Sockers’ Will to Win on the Wane : Soccer: Big lead in MSL race, loss of Collins to injury conspire to send the team into its first slump.

SAN DIEGO —  In baseball it’s called a pennant race, those last few weeks of a season when teams intensify their efforts as they fight for a playoff spot.

In the Major Soccer League, no one has yet coined a phrase to capture the drama of the chase. In the past week the Sockers have demonstrated why.

There is no drama, and no chase.

Those last few weeks are more nuisance than anything else. First place has all but been decided, and guess what? Those same guys who have won the whole thing nine of the past 10 seasons lead the pack again.

Which doesn’t do wonders for the Sockers’ ambition.

“We probably made the playoffs too soon,” said forward Thompson Usiyan, who apparently is a quick study of the Sockers’ habits--he’s in his first season with the team.

The Sockers assured themselves of making the playoffs March 14 with a 10-7 victory over the Baltimore Blast.

No celebration ensued, only a vacation.

After that victory, the Sockers dropped three of their next four games, the first time they have done so this season.

Now there are signs in the Sports Arena that seem to speak more loudly than those nine championship banners hanging from the rafters.

One such warning is the margin of defeat: One goal in each game. Before the recent mini-swoon, the Sockers were 10-2 in one-goal games and boasted about the statistic being a mark of a good team.

Now it’s downplayed.

“That’s not really any indication of how good you are,” Usiyan said. “Sometimes it’s just luck.”

Another indication of the team’s strength was its instinct to sense when its prey was wounded and then move in for the kill. Before these past four games the Sockers had won 45 of the 46 games in which they led heading into the final quarter. They since have lost two such games.

But again, players say they are only victims of circumstance.

“Every team we play now is in a do-or-die situation (for the three other playoff spots),” said midfielder Jacques Ladouceur. “So if (opponents) are down three or four goals, they’re still going to be cracking, whereas before if they were down three of four, they would let things slide.”

One other potential harbinger is that these losses are clumped together. When the Sockers lost consecutive games to Cleveland and St. Louis last week, it was the first time all season they had lost two in a row.

The players’ reaction? No big deal.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Ladouceur said. “We were just looking to clinch the division.”

But the Sockers have yet to do that. Sitting atop the league with a 25-12 record, they still must win one of their remaining three games, or benefit from the Dallas Sidekicks losing one of their four remaining contests, to clinch the regular-season championship.

Because that’s considered to be no more than a formality, however, the Sockers have begun counting the days until the playoffs.

“It’s hard to keep such high intensity for an entire season,” Usiyan said. “Especially when other teams have so much more to fight for. We’re just waiting for the playoffs, and then we’ll turn it on.”

If there is anything to worry about it’s that the Sockers will try to “turn it on” in the playoffs without two players who helped them win during the regular season, midfielder Brian Quinn (now with the U.S. national team) and defender Ben Collins (knee surgery last week).

Quinn has been gone since mid-January, and his absence was hardly felt--the team went on to score six consecutive victories once he left. But now with Collins gone, there is concern that the cumulative effect could prove devastating.

“We had to pick it up an extra 10% when Brian left,” Ladouceur said. “And now we have to pick it up another 10% because of Ben Collins. Losing Ben is definitely going to matter because he did so many things that maybe the fans didn’t notice, but we as players did.”

His absence loomed large in the fourth quarter of the Sockers’ most recent game, a 7-6 overtime loss to the Cleveland Crunch on Tuesday. The Crunch scored four times in that fourth quarter to push the game into overtime, then finished a counterattack 7 minutes 40 seconds into the extra period to earn the victory.

“I think not having Ben did make a difference,” said midfielder Paul Dougherty. “Out of the seven goals, Ben would have stopped at least two of them.”

Coach Ron Newman agreed.

“At that time (the fourth quarter), we could have used Ben Collins,” he said. “There’s no doubt about that. He’s a solid, well-organized player who reads the game well. He can sense danger before it happens. . . . Without him, we’re not lacking good players, but we are lacking good readers of the game.”

Collins has eight years of MSL experience. Only Kevin Crow with nine has more among Sockers’ defenders. The two switched with each other ensuring that the Sockers had a “good reader” on the carpet at all times.

Now the Sockers are mounting added pressure onto the rest of the defensive corps, still learning the nuances of the game. David Banks, Alex Golovnia and Jimmy McGeough (Collins’ replacement who hadn’t played all year before Tuesday) are in their second years of indoor soccer, and Terry Woodberry is in his fourth, but this is his first season as a defender.

Their inexperience showed late in Tuesday’s game. Some 11 minutes into the third quarter, Socker forward John Kerr stole the ball from Marco Rizi and went in to score on a break-away to give the Sockers a 5-1 lead. But 12 seconds later, Cleveland’s Greg Willin exploited the Sockers’ defensive inexperience and answered Kerr’s goal.

Later, midway through the final quarter, Kevin Crow ran onto a crossing pass from Usiyan at the back post and tucked it in to re-establish the Sockers’ four-goal lead.

But again Cleveland came right back, and 24 seconds later Hector Marinaro started a string of five consecutive Cleveland goals.

“They had no chance of winning that game until we started giving them goals,” Newman said. “They scored two immediately after we thought we put them to bed. We score those goals and then the supposedly defensive-minded team goes out to try to win the ball back, but instead they let in goals before we even have a chance to enjoy the fruits of our labor. And then of course the people on the bench just start going crazy.”

Which brings up another sign of trouble as the playoffs near: dissension.

Sockers players aren’t only going crazy on the bench, but they’re going at it in practice, too. As Monday’s practice wound down, Dougherty and first-year forward Mirko Castillo went jaw to jaw, though the confrontation didn’t elevate into anything more than a shoving match.

The Sockers have always bickered openly, but now there’s a difference. Juli Veee, Steve Zungul and Brian Quinn aren’t the ones doing the criticizing; guys like Dougherty are, and therein lies a problem.

Veee, Zungul and Quinn commanded respect not so much from what they said, but because of their performances. While Dougherty recently has established himself as the team’s top midfielder, he still is not in a class with someone like Quinn.

“And if you’re going to throw stones,” Newman warned. “You better not live in a glass house. If Paul starts to make mistakes, his teammates are going to get all over him.”

Dougherty doesn’t appear concerned.

“It’s just a matter of getting to know one another, really,” he said. “As the season goes on, we’re learning that we just want perfection from one another.”

Added Usiyan, “Everyone is very intense, and even when we were winning we would manage to tick someone off. But when we’re losing, it’s magnified.”

The losses will stop mounting, players say, once the playoffs begin.

“We are playing very well,” Usiyan said. “Our problem is we just don’t have the need to win.”