The omens are encouraging.
With its 2-0 victory over league favorite Houston on Saturday in the third of three home games to open the 2006 season, D.C. United (2-0-1) is off to it’s best start in six years. The last time D.C. went undefeated through its first three league games was 1999, when it won the first three games, all on the road, and eventually captured its third league title in four years.
“That’s what we did back in the day,” said midfielder Ben Olsen, a part of the 1999 championship team. “This is RFK, and we need to get back to protecting RFK. I think we got away from that in the last couple of years. It wasn’t as tough for teams to come in here, and that’s been a big goal of this team this year, to get back to that old, fortress-type place where teams don’t want to come to D.C.”
The season-opening home stand in the longest in the team’s history, but the strong results have quickly eliminated doubts and questions that lingered in the offseason following a 4-0 thrashing at the hands of Chicago Fire in the first round of the 2005 playoffs.
“I think people thought that we didn’t [get off to a good start this season] because our first game was kind of shaky, we were down, 2-0, and people were wondering,” said forward Jaime Moreno. “But now we are showing that at home it’s always hard to beat D.C. Now we have go on the road and get the W, too.”
