2011 Player Rating and Review - Tyrone Marshall

This offseason, the Burgundy Wave staff will give short reviews on the play of all Colorado Rapids players who received a decent amount of time on the pitch during the season along with a season grade. Starting with Goalkeepers and then moving up the field as necessary from defenders to forwards, today we'll feature Tyrone Marshall.

Name: Tyrone Marshall
Number: 34
Appearances: 27 (24)
Stats: Over 2100 minutes played, 1 Assist

It's hard to fault Tyrone Marshall for having what wound up being a fairly mediocre season when we look back at it. After all, he wasn't brought in to play 2177 minutes of football at 36 years of age. When Colorado picked up the former Seattle Sounders defender in last year's re-entry draft, it was so he could effectively replace Julien Baudet as Colorado's 'big central defender off the bench'. He looked to fit the bill quite well - more talented than Scott Palguta with plenty of footballing experience to give the rest of the defense confidence with him in it, along with some speed and size.

The problem is, Julien Baudet played a role that only required 4 starts and 14 total appearances all season long in 2010. That was a year that wasn't plagued with injuries, this year was plagued with injuries to an unfortunate degree. With the Rapids depth at an all time low, Tyrone Marshall was forced to start 24 games on the season as Drew Moor was forced to go to the left side, Marvell Wynne was stuck on the right or some combination of the two. Even worse for the old man's body, early in the season it became clear that the Moor-Wynne-Marshall-Kimura back line was the only one that was winning games for the squad as the ranks in front of them fell to injury. That forced even more starts out of the guy.

Honestly, Marshall for the vast majority of the season wasn't half bad. His defense was a bit too physical, sure, but he kept his tackles clean enough to get the ball out of harms way and played the big man in the middle role about as well as we could expect. His speed was nothing special but it was good enough, what we expected from our first man off the bench. Slowly as the season wore on, the wear and tear of 20+ games began to show slowly but surely on the 36 year old.

It was the very end of the season where the overplaying of Marshall finally hit the Rapids the hardest. The playoff match against Sporting Kansas City where he was both red carded and handed SKC a free penalty kick has to go down as one of his worst career moments. It was a moment that stemmed unfortunately from his speed being completely gone and a requirement on overly physical play to compensate, something that seemed to be slowly sneaking up on him the longer the season went along.

I still think that Marshall has another year of decent football in him as a depth player after seeing his decent play at the beginning of this year. It's absolutely crucial though that the team builds their depth to the point where Marshall is playing no more than 20 appearances in a season, ideally less than 15 of those being starts. Any more than that and the now 37 year old Marshall may once again be the easy breakthrough point for an opposing team when the Rapids need it least.

PLAYER RATING: 6