Dynamo/Dash Delivery: Dynamo remain unbeaten through six straight

Houston Dynamo

The Houston Dynamo stretched their unbeaten streak to six with a 1-1 draw in Colorado on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, the Dynamo will try to rebound from another late game equalizer by an opponent. The 1-1 draw was a letdown in light of how they have played recently.

After securing an early goal from Christain Ramirez to begin the second half, did the Dynamo make the conscious decision to sit back and repel Colorado attacks to close out the game? This is a great question to debate. Did they or didn’t they?

First, the Dynamo have never been a particularly good road team and that’s putting it nicely. They have had just one winning road record since arriving in Houston and have a minus 100 goal differential away from home. So giving up the road equalizer late was not necessarily out of the norm for them.

Second, bad habits are hard to break. The Dynamo did not become a sit back and preserve the lead team with an occasional counter overnight. It will take more then a three game win streak to change that habit. This has become a hallmark of a Dynamo team ever since they arrived in Houston. In fact, their first ever loss was a 90th minute goal by the Kansas City Wizards (now Sporting Kansas City). Much like Wednesday night, the goal scorer was an unlikely suspect in Jose Burciaga Jr. From 2001 -2007, the defender tallied just 13 goals and for the remainder of his career that culminated in 2019 he had just one more goal. Lalas Abubakar became the latest unlikely suspect and also a defender. In 93 professional games, he has a total of five goals including Wednesday night’s equalizer.

Third, this team is showing definitive overall improvement. Former legend DaMarcus Beasley once shared “that it’s seldom the game plan that wins or loses a match but it is the execution of the game plan that determines success or failure,”

Houston head coach Tab Ramos nearly echoed those words in the postgame press conference.

“I think it didn’t work out as well as I thought it would, only because we couldn’t keep the ball. When I put the three fresh guys up front, I was hoping that we could connect a couple of passes and then find them and then put the game away. We didn’t make the changes so that we could win the game 1-0; we made the changes so that we could score the 2-0 and walk away with the three points.”

Houston failed to execute and it cost them points in the table. Fortunately, they have more opportunities ahead with tonight’s game against FC Dallas.