New faces help lift D.C. to first win of season
Just like that, D.C. United has turned the page of its own history.
Well, not exactly. It took five increasingly painful losses to open the 2010 regular season before United finally got into the win column on Wednesday with a remarkably unfamiliar core of players.
No Troy Perkins, the 2006 Major League Soccer goalkeeper of the year, who was on the bench. No Luciano Emilio, the 2007 MLS most valuable player, who also was on the bench. Jaime Moreno, Major League Soccer’s all-time leading scorer, and Santino Quaranta, the team’s most famously redemptive story, were merely second-half substitutes.
Instead, United head coach Curt Onalfo turned to new faces — the young, such as 19-year-old goalkeeper Bill Hamid, and the hardworking, including new forwards Adam Cristman and Danny Allsopp — to get the monkey off the franchise’s back.
“For me, it was, ‘We’re 0-5,'” said Onalfo when asked about the decision to give Hamid his professional debut in the most dire of circumstances. “I felt like we gotta make some changes. That was one of the changes I thought long and hard about, and I went with my intuition on it, and it worked out fine.”
After the first month of the season took a heavy toll, there is no reprieve yet for D.C. (1-5-0), which will play its fourth game in 11 days at FC Dallas (1-1-4), which is also coming off its first victory of the season.
But the conservative approach teams usually adopt on the road to minimize mistakes in unforgiving settings should be right up D.C.’s alley, since Onalfo went that route to generate his first regular-season win as United’s head coach.
With little reason to make changes after trying for so long just to find a spark, on Saturday the familiar names that have epitomized D.C. over much of the last few years are likely to again give way to those who finally broke through.
“You have to put in the work,” said Cristman. “It has to be dicey, and it’s not always pretty. We’re all coming in with knocks and tired and dead, but that’s what it takes and that’s what we’re going to keep doing.”
