Marc Pelosi and Steven Gerrard each left Liverpool for Major League Soccer this summer, albeit on entirely different accounts. Gerrard ended a legendary career as Liverpool captain and joined the LA Galaxy as perhaps MLS’ biggest name player, whereas for Pelosi, an ACL tear cut short his stint with Liverpool’s academy, and the young midfielder joined his hometown team, the San Jose Earthquakes, to reignite his career.

Tonight, Pelosi and Gerrard’s paths happened to cross again as the Galaxy visited San Jose for a meaningful MLS fixture. By chance, the Quakes’ starting central midfield partner with Anibal Godoy, Fatai Alashe, was sidelined with an injury suffered the previous week and Pelosi was thrown into a holding midfield role far more defensive than he is used to. “I’ve trained with him and I’ve played with him in training games all the time, but I got to play against him now and it’s fun. Playing against any world class player like that, you learn a lot from what they do,” Pelosi said of playing against Gerrard, adding that they had a chance to catch up before the game.

Pelosi has definitely inherited some of Gerrard’s tough-tackling style and only Shaun Francis made more tackles than Pelosi tonight. “Playing in the middle you’ve got to be strong and tackle hard…growing up everyone always said I was a little bit aggressive,” said the Bay Area local. “They always get mad at me in training but I say, ‘just deal with it, it’s part of the game.'” And at the end of the game, Pelosi waited outside the Galaxy’s locker room as a team representative carried out a jersey swap with Gerrard.

Today, the Quakes’ dominant midfield rendered Gerrard almost invisible, a large part in defeating the visitors 1-0. Among the swaths of red Liverpool kits congregating high in one corner of Avaya Stadium, there was one woman in a Pelosi kit who must have felt very vindicated by the result. While Gerrard had sixty-four touches and made fifty-two passes, Pelosi had sixty-eight touches and made fifty-eight passes.

“Sometimes we play with one defensive and two attacking [midfielders] and I make a lot of runs going forward, but today Dom talked to me — we were playing with two defensive midfielders, obviously, Anibal and I — and he said to keep it a little bit more simple and not go forward too much. Pick your chances to go forward but just stay in the middle, keep the ball moving and control the game a bit more,” Pelosi summarized.

The Quakes were thus well-suited to blunt the Galaxy’s attack. Victor Bernandez and Clarence Goodson physically dominated Robbie Keane and Giovani dos Santos and Pelosi said that his communication with the center-backs was key in blunting the pair when they dropped into the midfield.

The Galaxy’s midfield presence was nonexistent and from the beginning as the Quakes – Shea Salinas in particular – caused their visitors trouble down the wings. Eleven minutes in, Godoy put Amarikwa in down the left with a lovely chip but nobody was in the middle for the forward to aim a cross at. Unsurprisingly, the Quakes’ opener in the nineteenth minute came from a cross. Marvell Wynne curled a cross from the right smack onto the head of Quincy Amarikwa, whose near-post header was denied by Donovan Ricketts; however, Salinas was first to the rebound to head the ball into the back of the net.

The Quakes’ will to win fifty-fifty balls was among the many nuances that come with the squad’s newfound confidence after a glorious August. Dominic Kinnear’s men won forty-six of duels compared to LA’s thirty-eight; Salinas sprinting back to stop a dangerous Dos Santos counter-attack from a corner; David Bingham’s aerial dominance in his box. When the Quakes were holding their lead late on, Bingham did brilliantly to come out and tip wide Omar Gonzalez’s header destined to be tapped in at the near post.

For Galaxy captain Robbie Keane, however, tonight’s story was all about the referee. In the forty-eighth minute, Amarikwa ran onto Bernardez’s long clearance from an LA corner only for Leonardo, the last man, to drag Amarikwa to the ground. The referee brandished a red card correctly, but Keane wasn’t impressed. “I do have a problem with a referee thinks it’s all about him instead of all about the players,” Keane said. “The referee should never be mentioned in the game. Never. That’s the sign of a good referee: never, ever mentioned in the game…it’s not going to enhance this league. That’s probably the worst performance I think I’ve seen from a referee.”

Keane argued: “The referee asked the linesman ‘Was it a red card?’ He didn’t give the linesman an opportunity to say yes, because of course the referee went like this: *pats shoulder* “fifty-fifty.” Then he went over — I was standing behind him — brandished a red card and pointed at the linesman and said the linesman said it was a red card.”

Cameras confirmed that the referee did point at his linesman but it shouldn’t matter much given that relay confirmed that it was an acceptable decision. That didn’t stop LA coach Bruce Arena from claiming that the referee “ruined the game,” and basically earn the fine that will inevitably come his way from the league. Arena did say, however: “we deserved to lose with the way we played. We did an awful job on the ball.”

Nonetheless, the Quakes thoroughly deserved the three points. The Galaxy were very poor in the first half, at best uninterested, and the Quakes dominated the closing stages when playing with a man advantage. In the last play of the game, Pelosi nonchalantly chipped a pass down the right into the feet of Wynne, who cut the ball inside and played it into substitute Adam Jahn, whose low effort from the edge of the box deflected just wide of the post. Kinnear’s men oozed class and barged right through the classiest team in MLS to end a fantastic run of form in August.