An American Story

What hap­pens when you link up the great­est Amer­i­can coach with the great­est Amer­i­can player in the great­est Amer­i­can matchup? A hat trick of course! The renewed part­ner­ship of Bruce Arena of Lan­don Dono­van so suc­cess­ful for the US National Team until Ger­many 2006 paid div­i­dends for the LA Galaxy last night in the biggest matchup Major League Soc­cer has. I’m sorry MLS snobs but I just can­not get excited about Kansas City play­ing Toronto or New Eng­land play­ing Col­orado. MLS as we’ve dis­cussed for some weeks on this site is  for the most part at this stage of the sea­son thor­oughly unwatch­able although I have often times forced myself to abject tor­ture in order to report for this site and the show.

But some­thing is always dif­fer­ent about when DC United meets the Galaxy. It has a feel­ing a his­tory which the man­u­fac­tured atmos­pheres of other MLS games can never match. These are after all the two teams that have made this league and quite frankly in leaner times kept this league in busi­ness. It’s MLS’ ver­sion of the Celtics– Lak­ers and when 11 PM ET rolled around, chan­nel surf­ing between Col­lege Foot­ball, other MLS games and the news stopped: it was time for Galaxy and United.

I’m con­stantly reminded what a night­mare MLS has been for one David Beck­ham when he shows off his leg­endary tem­per in front of offi­cials. In addi­tion, the red and black are so beat up now last night was hardly a con­test: but the atmos­phere was great and Lan­don Dono­van whose con­fi­dence has been sapped by Bob Bradley’s neg­a­tive tac­tics with the US National Team has been restored to right­ful place with yesterday’s dis­play. A nice per­for­mance for Alan Gor­dan as well and you have a play­off con­tendor from a team that did not win a game in three months. Only in America!

(Speak­ing of Play­offs check back tomor­row morn­ing for a full wrap on the USL-1 reg­u­lar sea­son finale and an early play­off preview)