Chris Seitz Needs A Very Short Memory
It is not often that you see a goalkeeper make a blatant, what-was-he-thinking mistake in a game. It's even more rare for you to see both goalies do it at some point during the same game. Apparently, the saying applies to soccer just like other sports - "on any given Saturday."
Early on in last Friday's match between DC United and the newest expansion team, the Philadelphia Union, United keeper Troy Perkins makes a strange play. The union play a ball into the center of the box for attacker Sebastien LeToux, and rather than challenge Perkins sets his feet and waits. Not surprisingly, LeToux heads the ball by him for the opening goal of the game.
Seitz apparently felt the need to one-op Perkins. In the second half, Seitz gave up a fairly weak goal on a shot from 25 yards out in the 62nd minute, then followed that up with a very nice save three minutes later. Unfortunately, five minutes after that, he did something that even I can't explain:
It's generally a rule of thumb as a keeper that you don't even toy with the notion of letting the ball out of your grasp until the defense has cleared out. Seitz not only decided to get rid of the ball befre DC forward Jaime Moreno cleared out, he then bit on a hip fake and dropped the ball to the ground with Moreno less than five feet away.
Luckily for Seitz, LeToux finished off a hat trick to give Philadelphia a 3-2 victory, but this is certainly a day he can't put behind him fast enough.
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