Fire 2, D.C. United 1
The only thing more miraculous than the way D.C. United snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on Saturday is the simple fact that the playoffs, technically, still remain within reach.
But to get there now, with two matches remaining, will require the same combination of seemingly impossible luck involving multiple teams that United managed on their own against the Chicago Fire, who scored two goals in stoppage time for a 2-1 victory after D.C. had gone ahead on a 90th-minute penalty kick.
“I’m gutted, absolutely,” United head coach Ben Olsen said. “It’s one of the toughest losses I’ve ever taken.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” United forward Charlie Davies said.
“You can’t even – it doesn’t even cross your mind, nevertheless occur,” was as much sense as United forward Josh Wolff could muster. “It’s very, very disappointing on a lot of fronts.”
And yet, D.C.’s giant step forward toward its first postseason berth since 2007 seemed all but complete when Santino Quaranta went down in the box after getting narrowly clipped by Chicago defender Gonzalo Segares with regulation winding down.
Dwayne De Rosario, who had missed a potential game-winning penalty kick against Chivas USA last month, drove his shot down the middle for his league-leading 15th goal of the year as Fire goalkeeper Sean Johnson dove left, giving United (9-12-11, 38 points) a fitting reward for having survived a tired and often uninspired performance due to a cross-country journey and short rest from playing in Vancouver just three days before.
Instead, the D.C. defense allowed Segares to make up for his earlier gaff, letting his centering pass two minutes later find its way across the top of the 18-yard box to Sebastian Grazzini, who snuffed out the celebration of 16,548 at RFK Stadium with a game-tying strike.
“I’m getting more gray hair than I can imagine right now,” De Rosario said. “It’s frustrating because you want to see that commitment, you want to see that passion and desire to win every ball – to do whatever it takes to stop a shot or block a ball to stop a play – but that isn’t the case and I don’t see that right now.”
When United frantically tried to take the lead again, they instead let down their guard in the most unimaginable fashion possible. As D.C. tried to regroup from having thrown numbers forward, Orr Barouch’s pass found Segares, who avoided an offside trap and tracked the ball to the end line. D.C. United goalkeeper Bill Hamid, believing Segares was offside, inexplicably raced off his line but was too late.
With the prescribed three minutes of stoppage time exceeded, Segares sent the ball back across the goal mouth, and Diego Chaves converted a sliding finish, giving the Fire (8-9-16, 40 points) an utterly improbable victory as Hamid desperately pleaded for a call that was not coming.
In the catatonic locker room afterward, his eyes swollen from being buried in a towel, Hamid refused comment. But while his individual actions were stunning, the collective analysis was that the result wasn’t entirely a surprise for a team that hasn’t just lost four matches in a row but has struggled all season to close out games.
“It would be easy to say that’s a snapshot of what’s occurred in the last – well, throughout the year, not just the last little bit,” Wolff said. “We said these things can’t happen down the stretch, and I don’t know how it happened, but it did, and it’s disappointing.”
Figuring out how to recover from the defeat will be as difficult a task as the road D.C. United now faces to get into the playoffs. After entering the night knowing that three victories in three matches would assure them a place in the postseason, now D.C. needs help in a three-way battle with the Portland Timbers (11-14-7, 40 points) and New York Red Bulls (9-8-16, 43 points) for the final of 10 MLS playoff spots.
Not only will United need to defeat Portland on Wednesday, it will also need New York to lose to Philadelphia on Thursday. If D.C. makes it that far, it then needs a win over Sporting Kansas City on Saturday as well as a loss or tie for the Timbers at Real Salt Lake and a loss to Columbus by Chicago, the team that stole three points from them on Saturday night.
“The crazy thing about this is that we’re still not out of it,” Olsen said. “We’ll move on, but it’s a tough one. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.”
