For Campos, It’ll Be Like Old Times
CHICAGO — Jorge Campos, irrepressible as ever, was fielding questions in the locker room at the Citrus Bowl after Sunday’s Major League Soccer All-Star game.
What, he was asked, would it feel like to play against his former Mexican national team teammate, Carlos Hermosillo, when the Chicago Fire and the Galaxy play each other today at Soldier Field?
Campos grinned and answered quickly.
“Either way, a Mexican wins,” he said.
The afternoon game marks the first time the one-time Galaxy goalkeeper will be playing against his former team.
Add in the fact that the match pits the Western Conference-leading Galaxy against the second-place Fire, the only team with a realistic chance of overtaking it, and it is easy to see why the game has caught the imagination of Chicago fans.
More than 24,000 tickets had been sold by Friday and MLS officials were predicting a crowd of 40,000 or more.
Los Angeles (17-6) leads the conference with 49 points and has nine regular-season games left, including today’s. Chicago (13-9) is in second place with 37 points and has 10 games left.
“They are a different team than [the Rapids],” Galaxy Coach Octavio Zambrano said after the victory at Denver. “This team wants to attack. Chicago is a different team. They wait, wait, wait, wait and then try to counter.
“So we need to approach it a little bit different. But if our two players, Welton and Cobi [Jones], play as sound and disciplined defensively as they do offensively, that should lead to our success.”
Jones and Welton were in rare form against Colorado. Jones scored three goals and Welton two, but both players also chased back on defense and made several key defensive plays.
Most encouraging of all was the play of Hermosillo. In his previous games for the Galaxy, the veteran forward had seemed out of touch with his teammates and looked slow and awkward by comparison.
“We figured that it just wasn’t going to work with him playing as a center-forward,” Zambrano said after the Denver victory. “He needed to make diagonal runs. He needed to drop back deeper.
“He did all those things and the space that he left behind opened it up for Cobi and Welton to fill that space. . . .
“Slowly, by trial and error, we found something that works.”
Even so, the Galaxy made a move Friday, trading forward Harut Karapetyan to San Jose for forward Lawrence Lozzano. In 12 games, Lozzano scored four goals and had one assist. Karapetyan had been with the Galaxy since the team began in 1996. He had scored four goals this season. Lozzano will join the Galaxy on Monday.
“There’s always room for improvement and you’re never happy as a coach,” Zambrano had said before the trade. “When you have a team like this, you can’t make too many substitutions.”
Friday’s MLS Game
Roy Lassiter scored on a penalty kick in the 57th minute to give D.C. United a 1-0 victory over the Dallas Burn before a crowd of 9,437 in Dallas.
