Pure Unadulterated Speculation
posted on 15 December 2006 by cozOne of the persistent rumors/questions around the Fire these days is “will Brian McBride come home to Chicago?” According to Soccer America, however, Chicago sits a lowly 12th in the allocation pecking order, while his former club the Columbus Crew sits in second.
Meanwhile, one of the other big questions in Chicago is “what happens to Zach Thornton?” The longtime Fire goalkeeper lost his starting spot to Matt Pickens over the summer, and it’s not likely the team wants to spend the kind of salary Thornton commands on a backup ‘keeper.
Theoretically, Columbus has five goalies on its roster, but only two of them actually have MLS experience, and the one they recently went out of their way to acquire has none. So would Columbus sacrifice their allocation, and McBride, for a package including Big Zach and maybe some other, younger prospects like Floyd Franks and Logan Pause? Or even Calen Carr? The hardcore fans would shriek at the prospect of losing Carr to gain McBride, but speedy forwards seem to be a dime a dozen in the SuperDraft.
I’m not saying this is in any way likely, and still think that Zach might end up as the goalkeeping coach here in town if one of the many Fire alums coaching domestically were to hire Daryl Shore. But it seems that soccer writers make their living on the hot stove circuit, so I just want to fit in.
Crawling Toward the Mainstream
posted on 6 December 2006 by cozBack during the MLS season, I remember thinking that soccer will have truly arrived in this country when something like Chad Barrett breaking his foot and missing the rest of the regular season shows up on the screen crawl of Comcast Sportsnet Chicago.
So you can imagine my surprise when I saw that ESPN2 reported both the Klinsmann rumor and US Soccer’s denial of it amidst all the college hoops — and, to be fair, Champions League — scores last night. I don’t think it rose to the level of Sportscenter coverage, but it still feels like a step in the right direction. You’ve got to crawl before you can walk? Sorry, too many ways to stretch that metaphor.
Watch the Eurosnobs’ Heads Explode
posted on 4 December 2006 by cozOne of the hallmarks of Eurosnobbery in soccer is that American soccer can’t succeed until MLS adopts the late summer-through-late spring calendar used in many of the European leagues. Except now FIFA president Sepp Blatter has come out recommending that the world come closer to our way of doing things, rather than the other way around.
Of course, Blatter says a lot of things in the press that have very little basis in reality sometimes — like the infamous “women’s soccer should wear sexier uniforms” comment — but I’m really curious to see how this one ripples through BigSoccer, especially since Sepp says this idea is supported by the big European clubs. On the schedule, that is, not the women’s uniforms.
No Figo, and now no Reyna?
posted on 28 November 2006 by cozOkay, so Ives is reporting that Bruce Arena is no longer interested in Figo as one of his two “Designated Players,” and now Fox Soccer is saying that Claudio Reyna isn’t planning to come to MLS in January. So, for all the hype, New York may end up with an injury-prone Ronaldo and that’s it.
Which, of course, means that absolutely nothing has changed for the team formerly known as the Metrostars, but you had to expect that, right?
Playoff Watch Continued
posted on 26 October 2006 by cozLast week I mentioned how soccer journalists tend to pillory the MLS playoff structure, then pick all the higher seeds to win anyway. After finding as many articles as I could, I ended up with a sample universe is 16 writers (I’m combining the ESPN.com guys since they only previewed one conference each) as follows:
Ives Galaracep/Jeff Carlisle (ESPN.com)
Glenn Davis (Houston Chronicle)
Jamie Trecker (Fox Soccer Channel)
Stephen Goff (Washington Post)
Johnnie Whitehead (USA Today)
Adam Hirschfield (USA Today)
Steve Davis (USA Today)
Marc Connolly (USA Today)
Beau Dure (USA Today)
Grant Wahl (SI.com)
Ridge Mahoney (Soccer America)
Brant Parsons (Orlando Sentinel)
Pat Walsh (Goal.com)
Luis Arroyave (Chicago Tribune)
Jeff Bradley (USA Today)
Robert Burns (FoxSports.com)
Below I’ve listed how many of these writers picked the lower seed in each race:
NY Red Bulls: 2 (Arroyave, Bradley)
Chicago Fire: 4 (Steve Davis, Dure, Bradley, Parsons)
Colorado Rapids: 1 (Bradley)
Chivas USA: 2 (Connolly, Wahl)
Now that we’re halfway through each series, everything seems have played out exactly as you would expect given the seedings. Both number one seeds won on the road. Both number three seeds won at home. Every game was decided by one goal, which gives the number one seeds a prohbitive advantage going into the home leg, and gives the number two seeds a very good chance of coming back.
So empirically, the system seems to work, doesn’t it?
Fish With Hands
posted on 22 October 2006 by cozOkay, I struggled for a while with appropriately witty titles. From the looks of it, I couldn’t come up with anything good.
Anyway, I’ve met Fox Soccer Channel announcer Max Bretos. He’s a nice guy. And I’ve said in the past that I never cared for the Ty Keogh model of making every single play into some sort of controversy. Those things being said, Bretos and Christopher Sullivan totally dropped the ball, no pun intended, in their broadcast of Saturday night’s FC Dallas - Colorado Rapids playoff game.
On FC Dallas’ first goal, two Colorado defenders raised their arms to indicate, well, something wrong with Carlos Ruiz’s run toward goal. At first I thought it may have been an inexplicable appeal for offside, except that this was on a throw-in and two of the players were clearly between Ruiz and goalkeeper Joe Cannon. When they showed the replay, it was more obvious, as Ruiz appeared to punch the ball forward with his left hand down around his waist.
Absolutely no mention of this was made at any point of the broadcast, I don’t think. Certainly not at the time of the goal. If you’ve got defenders appealing for something, that should be some sort of indicator that you should pay attention to the replay and see what all the shouting is about. To be so oblivious as to miss this is, to me, downright neglectful of one’s duties as an announcer. They made a bigger deal out of whether or not Abe Thompson was offside on Dallas’ second goal, which screams laziness to me, in that they addressed the obvious one, but when the play didn’t conform to the easiest point of controversy — offside rather than a waist-level handball — they completely missed it.
To be fair, I did skip the halftime highlights, so if they went back and corrected their error, good on them. But if they didn’t, it’s pretty disappointing.
Let The Rookie Win
posted on 22 October 2006 by cozWhen I looked at the lineup sheet for the first leg of the Chicago-New England conference semifinal series on Sunday. I was a little worried. On the one hand, it was the same Fire lineup that beat DC United the previous week. On the other, with the left side covered by Dasan Robinson, Gonzalo Segares and Ivan Guerrero, I was concerned that all three of those guys like to get forward, and that could mean Steve Ralston would be able to find space in behind them.
Less than two minutes in to the match, my fears began to be realized, as Ralston made a penetrating run that was turned aside by Chicago goalkeeper Matt Pickens. Ralston set himself up really high, which forced the Fire to change their shape and almost play with Segares as a fullback, with Robinson sliding into the middle.
Then, in the second half, something changed. As near as I could tell, Revolution coach Steve Nicol thought that Clint Dempsey might be able to exploit rookie Dasan Robinson on defense. Two things are important here. First, he can’t. And second, this forced Ralston back deeper into the midfield, entirely neutralizing the mismatch over Segares that New England had enjoyed in the first half. As a result, New England was unable to find the back of the Fire net — although Pickens also had something to do with that — and Chicago finished the day with a 1-0 victory putting them in the driver’s seat going into the return leg next Saturday.
Nicol, to me, seemed to shoot himself in the foot by buying into the hype that his squad would live and die by Dempsey, and by focusing on his matchups, screwed up the thing that was working the best for the team up to that point.
The Fire will need to solve the Ralston problem in New England in order to advance, but up a goal and having been successful in Gilette this year, that might not be too tall an order.
MLS Playoff Prediction Watch
posted on 20 October 2006 by cozI started a thread over on BigSoccer about this, but it hasn’t really drawn the attention I would like. At least not yet.
Anyway, the premise is this. MLS writers like to talk about parity. They also like to bitch about the playoff system. Except that it seems nearly every single one of them then goes on to pick the higher seed in every first-round series.
If I can find the time and recover some of the previously deleted articles from this week, I’m going to try to compile a list of how many writers actually picked an underdog. So far, I’ve got Glenn Davis, Ives Galatassaraycep, Andrea Canales and Jamie Trecker going four-for-four, and Luis Arroyave going three-for-four, picking the Red Bulls over DC as his lone defection.
I’m sort of fascinated by this right now, so there’s a chance I might actually follow through and do the research.
Let Me Get This Straight
posted on 20 October 2006 by cozFabien Barthez is too “high-profile” for Chelsea, but Gianluigi Buffon is not? If Jose Maurinho said the retired French ‘keeper-slash-Moby lookalike Barthez was, perhaps, too far “up there,” he might not have been talking about profile. He might have been talking about age. Otherwise, I’d be a wee bit offended if I were Buffon.
I’d also have a lot of money and a World Cup championship to my name, but never mind that.
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