Excited by the MLS Cup rematch? Don’t Be.

Tonight on ESPN 2 at 9pm ET the two time defend­ing cham­pion Hous­ton Dynamo will face the three time defend­ing runners-up the New Eng­land Rev­o­lu­tion. Sounds mouth­wa­ter­ing, right? Wrong!

The fol­low­ing key play­ers are miss­ing thanks to World Cup qualifiers:

HOUSTON:

Brian Ching (USA)

Dwayne DeRossario (Canada)

Pat Onstad (Canada)

NEW ENGLAND:

Shal­rie Joseph (Greneda)

Khano Smith (Bermuda)

Kenny Mansally (Gambia)

and of course some play­ers like Tay­lor Twell­man have not been called into the their national team (in his case the USA) due to injury.

MLS insis­tence on play­ing right through CONCACAF’s World Cup qual­i­fiers and in some cases accel­er­at­ing the sched­ule of teams par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Superliga makes this match cer­tainly worth miss­ing. This match would have been one of the sig­na­ture events of the sea­son but now instead will resem­ble a meet­ing of two ham­strung USL-2 sides. Major League Soc­cer may have made strides in qual­ity over the past few sea­sons but the league is not yet strong enough to give a pre­sentable prod­uct when so many key play­ers are missing.