION - LA has been grinding out the results lately and I doubt we'll see much different from them this weekend, they'll look to frustrate KC and capitalize on a mistake. With Sean Franklin set to miss time for the Galaxy, the Wizards will likely be looking to run at the older back line of the Galaxy.

KC 2 - (Lopez, Arnaud)
LA 1 - (Donovan)

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