Watching the replay is always the best way to grade a match. I did see a replay of the Riley incident on Laurie’s Offside blog. First, Riley did not throw a punch. When you watch the incident, stop the DVR moment by moment because if you watch it live speed, you will miss everything.

You will see Mark Magee grab Riley behind the neck and try to pull him down. Riley responds by grabbing Magee’s neck and then Magee flops.

Oddly, that’s the only part of the game I didn’t see live, but had the advantage of replay, as I was waiting in a beer line.

I’ve been at every home game this season except this one. I gave my tickets to this game to some colleagues of mine at work. I ended up watching the DVR’d broadcast Sunday evening and was appalled. The refs were bad, LA’s strategy was an insult to the league and the game, and we showed a severe lack of patience and creativity in the face of LA’s sloppy play.
The biggest thing I saw that led to pretty much everything else controversial was the (sometimes blatant) delay of game tactics incorporated by the Galaxy. The Jaqua penalty was just one call and honestly I think it could have gone either way. However, most of the pushing and penalties were an effort by LA to compensate for what they knew was a sub-par defense. It seemed that with every foul they would have to tie their shoes or fix their socks before play could continue. By the second half, Riley had had enough and attempted to grab the ball out of Berhalter’s hands at which point his LA teammates came to his aid provoked Riley into doing something stupid. Honestly, I think the ref is responsible for this as he didn’t take any steps to eliminate LA’s delay tactics at all.
The part where we failed is that we did not do a good job taking advantage of LA’s lazy strategy. There were a few plays where Zakuani and/or Le Toux easily sprinted past their defender (sometimes with, sometimes without the ball). Why didn’t we create more of those opportunities with some more aggressive deep passes? Sometimes these caused us to lose the ball, but more often it worked out and turned into a decent shot (and one goal). We failed to capitalize on this more often and instead allowed ourselves to get frustrated and angry.