Written by Wendy Pintor
5/17/23
Goals came in quickly in the first half by Lucas Zelarayan and Malte Amundsen, that was enough for the host Columbus Crew, at the Lower.com Stadium, Crew who also have also had a bad start with a four-game winless streak.
Cucho Hernandez sent a through ball to Zelarayan down the line . Zelarayan cut back on young Jalen Neal inside the box and fired a strong low shot past Bond, who started today on goal. The Crew took a two-goal lead within the 43rd minute with Amundsen sealing the job.
Amundsen, playing in his second match and making first start since being brought on from New York City FC on April 25, he cupped out a defender and got his shoulder on a cross by Alexandru Matan to knock the ball into the goal. Columbus increased its league-leading first-half goal total to 13.
Tonights 2-0 victory over the LA Galaxy meant so much to them and their fans. This was the first meeting between the teams since a 3-1 home win for the Crew in May 2019.
Patrick Schulte made two saves for his third shutout of the season for the Crew (5-4-3, 18 points), who were on a 0-2-2 stretch. The Crew had been hunting for a goal with several good opportunities, going all in since their first touch on the ball, including a imperfect break by Hernandez that resulted in a weak chip shot that was easily stopped by Jonathan Bond, even that didn’t help LA Galaxy’s mentality.
LA Galaxy (2-7-3, nine points) had a 2-2-0 streak end. They have not scored in the past five road games.
LA star forward Chicharito did not start because due to a heavy schedule. He entered in the 61st minute for leading scorer Dejan Jovelic who had a well deserved starting position after his performance against San Jose. However, whether or not he deserved it left unanswered questions as to why second half he didn’t sub out when asked how he set up the line up.
“Honestly, it was a difficult decision. I was mulling it over and processing it. Before we even came into the week, I had sort of a plan going into this week based off of the travel. The short turnaround is going to be on both ends. The travel from LA to Columbus. A little longer. The day is longer. The guys are recovering from the last game. We’re going into a long week. I felt like we had some guys who were, in the end, they felt great, which was tough to leave them out, because there were a lot of guys who I left out who felt like they were ready to play, and they felt like they were ready to play. But we have four games in 10 days that we’re trying to also manage. And some guys have had little knocks or things that they’ve been managing over the course of time, and so… I also need to see what some of our other guys can do for us and how they’re going to contribute to this team during this stretch. My calculation was this was going to be the longer of the two travels. The less amount of time to recover, just because of the travel and everything, and we’ll have a shorter trip tomorrow. It’s just a one hour hop over to D.C. We’ll have a day to train. We’ll have… it’s the same amount of time, just not the same length of travel per say. I knew Columbus was going to be a team that was good with the ball. Wilfried’s [Wilfried Nancy] teams are always good with the ball, so it was going to be some defensive work inside of this. So, I was trying to also kind of manage our group going into the weekend. So, we’ll try to put the best team together we can for the weekend and we’ll look to take some points, or something out of D.C., and then come back and prepare for the next one. “ said Vanney after tonights game.
Both teams play Saturday, with the Crew traveling downstate to play FC Cincinnati while LA is at D.C. United.
Scoring Summary:
CLB: Zelarayán (Hernández), 25
CLB: Amundson (Mățan), 43
Misconduct Summary:
CLB: Ramírez (caution), 46
LA: Puig (caution), 82
LA: Chicharito, 88