Galaxy Using Absentee Ballot

What Major League Soccer is staging at the Rose Bowl tonight amounts to basically this: What’s left of the Galaxy versus what left from the Galaxy.

On one side will be Sigi Schmid, whose coaching skills will be tested as he sends out a starting lineup not featuring Cobi Jones, Robin Fraser or Greg Vanney.

It will feature Luis Hernandez, but as 22,472 people pointed out with their feet last week, so what?

On the other side will be Juan Carlos Osorio, whose coaching skills also will be tested because he is an assistant, taking charge of the New York/New Jersey MetroStars for the game only because Coach Octavio Zambrano is suspended.

Osorio will send out a lineup that will be quite familiar to local fans, featuring no fewer than four former Galaxy players: Clint Mathis, Roy Myers, Mark Semioli and Daniel Hernandez.

It would have featured a fifth, defender Steve Jolley, but Jolley was red-carded for his involvement in the same brawl last weekend that saw Zambrano banished.

The MetroStars’ coach claims that the $500 fine and one-game suspension imposed on him by MLS is a bum rap, that all he was trying to do was break up the melee involving the MetroStars and Chicago Fire.

“Obviously, I’m disappointed because I was looking forward to going back to Los Angeles and also because it’s a very important match for us,” Zambrano told the North Jersey Herald-News. “The ruling was surprising, but I know what happened. I think all the persons involved know what happened.”

Zambrano said video footage that the league’s disciplinary committee failed to view clearly shows him being struck by Fire assistant coach Denis Hamlett, who was not punished.

Hamlett, after first denying that he had hit Zambrano, later said it was accidental. Either way, the league might have seen the Fire’s 4-1 loss as punishment enough.

Zambrano, the Galaxy’s coach before Schmid, will make the trip to Pasadena regardless and will view the match from a Rose Bowl suite.

It promises to be intriguing, as the Galaxy tries to make up for the absences of Jones and Vanney, who will play for the U.S. national team earlier in the day against South Africa in the U.S. Cup, and Fraser, who would have been with them but is injured.

“It’s been kind of a pesky ankle injury that really has taken its time coming around,” Fraser said. “While there is a remote possibility [of him playing against the MetroStars], I highly doubt it, which is unfortunate.

“We haven’t been playing that well in recent weeks and we’re looking to get back on track.”

As for the MetroStars, the motivation will be obvious as Mathis and Myers try to show that they were too good to be lost in the trade that brought Hernandez to Los Angeles.

The whole point of that transaction was to put fans in seats. But after 40,303 showed up to see the Mexican striker’s debut on May 20, only 17,831 made the journey a week later. That’s a drop of 22,472, a drop the Galaxy can ill afford.

Still, the team leads the league in attendance at 21,867 per game, but not in goals scored.

Hernandez is supposed to do something about that too, but the questions tonight are, who can get him the ball and who can take defenders away from him?

It’s up to Schmid to identify them and up to the players to prove him correct.

Soccer Notes

The defending-champion U.S. women’s team was put in the same first-round group with China, Norway and Nigeria during today’s draw for the Olympic soccer tournaments. The U.S. men’s team was drawn into Group C with the Czech Republic, Cameroon and Kuwait. . . . The U.S. women routed Canada, 9-1, in the Pacific Cup at Sydney, Australia, rebounding from an opening loss to China. Tiffeny Milbrett and Cindy Parlow scored three goals apiece, and Lorrie Fair added two in a two-minute span early in the second half.

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The Associated Press contributed to this story.