Happy enough with a 0-0, and a second half to build on

Nil-nil against FC Dallas, and neither side can really complain about it. They had a couple of genuinely good chances and the rest of it was scrappy. We were more consistently in on goal and more consistently threatening than they were, but we couldn't create a single thing you'd call clear cut. I was in the stadium for this one, and a nil-nil never felt unfair.

Vanney started in a 4-3-3 with Reus through the middle and Paintsil and Robert Taylor wide. The opening was niggly and full of aerial clashes, and there was an early Paintsil mistake that Marcinkowski had to come and rescue. Dallas had the better of it for the first half hour or so, then around 38 minutes it turned and the rest of the half was ours. They finished it with sixteen shots to our six and only two on target, which is a lot of shooting and not much aiming.

Vanney switched to a 4-2-3-1 for the second half. Paintsil went up top, Reus playing off him as a 10, Taylor left and Sanabria right. We looked better going forward immediately, especially down the left. It did come at the cost of a little more defensive fragility, but it was the right move. Paintsil beat his man around 58 minutes and made a chance for himself, then we had a few other decent pieces of build-up play which made for a dominant period of the game for Galaxy. Dallas went from sixteen shots in the first half to two in the second. We had twelve, eleven of them from inside the box, and 61% of the ball.

The interesting part isn't what the switch did on the night. It's that it points at the shape I think we need going forward, with Kyogo in the side so he and Reus can play together.

For all that second-half control we didn't score, and it isn't that we couldn't get into the right areas. Fourteen of our eighteen shots came from inside the box. We got into good positions all night and then kept taking the wrong option once we were there. Plenty of attempts, and barely a good one among them.

Jonathan Sirois had a fair bit to do with it too. Nine saves, and he was comfortably the best player on the pitch. Some of that is a keeper having the night of his life and some of it is us hitting him.

There was a VAR check on a Dallas penalty in the second half. From the stands it was a heart-in-mouth moment, the kind where you can already see the dropped points arriving right on schedule. I still haven't seen the replay. I was worried.

Reus was world class, and his work rate for a man his age genuinely impressed me. Delicate short passes, a cut above anyone else out there, which given who he is is about what it ought to be. He was also on his own for long stretches with a gaping hole behind him back to the midfield three, and he was visibly annoyed about it by the half hour.

Haak was exactly what you want from a defensive midfielder. Solid decisions, ball retention in tight spots, a force in the middle of the park. Marcinkowski made four saves without having to be spectacular for any of them, and Glesnes and Yoshida put in two last-ditch tackles right on half time that stopped us going in behind.

Sanabria was dogged all night. That Arturo Vidal energy, high intensity and hard tackling, with a touch of class and a goal threat on top of it. I'm high on him right now. The numbers don't pick him out, but this is an eye-test call and I'm backing it.

Paintsil is the one who'll be annoyed. He was in on goal with one man to beat just after the hour and got the ball tangled up in his feet. The decisions and the touches let him down at exactly the moments they mattered.

Musa ended up as Dallas's lowest-rated starter, which isn't how any of us expected that to go. We went into this worried about him specifically and he had plenty of the ball in dangerous areas, but it never landed.

He came on for Taylor just after the hour and he wasn't great. One shot, wrong side of the post. But he was promising, and the promise wasn't in anything you could measure.

He looked hungry. High energy, eager to please, with an appetite to run that is exactly what you want from a new signing. He had a go almost immediately, then a proper chance around 76 after a brilliant Reus run opened the space for him, and he put that one outside the post as well. Maybe no left foot.

What actually stood out was the kind of striker he is. He was constantly looking to run in behind, sitting on the shoulder of the centre-backs, attacking the channels. I haven't seen a Galaxy forward do that since Joveljić. Nascimento and Klauss were both happier taking it with their back to goal and playing someone else in, and Kyogo was relentless. This is total hopium and I know it, but on that evidence I'm high on his future here.

He also looked like he isn't fully fit. Very sharp early, then blowing by 89. And he was our only substitution until the third minute of stoppage time, which tells you plenty about how thin this bench still is.

A decent night, and about as happy as you can be with a 0-0.

Let's not lie to ourselves though: this isn't enough to get us to the places. It's a performance to build on and it suggests that with a couple more players we could make a run at the playoffs, but we're running out of time to add them.

If the DP does get announced this week, and my understanding is that it might, I'll be feeling decidedly more optimistic about the run-in than I was after San Jose, and certainly than I was after St Louis.