Chivas USA defender accepts sacrifice at face value
MLS REPORT
If a player is going to have his cheek sliced open and his nose smashed to pieces, it might as well be by a future Hall of Famer.
That's what Chivas USA defender Lawson Vaughn figures, anyway. Pain aside, at least he has a story to tell.
On Saturday evening, in the ninth minute of Chivas USA's game in Texas against the defending MLS champion Houston Dynamo, Vaughn leaped to head away a cross at the same time that Houston midfielder Dwayne De Rosario attempted a bicycle kick.
De Rosario, a Canadian national team veteran and four-time MLS champion, has a kick like a mule, even when he flips over on his back and tries a trick shot like he did Saturday.
His boot caught Vaughn square in the face, opening a cut that required 32 stitches, leaving Vaughn's nose a wreck and earning De Rosario a yellow card for reckless play.
Jay W. Granzow, the doctor who repaired the damage at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance on Sunday, said the only broken nose he has ever seen that was worse was on someone who literally had been kicked in the face by a horse.
Vaughn, who established himself as a starter last season, will be sidelined four to six weeks.
Chivas USA is going through a bleak spell at the moment, having won only once in six outings in 2008, and things don't figure to get much better Sunday, when the New England Revolution will be at the Home Depot Center.
Coach Steve Nicol is not someone who allows one bad performance to be followed by another. The fight will be back in the Revolution after last weekend's 3-0 home loss to the Chicago Fire.
Nicol was blunt in his assessment of that game.
"I thought we were consistent -- consistently bad," he said. "We were second in every department -- passing the ball, reading the game, challenging for the ball, finishing. You name it, we were second. Above the neck, we were dead. Now we have to figure out why?"
Chicago, meanwhile, will be playing again Thursday night (4:30, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes), against a wildly inconsistent D.C. United team. Not even the most astute MLS observer wants to predict the outcome.
The Fire has one of the best defenses in the league in 2008, having not yet allowed more than one goal a game while compiling a 4-1-1 record. But D.C. United has scored two four-goal victories at its RFK Stadium home, routing both Real Salt Lake and Toronto by 4-1 margins, while going 2-4-0.
