Montreal with huge tie vs Club America at Azteca for CONCACAF Champions League final

Well, the hed pretty much says it all.  The Impact scored early in the first half and then held on to the lead for the remainder until, in the 89th minute Mexican international Oribe Peralta headed in a corner to tie it up.  Based on CONCACAF's away rules, this gives the Impact the advantage going into the return leg in Montreal as a scoreless game will result in an Impact win, away goals being weighted slightly more than home goals.

In any case, here's the official MLS recap.  For a good laugh, the comments section deserves a quick skim; there are some very angry and delusional Club America fans.  The USMNT U23's 3:0 spanking of Mexico last night cannot have helped the matter.  

What's the Matter with the Timbers? Orlando City SC 2:0 Portland Timbers

One might easily be forgiven for assuming that, after last week's sound and convincing drubbing of erstwhile Western Conference table leaders FC Dallas, the Portland Timbers would have seen Orlando City SC, an expansion side after all, as an easy mark at home, and would accordingly have taken to the pitch with a great deal of hunger together with a marked determination to earn another resounding victory.

Unfortunately, one would be mistaken in so doing.  In fact, by all accounts, for reasons that are not readily apparent --we will speculate on them a bit further down-- the Timbers did the opposite, and aside from Darlington Nagbe and a handful of isolated instances in other players, the Timbers seem to have not shown up to play at all.

But maybe that's not right either; while they did look quite poorly for much of the first half, the Timbers didn't look completely impotent and in fact, to the contrary, managed several decent looks at goal in spite of their apparent lack of passion.  During the second half they looked a bit more lively and did dominate possession, but again, there was no real heart in their performance and it was badly marred by stupid mistakes, chippy play and a general lack of execution in the final third of the field.   

One idea might be that the horrific and completely arbitrary refereeing threw the boys off so that they didn't know which foot to stand on.  While it's true that referee Kevin Stott, whatever his antecedents may be, proved himself deeply incompetent and, perhaps even worse, totally inconsistent, one has to think that by the time players reach this level of play, they will have encountered any number of terrible refs and accordingly ought to be capable of handling the situation.  For their part, the Lions certainly were, even if it is arguably the case that they got the better of the abysmal officiating.

As for Stott, I think we can all agree that he has no business at this level of play, South African antecedents or no, and that he really ought to stick to teaching math to middle-school kids.

Another possibility is that the Timbers were, sad to say, a bit star-struck at the prospect of playing against Kaka', a man who must have figured as a childhood idol to much of the roster, but if this is what happened, it's a new development since in past years they have shown no signs at all of being star-struck by the presence of players such as Thierry Henry or David Beckham, both of whom are easily Kaka's equal in terms of international stature.

Complicating the matter is the fact that with the exception of a specific central midfielder who will remain unnamed for the shame that's in it, no single Timber played that poorly and what really bit them in the ass is that none of them played very well either, with the exception of Darlington Nagbe who continues to redeem himself from last year's lackluster showing.

A final possibility (aside from the idea of alien intervention, lizard people and the like) is that the Timbers, while competent, just don't really have their shit 100 percent together in the absence of Diego Valeri and team captain Will Johnson and that in consequence, when faced with wildly inconsistent officiating, they kind of lost their heads and gave away the first half; and while they were able to pull it together for a better showing in the second, it was still rather uninspired play.  (This last leaving aside the evident fact that for whatever reason, former Timbers and current Lions goalkeeper Donovan Rickets appeared deeply motivated and managed two improbable saves in the second half: does Rickets have hard feelings toward Portland?  I couldn't say, but he certainly played as though he had something to prove.)

Anyhow, the whole thing amounted to a pretty disgraceful performance.  I don't claim to have the answers, the above are merely guesses.                   

Frank Deford is an Asshole; Why even the Elitists at NPR are wrong about MLS

Actually, in all fairness, I have zero evidence that Frank Deford --longtime Sports Illustrated stalwart and NPR contributor-- is in fact an asshole and for all I know he's just a regular friendly dude who happened to badly strike out --pardon the baseball metaphor-- in his recent NPR screed on MLS. 

But here's the thing; Deford is supposed to be a sort of "elder statesman" of sports journalism, he's dignified with a regular spot on NPR --a demographic not necessarily known as a bastion of sports fandom-- where he regularly portrays himself as possessing sage-like insight into what's really going on in the world of professional sports.

And maybe he does possess such insight.  I don't know.  What I do know is that like so many of his colleagues, he is deeply ignorant where soccer is concerned, and far from tackling the subject of MLS with anything like penetrating insight, what he did in the above piece is to trot out virtually every tired old platitude about why nobody cares about MLS that we've all been hearing for the past 20 years.

The magisterial Deford holds forth at a library in Connecticut.  Photo; Wiki commons.

First, he treats us to the old canard about how Latino fans are somehow going to save MLS from irrelevancy by raising it to new heights of popularity.  Whether he is completely oblivious to the fact that this is a model that was abandoned back in the 1990's, or he is simply ignoring it, the fact remains; MLS has recognized for at least a decade that Latinos in the US don't give a shit (or at least not in numbers that matter) about MLS because time-zones being virtually the same in North vs South and Central America, there's no reason for them not to continue to follow their home teams, which is what they overwhelmingly tend to do.  

Did Frank not get the memo that in recent years cities like Montreal, Portland and Vancouver (none of them especially well-known for having large Hispanic populations) got new MLS franchises while Chivas USA, the poster child for MLS's efforts to appeal to Latinos, was driven from the ranks as the unclean abomination it basically was?     

In critical thinking, Frank, we call that a "straw man" argument.

Next, Frank moves on to the idea that soccer can never become mainstream in the US because it's not American and Americans really only like things that are American.  Right.  Go America!  I don't know whether to laugh or be offended.  Maybe I'll do both.  Frank, you are showing your age good buddy.  While there are plenty of Americans who, as you suggest, are insular, clannish and ridiculously patriotic, I would argue that most of us, or at least half of us, aren't, and that whatever the root of soccer's popularity issues in the US may be, they are not, as you and the legions of meat-head internet warriors would have us believe, related to the fact that soccer isn't American. 

Frank's next point (and I think this is probably his strongest, though it says something for the quality of his arguments since it's still quite weak) is that European league play is widely available on US TVs and that it enjoys much higher ratings than MLS and that therefore, I guess, MLS can never hope to catch up.  However, he says this immediately after stating that MLS has an average attendance of 19k per game, completely glossing over the fact that watching a game of "footy" with your pretentious asshole roommate who studied in Sheffield for a term, is completely different from watching a live match at a real stadium with thousands of other passionate fans.  

Maybe Frank has never actually been to a live MLS match?  (If I had the means, I would cordially invite him here to Portland for the full and proper experience, but alas, I do not.)  This is the impression I get.  Either way, surely he understands that there is a visceral difference between supporting some hypothetical team on the other side of the world --with which you have no real connection-- and actually going to your home stadium and cheering live with thousands of others.  Whatever the attractions of the big European leagues may be --and no one can deny that they attract by far the best talent in the world-- they can never compete with the experience of being at a live match.

Frank wraps it up by invoking USMNT coach Klinsmann's recommendation that top US players should play in Europe, as if this is somehow a final nail in the coffin of his condemnation, never mind the fact that the same could easily be said of players from Brazil, Argentina or whatever other non-European powerhouse country one may choose to name.  

So let me get this straight Frank, your argument is that because top Brazilian players will probably develop into even better players in the European leagues, as I think everyone acknowledges, Brazil will therefore never have an international presence in soccer?  

Do you not see how stupid this makes you look?  

As others have pointed out, your problem, Frank, is that you are old and are no longer looking in the right direction.         

        

Thorns get New Kit

In an item of potential Portlandish interest, the Portland Thorns rolled out their new kits yesterday.  Stumptown Footy has a pretty good piece on the subject and even though I have yet to attract any readers, I encourage their ghostly and hypothetical counterparts to head on over there for some Thorns love.