Columbus 1, DCU 1

What's missing? I realize I should consider the long view that sometimes a team can outshoot an opponent 18-3 and dominate possession for long stretches of the game and still lose, much less tie, and I should admonish myself for not grabbing comfort in the standard wisdom that a point on the road is a good thing and three points a bonus. I don't sense so much a lack of urgency as much as a lack of intensity, and they are different things. I can't imagine a Peter Nowak team ever playing without urgency; I sometimes wonder if Nowak's emphasis on aggression mistakes physical urgency for mental intensity. And paradoxically, I wonder if the absense of the man who symbolized DCU's physical urgency, departed Dema, is what's missing in the mental intensity: Dema took care of the physical urgency himself, allowing others to focus on soccer.

They are also shorthanded. Nowak had available on the bench last night Clyde Simms, Jeff Carroll, Devon McTavish, Domenic Mediate, Matt Nickell, Nick Rimando, John Wilson, with only Simms playing, replacing Lucio Filomeno (who started in MF, I suppose because Simms couldn't go 90). Jamil Walker, who might have made a difference in the last 20 minutes, was a scratch because of a hamstring injury. That Walker's absense seems significant cannot be a good thing. If they lose another starting midfielder (or starting striker or starting defender) for any substantial stretch of time, they could be deeply screwed.Next week in KC against a team embarrassed last night in Salt Lake and a team that thought it deserved better than what they got against DCU last week.