Enjoyable Soccer That I Did Not Watch

On the whole it seemed like a fairly good weekend for Spurs and United, which meant, of course, that a perfect storm of outside forces and channel choice keep me from watching either. Setanta and Direct Kick continue to be my mortal enemies. On the other hand, I had a good day watching the Final Four and the goalless part of NY-Columbus and Chivas-RSL, the latter being mostly good for annoying other people at the bar who wanted to turn to "a real sport." The real sport turned out to be arena football, and the irony was lost on many.

I did manage to see the highlights of DC United's apparently deceptive 4-1 ass-kicking of Toronto. All of them were essentially garbage goals, which is a little worrisome when viewed out of context. But then again there were four of them, and every one featured a whole lot of black running around the six yard box, so that's progress of a kind. But the general tenor of post-game commentary was not terribly positive, and the MLS highlight package included more quality chances from a lousy 10-man team than you'd think permissible. I remain unconvinced, and I guess we'll see whether or not the progress is real come Wednesday.

As for Spurs, I saw not even highlights, but a 1-1 draw on the road against a good team seems to be about as much as you could ask for these days. Even over the Spurs BigSoccer boards, the apathy was fairly widely-acknowledged and the first "Rate the Season" threads have already sprung up. It's post-mortem time, and no lousy actual games can get in the way of uninformed speculation about next season

Game Review: Pachuca 2 - 0 DC United

Yesterday's CONCACAF game was deja vu to any Spurs fan who suffered through the loss to Newcastle on Sunday. Both games started with a promising, engeretic flurry for the good guys, but then slowly descended lower and lower into near-complete impotence. Every United botched pass, dribble into traffic, or sorry giveaway recalled the disaster at White Hart Lane to perfection. Only if DC had been wearing road whites could the flashback have been more complete.

So yes, that was an immensely frustrating game. Not in the sense that the team has been completely abject, but in the more needling way that every flaw the current roster was intended to fix seems to have gone untouched. For a team supposedly renovated around crisp passing, there was almost none of that at Pachuca. Dribbling into several defenders, or a giveaway, seemed to be the standard procedure in the rare moments United ventured over the halfway line. Fred had another energetic and mostly positive game, but it's seeming that for all his danger, he may never discover what the outside of the field is there for. And even at the back, where performance has been largely as advertised, there was Martinez's gaping error on the second goal. All of it combined for twenty decent minutes and then a neverending cycle of goal kick/giveaway-oncoming rush-blown Pachuca chance-set piece-repeat. 2-0 was a miracle given the shape of the game after the half.

(Interlude: I will not blame Zach Wells for playing the high-percentage shot on the first goal. He got beat by a ludicrous goal, and that's that. Otherwise, I thought he had a solid game and deserved more than the 4 he got from Goff. Though, if trends continue, we will need to have a serious discussion about his distribution sometime next month.)

There are definitely excuses to be made about the altitude, but I would have found them more convincing had the same sloppiness not been evident from many players even in the first minutes. The guy I'm really thinking of here is Emilio, who is a shadow of himself right now. Really the only difference between him and Niell at present is the memory of last year. Otherwise, they had similar nights of frenzied but generally pointless running and forklift-like first touch. Gallardo was also iffy, going all over the place but still delivering more good intentions than good balls for the forwards.

It is still very early in the season, and the team is a work in progress, but to fail so meekly is still a little maddening. This team was built with CONCACAF in mind, lest we forget. And with each passing game, we inch closer the dividing line between "they haven't had time to gel" and "something is just wrong here." That line may be a lot closer if they can't summon a large amount of fight at RFK.

MOTM - Yeah, right. Honorable mention to Fred, but that's it.

In Case Anyone Wanders By

Seattle Speaks: A Case for the Sounders

I broke my long hibernation over at Pitch Invasion to write the aforelinked (is that a word?) piece on Seattle MLS' name-the-team vote.

The take-away message: if you haven't already, go here and write-in "Seattle Sounders." Voting is open until tomorrow night, Monday the 31st.

Can I Admit the Following?

1. I just didn't care about last night's DC game. That is, of course, much easier to say the day before rather than the day of, when you still find yourself going to ridiculous lengths to watch the game and then fuming over score updates when you fail at the former. Such is the force of habit. But really, I care about CONCACAF right now, not our tradition season-opening loss. We will, however, leave last night's implications for said important game alone for now. There's only so much you can take in one weekend. And speaking of which...

2. I am having heretical thoughts about Juande Ramos. Already. Like, has he really done anything for the winning mentality of the players, who put up a very nice Potemkin village of resistance today? Or, has he been some lucky swings away from an Avram Grant-like substitution record instead of a tactical genius? I can't tell. Certainly he didn't put out the first team today, and it showed in spades (Michael Dawson, that will be quite enough, thanks). But it's now been two awful, embarassing home defeats since the Carling Cup, and it makes you wonder if he has in fact done those Jose-like magic tricks with the mental toughness and heart of the team. It didn't look like it today.

US Soccer, brought to you by Bic

Nothing kills your appetite for the last fifteen minutes of a game like knowing they're scoreless and probably fairly ugly, so I bowed out of the US-Poland replay right after Eddie Lewis' fantastic free kick goal. Someday we'll score from the run of play again, but apparently we also don't need to, so hey, what the hell. A collection of random thoughts from the game:

• 3-0 was definitely more than we deserved. Not unfair, but not wholly accurate.
  
• Nice game from our defenders/forwards, especially from Cherundolo and Heath Pearce, who were defending well and getting forward effectively. This was especially nice seeing as Clint Dempsey was on sabbatical for this game.
  
• Bradley was kind of "eh" today. Not bad, certainly productive but Clark seemed more effective and took an aggressive role whereas Bradley kind of hung back. On the other hand, he was zipping some nice passes around and showing off what Dutch coaching has done for his touch.
  
• Forwards? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Which leads me to:
  
• Can we buy a large quantity of bubble wrap in which to place Jozy Altidore until, say, mid-2009?
  
• Finally, it's not that the new uniforms look bad. In fact, Nike is putting together a nice little streak of surprising me with shirts that look nowhere near as goofy in person as they do on ussoccerstore.com. But that blackish-greyish color is just...unnecessary. What's wrong with a blue or red shirt? Do we really needed to be reminded of nothing so much as mechanical pencils during our away games? Leave the crazy off-colors for club soccer.
  

Canadians Are People, Too

MLS is Canada's top-tier soccer league, but you wouldn't know it from looking at Canada's U-23 roster (scroll down to find it). Of the 20 players they brought to qualifiers, only two (Tyler Hemming and Andrea Lombardo) are MLS players, both members of Toronto. But there are also two American U-23's playing for TFC alone without bringing in the rest of the MLS players on the U.S. team, who make up the vast majority of the roster.

All of this is by way of saying that Canadian players are being screwed by the international players rule in much the same way that young Americans are being screwed by the salary cap and developmental contracts. No team wants to waste an international player spot on a developing Canadian, just as few young Americans want to choose the low MLS entry wages, meaning young talent from both countries is being choked off from the league. The salary cap situation can't be realistically fixed for some time, but it's easy enough to declare that since MLS is an American and Canadian top-tier league, both countries' players count as domestic signings. It won't happen, but Canadians, especially college players like Jakovic and O'Brien White for whom MLS is the next logical step, deserve a greater chance in the league than just Toronto.

The Joys of Live Text Update

Manic mouse clicking is possibly the worst way to "watch" a game of soccer, but let it never be said that the Live Text Updates page doesn't have a weirdly satisfying drama about it. Click refresh, wait anxiously for the page to cycle while holding your breath, and then live or die with the boring one-line summary of the latest play. No build up or sense of flow, just repeated dice-rolling and mild anxiety.

And even when it looks bad, you still have the devoid-of-any-negative-knowledge chance that your next click might read: "GOAL!! Tottenham 4 - 4 Chelsea."

Well done, boys.