There weren’t many DC United fans at RFK on Saturday. I’m not sure why so many chose to stay away, but they missed a belting game of soccer.

The club has come in for varying levels of criticism for choosing El Salvador as opponents, but as an exercise in shoring up the often difficult relationship between DC United and the Salvadorian community, it was a brave move. From a soccer point of view, I’ll admit that I wasn’t particularly excited at the prospect. A club side playing a national team always strikes me as being something of an anomalous match-up that looks quite amusing on the schedule, but the best thing about ‘Syracuse Salty Dogs versus Papua New Guinea’ is saying it rather than actually attending it.

Yet there was no feeling that somehow the result did not matter, as is normally the case with exhibition matches. Even the marketing department’s inventive powers at creating a bogus incentive like the Capital Cup cannot usually disguise the overall meaningless of such games. On Saturday, both teams wanted to win from the kick-off. And a makeshift DC team played its best soccer of the season.

The biggest crowd of the year so far was made up almost wholly of ‘away’ fans, and the passionate noise they brought to RFK was what made this an occasion worth getting worked up about. It made your skin tingle and your hairs stand on end to be among so many fans who were clearly here for the soccer ahead of the cotton candy.

The roar that greeted El Salvador’s goal was as powerful as the potent free kick that provoked it. The last time I heard cheers like these in RFK was when the Honduran national side was outplaying the US in a World Cup qualifier almost two years ago to the day. The importance of this kind of noise at sporting events cannot be underestimated. It doesn’t come through tannoy-blasted exhortations, ‘rousing’ songs and fake chants. It comes from spontaneous joy at what has just occurred in the game, and is a measure not just of the quality of the skills on show, but of the wonderfully explosive emotions that can be released in a soccer arena.

Not all those emotions are positive, as the booing of Marco Etcheverry at every corner kick demonstrated. Still, this generated an interesting spectacle at each individual corner. How would Etcheverry react? (I was dying for him to blow the fans a kiss.) With commendable coolness, every time, and with the kind of corner kicks he built his name on. I ended up wishing they would come and boo him every week.

For the DC fans who came, there was an added satisfaction in seeing them come back and win the game with ease and style, connected with the perverse delight of being one of the triumphant minority celebrating goals when most around you were sitting in silence, or cursing in disgust. If anyone resented my cheering, I certainly didn’t notice.

In the sobriety of the post-match analysis, few would disagree with Ray Hudson’s comments that DC’s Ronald Cerritos and Eliseo Quintanilla were the best Salvadorian players on the field. El Salvador allowed DC more space than they will ever enjoy in a competitive game, and there didn’t appear to be any outstanding prospects in their line-up aside from, perhaps, its goalkeeper Santos Rivera.

However, even if this match only kick-starts a scoring streak from Earnie Stewart, it will have been worthwhile. It also showcased once more the blossoming skills of Quintanilla, who should, to me at least, have been in the starting line-up since the first Saturday of the season. And the freedom from the pressure to achieve a result at any cost allowed a player like Jose Alegria to show that he can, besides being a defensive midfielder, dribble round opponents and shoot.

For the second time in ten days Alegria hit the woodwork from outside the penalty area (he did the same in the scrimmage against the University of Maryland). It occurs to you that maybe he could try that out in a proper match. And you hope that it occurs to the coaching staff as well.

Saturday also marked the end of the World U17 Youth Championships in Finland. For much of the tournament, the football was free and flowing, and was spiked with back heels, feints, pacy dribbling, and long-range goals of smashing quality. Here was a platform for players to display their flair before the natural desire to express themselves is coached out of them, and the need for team success overrides the joy of executing an overhead kick on the halfway line. Aside from the tight Brazilian defence, it was exhibition football.

The exhibition games for seasoned professionals often show that the flair is still there. Only, it requires a courageous coach to allow his players to bring it out when there are points up for grabs. In the mid-1990s, Eintracht Frankfurt’s coach Charly Koerbel tried to motivate his players to compensate for the absence of the injured Nigerian midfielder Jay Jay Okocha by telling them all before a game to "try a bit of Jay Jay".

I don’t know how many attempted to imitate any part of Okocha’s considerable repertoire of dragbacks and dribbles, because I didn’t see the game. One thing I do know for sure — they lost, and not long afterwards Koerbel was sacked. With one point separating DC, New England and Columbus at the low end of the Eastern Conference, don’t expect to see Alegria bursting forward too often in the final weeks of the season.