There are many things in sports that athletes term contagious. Winning and losing, of course. Hitting baseballs. Making free throws. Kicking field goals. Make just one, and they can catch on like wildfire.
You can count scoring goals in soccer among them as well. When you’re not scoring them, it seems as though the drought can last forever. But just one goal can change everything and light up a goal-scorer’s professional life.
Wizards forward Scott Sealy hopes what he started last week is catching. And he hopes it continues when the Wizards play host to the New York Red Bulls at 7 tonight at CommunityAmerica Ballpark.
“They all count,” Sealy, 27, said of the goal he scored in the Wizards’ 1-1 draw at FC Dallas last Friday. “Each one helps.”
Sealy, the Wizards’ talented and proven young striker from Trinidad & Tobago, hasn’t had the 2008 Major League Soccer season he’d hoped for. Another sports contagion — injuries — bit him late last season and continued through the early portion of this season, particularly strains in his leg muscles that forced him to miss training and a couple games.
He appeared to be rounding into shape by the second week of the season and scored the game-winning goal in a 3-2 victory over the Colorado Rapids on April 5.
But then Sealy’s goal-finishing touch, along with the rest of the Wizards, went into a prolonged slump that ended with three consecutive shutouts and four straight games without a goal from a Wizards player.
That ended last Friday in Dallas, however, when, in the 39th minute, Sealy took a pass slotted through by Claudio Lopez, wheeled inside and fired a low shot just inside the right post for his second goal of the season.
“I saw the defender lean in,” Sealy said. “He probably thought I was going to turn out and shoot, so I turned the other way and was able to get free.”
It was the kind of move — back to the goal, wheel and shoot — that helped net Sealy 26 goals in his first three seasons with the Wizards, including a team-high 10 in 2006.
It also helped melt at least some of the frustrations that come with not scoring a goal in nearly three months.
“I don’t think it’s been just myself,” he said. “The team has been struggling to find any rhythm. For a while, the service wasn’t there.
“The last few games, we’ve been creating plenty of chances. Now, I can look in the mirror and say, ‘If I don’t score, I don’t score.’ I’m just concentrating on the fact that, if you get a couple good quality chances every game, I should put at least one away.
“I just want to get consistent and go on a scoring run.”
No one would like to see that more than Wizards coach Curt Onalfo, who said he was glad to see Sealy break back into the scoring column last week.
“It was a good ball in by Lopez,” Onalfo said. “Sealy did a great job of turning and putting the ball in goal.”
Sealy pointed out that the top goal-scorers in MLS all go through prolonged periods of not scoring.
“You look at a guy like (reigning league MVP Luciano) Emilio,” Sealy said. “He scored 20 goals last year. He went something like seven games early this season without scoring. Now, he appears to be scoring again.”
With last Friday’s goal, Sealy hopes to have his dry period behind him.
“I want to score every game,” he said. “I’m very disappointed when I don’t. I know I’m a goal scorer, and that I’m going to score eventually.”