Kenny Cooper scored his eighth goal of the MLS season to help New York Red Bull to a 1-0 home victory over Houston Dynamo on Wednesday night.
After somewhat of a scoring (and conceding) spree, the Red Bulls have tightened things up at the back to score their third-straight 1-0 victory which has allowed them to move to second on the Eastern Conference table.
Cooper pounced on a poor backpass from Corey Ashe to deflect Dynamo keeper Tally Hall's attempted clearance into the back of the net and the goal was indicative of the way New York have been playing recently with an undermanned back four of Brandon Barklage, Tyler Ruthven, Markus Holgersson and Connor Lade.
"It is cynical. It's gross. We're not impersonating Barcelona; we're not playing beautiful stuff. But we've got a very limited squad right now. We've gotten nine points from these three games when most people expected we'd get zero.
"That being said, the last two weeks have been the craziest of my life. I never could've dreamed it up that way. I get goose bumps thinking about it. To play in an unbelievable venue like this and grind out results when people are expecting us to get us to get routed is surreal.""We've got to lose that (unheralded) title. We have the same questions every week, that they can't believe we've done it. But we have: We've done it," said Ruthven.
