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By Keith

Although the forecast predicted otherwise, it turned out to be a pretty nice day for tailgating, but the same can’t be said for the game, where the MetroStars, who after 4 games at home this season, have yet to record a victory.

In honor of Mother Day’s weekend, I’m going to stick with a common phrase mothers tell their children: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. So with that in mind, I’ll end my recap of the MetroStars 1-0 sad defeat to the San Jose Earthquakes.

Alright, so I honestly can’t get away with leaving the multitude of readers of firstrowidiots.com with such a short recap of Saturday’s game, so I guess I’ll dive into more detail of the day.

Riding the joy of the MetroStars first victory of the year, which happened in a convincing fashion the previous week in Colorado, the Idiots ignored the dire forecast of cold and rain to see if the MetroStars finally got their act together or we were all in for a long and painful season. Sadly, the latter was true, but we’ll get more into that more in moment.

As usual, there was plenty of food and beverages, including Romanian wine courtesy of Daniella, Joey’s wife. Brian continued the tradition of bringing chicken wings to the tailgate, which of course allowed us to participate in one of our new favorite past times of chicken wing kicking. An Idiot, who will remain unidentified, proved his skill, or shall I say lack of, by kicking a wing in such a completely odd fashion that it ended up on Greg’s windshield. Adding to the oddness was the fact the Idiot was behind and to the left of Greg’s truck when kicking.

Even after consuming massive amounts of wings, we still had a lot left over right before we went in. The leftovers led to an ‘Apprentice’-style competition with Brian and me competing to see who could give away their batch first. Competing at a disadvantage, I had at least 3 times more wings than Brian, I narrowly lost. When he finished up, I had only 3 chicken wings left, which I quickly gave away to a two kids who really, really enjoyed our wings. Ronen played the Trump role summarily dismissing me (yes, I’m opting against using Trump’s favorite phrase so we don’t experience any additional litigation). I’ve accepted the action as a professional and will no longer work at tailgates; instead I’ll just show up and enjoy the food, beverages, and weather. In fact, I’m totally looking forward to it. Thanks, Ronen and Brian!

Attendance was nearly perfect with Brian, Drew, John, Joey, Ofer, Ronen and myself present. Even the mysterious Idiot Greg showed up, but due to family obligations related to Mother’s Day, was not able to stay for the game. Idiot Paul unfortunately wasn’t able to make it. The Idiot had two guests for the game with Daniella, Joey’s wife, and her father visiting. Little Idiots in attendance included Joey and Arel.

Daniella’s father brought some excellent pastries which was a nice change from the usual and greatly appreciated by the Idiots. Nick also stopped by during the tailgate with a big bucket of beer to share with the Empire Supporters Club as well as the rest of the people tailgating at 16A. It’s not every day the GM brings fans beer in the parking lot. Next time we’re going to try and get Nick to allow us to bring the beer in to the stadium, where we would have definitely appreciated it even more.

The forecast of cold and rain most likely were huge contributing factors to the second lowest attendance for a weekend game in Metro history. The stadium looked and felt pretty empty with an announced crowd of only 8,274. I’m sure the sub-par performance so far this year at home hasn’t helped. The Metros didn’t show anything on the field that day to convince fans to come back either.

Injuries continue to plague the team with French star Youri Djorkaeff, Jeff Agoos and luckily Woly unavailable to play. The Metros only had a few real chances throughout the game with an around 30-yard shot by Guevara that bounced off the left post in the 14th minute. The next close call came when the King hit a close-range head shot off the top of the crossbar in the 31st minute. After that, the game was pretty much eventless for the Metros. The Earthquakes got on the board with a goal by Ronald Cerritos in the 60th minute, assisted by Metro Reject Brad Davis. After the goal, the Metros all but physically left the field showing an uncharacteristic lack of drive or desire. The Metros clearly have some serious voids, but one thing we could always count on in the past is the fact they never gave up. This wasn’t the case on Saturday and hopefully this trend doesn’t continue.