and it always ends up effecting our seeding for the tournament making it a harder path for us. We have a super talented team. I don’t expect us to tear though teams like Indiana or Wake Forest, but I do expect us to be more competitive than 3-0 in those matches. If this keeps up we should at least check Cobi’s interest would be in the position seeing how the Galaxy didn’t give him a fair chance at the HC gig there. I still think of Cobi as the face of the program and his playing and coaching experience would be a huge plus for us.

They never looked like scoring. 3-0 is a slightly unfair/misleading score, since two of the goals (the first and third) came immediately after blown calls by the ref, but after they fell behind they were just awful. I think the tactics did play a large part in that.

We played terribly, but we also got absolutely hosed. Indiana played pretty dirty, and got rewarded for it, with free kicks after full-body tackles, twice leading to goals. On Indiana’s second, the only legit goal, our players looked completely flat after the terrible decision for the first goal.

On the other hand, our attempts at a comeback were completely useless. No linking between defense and attack, and the midfield seemed absolutley non existent. We could rarely keep possesion and had no ideas on what to do in attack (throughout the game). We seemed extremely unorganized, and some of Salcedo’s tactics made little sense. We played with three centerbacks, which I hadn’t seen in any of our previous home matches, this or last year. And when we needed to move forward and the 3 accross the back were even more useless, we made no changes, leaving them all on. Maybe the last half hour has stuck in my mind, but that was terrible. Nowhere to go but up after that.

we don’t have a player named Will Hoosier.

i haven’t been keeping tabs on the soccer team like i did when i was in school, but didn’t we lose a lot of our star power to the MLS and such?

First, let me preface my comments by saying I am not making an excuses for the Bruins performance to date…But having said that, remember that this team lost three very good players in Beltran, Zizzo and Meyers. Would the results be any different to date with these three, no one will ever know.

I think the program made a big step in the hiring of Kenny Arena…Here is a coach that compliments Soto, as KA bring to UCLA, a coach with relationships outside of Southern California. Not to mention his relationship to Sarachan who most recently was the scouting director for the US Development Academy. A program of UCLA’s stature need to maintain a national recruiting presence as there are a bunch of hungry emerging programs out there ….some traditional….(St. Louis) some not so traditional (Evansville-Louisville – Cal Poly – UNM). Grimes in Cal is on a recruiting roll and getting a fair amount of so cal blue chippers (Fitzpatrick and Birnbaum) and Santa Barbara is churning through players as if they were a commodity (Rueckner – Minton?) with their international recruiting efforts (Boxall and Hedevag).

I believe UCLA will need to address the trend towards identifying international talent but more importantly identify and win the local recruiting wars by signing the best talent in So Cal. If the recruiting success in So Cal begins to wane, UCLA may very well be in trouble as UCSB/Cal Poly/Santa Clara/Cal are all very aggressive and some of these campus locations and large fan bases are very attractive to a potential recruit.

Surely though…the clock is ticking.