MLS Wrap

Costa Rica used the home field advan­tage of their infa­mous plas­tic pitch to dis­patch a pesky Grenada side 3–0. The Chicago Fire’s Gon­zalo Segaras went ninety min­utes pick­ing up a yel­low card for the Ticos while Shal­rie Jospeh as usual gave a work­man­like per­for­mance for his nation, Grenada. Guatemala strug­gled with St Lucia but pre­vailed even­tu­ally 3–1 win­ning the two leg tie by an aggre­gate score of 9–1 and advanc­ing to the group stage where they will face the win­ners of today’s ties between United States/Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago/Bermuda, and Cuba/Antigua. Mex­ico beat Belize 7–0 last night but again strug­gled with hold­ing the ball and main­tain­ing pos­ses­sion in the first half. But the skill level of the Mex­i­can play­ers can­not be ques­tioned while the skill level of the top Amer­i­can play­ers beyond Lan­don Dono­van is cer­tainly highly debatable.

On to MLS whose qual­ity is still suf­fer­ing from the absence of inter­na­tion­als and the con­di­tion of pitches both those of the plas­tic vari­ety which are always poor and those with grass that aren’t main­tained to a truly pro­fes­sional stan­dard. Add the bak­ing sum­mer heat and you have what amount to some com­pletely unwatch­able foot­ball par­tic­u­larly when MLS matches are being played at the very same time as World Cup qual­i­fiers and Euro matches. It’s not all MLS’ fault, because the early part of the sea­son was not only excit­ing, but pro­vided a qual­ity foot­ball expe­ri­ence that many matches even in Euro­pean leagues fail to provide.

Per­son­ally I feel some of the foot­ball at the Euro Cham­pi­onships has been over rated. Like the World Cup, whose level of foot­ball is vastly over stated thanks to the atmos­phere and drama around matches, at times the Euro­pean Cham­pi­onship lack a com­pelling rea­son to park your­self in front of a TV and watch the matches. Now that has cer­tainly not been true the last three days of knock­out rounds, but even when the foot­ball has been poor it has been vastly supe­rior to any­thing US National Team has pro­duced in years. Again, the fed­er­a­tion con­tin­ues to prop­a­gate to the masses that the national team is bet­ter than ever, from my van­tage point the stan­dard of foot­ball ebbs and flows and while MLS is cer­tainly at one of its high­est points (prior to this last month with some many miss­ing play­ers), the national team is at a point right now which many of us believed it would be far beyond come 2008. In fact, as I will get into some­time in the next few weeks we were in fact promised long ago that US Soc­cer would be far far beyond its cur­rent state approach­ing the 2010 World Cup. The national team even when scor­ing eight goals has become tough to watch with­out your heart in your stom­ach because our play­ers lack the skill on the ball, the pass and go men­tal­ity and the ini­tia­tive I see so many in the CONCACAF region have devel­oped. It is a sad day when I can count more Cana­dian foot­ballers I’d rather start a team with than Amer­i­cans. In fact, it sim­ply may be a case of Dale Mitchell’s approach ver­sus the men­tal­ity here in US Soc­cer but again this is a topic for another time and a topic which I am sure will inspire pas­sion on both sides.

I leave this topic with this very telling state­ment from Soc­cer America’s Paul Gard­ner the dean of Amer­i­can Soc­cer writ­ers in the wake of the dis­as­trous three game slate of friendlies:

Bob Bradley is skilled at pro­duc­ing work­man­like teams. But they play banal soc­cer — if we didn’t know that pre­vi­ously (those of us who suf­fered through his years at the Met­roStars sure as hell did) we do now. Pedes­trian soc­cer rules, and Banal­ity Bob is saved, on occa­sions, only by the flair and bril­liance of Dono­van. As long as Dono­van is around, there is hope of some­thing more reward­ing than Bocanegra’s crunch­ing fouls or Michael Bradley’s late tack­les. The ques­tion that needs answer­ing is why — at this late stage in the Great Amer­i­can Soc­cer Boom — the hopes for skilled, international-level play rest so heav­ily on one player. Is there an obvi­ous replace­ment for Dono­van wait­ing to take over? I don’t know of one — yet there should, by now, be three of four such candidates.

One can hope today’s exper­i­men­tal squad in the sec­ond leg ver­sus Bar­ba­dos can begin to pro­vide us with the cre­ativ­ity and style of foot­ball those of us who have suf­fered with this national team for years now deserve as fans. The lack of a Clau­dio Reyna, John O’Brien, Earnie Stew­art or Tab Ramos in the mid­field is painfully appar­ent every time you watch the US National Team circa 2008. Now back to MLS.

I would label only one per­for­mance of the week, truly out­stand­ing and that was Red Bull’s mid­week draw with New Eng­land, where Juan Car­los Oso­rio used a mid­field dia­mond for­ma­tion and a shift of Dave Van Den Bergh to left back to cre­ate havoc and con­trol the match. Quite hon­estly New York deserved three points and their effort was one of the best I have seen in MLS all sea­son long. Juan Pablo Angel goes in Dave Denholm’s cat­e­gory of “guys the league had caught up to” and quite frankly both games this week showed New York to be more effec­tive with­out Angel than with him. Juan Car­los Oso­rio con­tin­ues to prove what a shrewd tac­ti­cal man­ager he is and once RBNY has a tal­ent level to match most MLS sides they will likely con­tend for honors.

Real Salt Lake con­tin­ues to dis­ap­point me from the eye test but yet they today find them­selves in sec­ond place in the west, which tells all you need to know about the weaker con­fer­ence right now. Kenny Deuchar who has strug­gled since com­ing over from Gretna had a goal last night which this morn­ing I saw cred­ited as an own goal to Jay Heaps. But Deuchar’s supe­rior skill in the air must be cred­ited for RSL’s vic­tory even if the offi­cial score sheet says otherwise.

Chivas and Chicago I will admit put me to sleep on Thurs­day and after a great few days of Euro and South Amer­i­can qual­i­fy­ing action I could not stom­ach the com­bi­na­tion of Chad Barrett’s misses and poor first touches. Around minute sixty I faded for good, but can take from the match the con­tin­ued qual­ity of Sacha Kljes­tan, Ante Razov and Jesse Marsch. Chivas USA is play­ing at high level right now, and the match last week­end against RSL not with­stand­ing, the Goats look poised to chase the West­ern Con­fer­ence crown and could be dan­ger­ous in Superliga.
Toronto FC is my favored side to go deep in the CONCACAF Cham­pi­ons League, the only MLS side I fancy in the com­pe­ti­tion. How­ever, the Reds were using too many tired legs from inter­na­tion­als thanks to MLS’ pecu­liar sched­ul­ing prac­tices and looked flat against a bad Kansas City team. FC Dal­las looks like the same poor team they have been since late April, and they are now on their third coach of the season.

Sigi Schmid has the Crew once again pointed in the right direc­tion. Colum­bus should have beat LA at the Home Depot Cen­ter save one very odd moment. The dive David Beck­ham took in the box to draw a penalty, was just that moment. Maybe I’m show­ing my cul­tural bias here, but gen­er­ally Eng­lish play­ers are bet­ter sports­man than to just flop like Becks did last night. Eng­lish foot­ball gets crit­i­cized in these parts for lack of tech­nique ‚skill and flair but one thing I feel the Eng­lish still do bet­ter than any­one is play the game hon­estly and with­out try­ing to “put one over” on the offi­cials. Steve Ger­rard is a notable excep­tion to this men­tal­ity, but can you blame him when he has been sur­rounded by so many for­eign play­ers at Liv­er­pool. I’m not try­ing to insult any cul­tural sen­si­tiv­i­ties here, but I just never expected such a bla­tant dive from the for­mer cap­tain of the Three Lions.

The match itself was out­stand­ing but the dive ruins the whole thing for me. It was so bla­tant and to me once again so totally unex­pected. Lan­don Dono­van dives a great deal and so does Car­los Ruiz. Those are the Galaxy play­ers I expect to see pull a stunt like this and I’ll again show my cul­tural bias or appre­ci­a­tion depend­ing on your per­spec­tive in say­ing I tol­er­ate div­ing to some extent from cer­tain indi­vid­u­als and not oth­ers. While this sounds like out­right hypocrisy, the game is played and taught dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent cor­ners of the globe.

MLS in April and May was out­stand­ing. MLS in June has been close to dread­ful. What will July yield? Hope­fully a return to the qual­ity of the early part of the sea­son, but the sum­mer heat and gen­eral fix­ture con­ges­tion makes it a dif­fi­cult proposition.