MLS scheduling is weird. Each team will play every other team in the league, but some of them just once, some of them twice, and some of them three times. What's more, there's no guarantee the scheduling will be equitable. Take, for instance, the series between D.C. United and the Columbus Crew last year. They met twice over the course of the eight-month 2013 season, both within a 34-day period in March and April. Which is to say that it's been 10 months since we last saw the Gold-and-Black. And what an awful game that was.
That was the game where Brandon McDonald well and truly lost it, being primarily responsible for three first-half goals and then exploding in the locker room at halftime, practically forcing Ben Olsen to sub him out during the intermission. We thought it might have been a good omen when the scoreboard at Columbus Crew Stadium caught fire - it wasn't the RFK scoreboard, after all - forcing a delay before kickoff. But it wasn't to be.
Saturday, Ben Olsen will run out no more than two players who started the debacle in Columbus less than a year ago, as Bill Hamid and Perry Kitchen are the only names among those starters who figure into the first XI, and only Kyle Porter of the rest of the starters remains on the roster.
Because this video is so bad, I decided to grab another one to share today, and I think it's pretty on point, in a Bob Uecker in "Major League" sort of way. It's from the last time D.C. United played Columbus at home in the season-opener opener the year after finishing with the worst record in MLS. That 2011 meeting also went much better for los Capitalinos than their most recent tilt with the Crew, so here's hoping you enjoy it - and what goes down at RFK this Saturday - more than the video at the top of this post.