Superliga Matchday One: Houston-Atlante

SECOND HALF:

Really ho-hum espe­cially after the out­stand­ing goal by Brian Mul­lan that pushed the Hous­ton lead to 4–0. Rico Clark looked com­fort­able slid­ing up into the cen­tral mid­field role in the sec­ond half and Mul­lan and and Brad Davis showed some great under­stand­ing of each other as well, an under­stand­ing that comes from play­ing together for so many years. Atlante played bet­ter in the sec­ond half, but are totally out­classed in this event as pre­dicted by myself, and Mario Valdez  on our Superliga pre­view spe­cial #1 the other day.

FIRST HALF

Atlante is the weak­est team in Superliga and has also decided to treat this tour­na­ment as a set of friend­lies to get ready to defend their Aper­tura title come the fall. So it is dif­fi­cult to read too much into Houston’s fine first half per­for­mance other than to say, other almost all other MLS sides would have per­formed worse, in some cases much worse. The Dynamo’s spac­ing and mid­field play have been superb on the awful Robert­son Sta­dium pitch. Stu­art Holden has regained his knack from last sea­son to posi­tion him­self per­fectly in the box for crosses and deflec­tions, and has two out­stand­ing goals. Holden has stated his case tonight as to why Peter Nowak should choose him for the Olympic Team even if it means not tak­ing Rob­bie Rogers who has been in form for Colum­bus and was named to the MLS All Stars Start­ing XI. I’m not advo­cat­ing not tak­ing Rogers by any means but Holden’s per­for­mance in pres­sure matches the last two sea­sons: Superliga and MLS Cup play­offs trumps Rogers per­for­mance in reg­u­lar sea­son MLS matches if it were to come down to those two.

Dwayne DeRosario had dropped back into a deeper role than he’s been play­ing in recent MLS matches and has looked out­stand­ing. How­ever for the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive match DeRo lost his cool and this time he was right­fully sent off. The Atlante defender was also sent off but that mat­ter lit­tle as Atlante is as good as out of this tour­na­ment and can use the remain­ing two hun­dred twenty min­utes of foot­ball in Superliga 2008 to exper­i­ment and get them­selves ready for the fall. Hous­ton on the other hand now has a big prob­lem as Guadala­jara comes to town Tuesday.

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