As Charleston celebrates, a Dynamo player tries futilely to keep his head from exploding.
I was going to write something about this today but the leprechauns over at the Belfast Telegraph beat me to it.
"Amid all the Hollywood hysteria that attends his presentation at the Home Depot Center tomorrow, consider this - almost 3,000 miles away, on a Virginia student campus, the same players he hopes to inspire were beaten 1-0 by the Richmond Kickers, before a crowd of less than 5,000."
You can read the entire, typically brutal & British piece here . I wasn't thinking so much about Beckham per se but the glare that he's brought to the league right now; With 3 MLS clubs (Houston, DC United, and LA) getting ousted from Open Cup play by USL sides, what does that say about the quality of the leagues? For the USL this is one of the best things that could happen to them, aside from signing Ronaldinho's secret love child . For MLS, what does it say when the mighty D.C. United is bested by a Harrisburg…a USL 2 team? Or that the defending champion Houston Dynamo got handed a shit sandwich from Charleston? I'm not trying to hate, I'm just saying that these are the the things that don't need to happen if MLS is to lose the perception that it is a "Mickey Mouse league" (and I won't even broach the topic of football lines in New York, New England and KC for nationally televised games).
Also of note is the fact that Richmond played LA at home and drew less than 5K. Sure Beckham isn't with the team yet but this is A) an MLS side that has seen their name in print more in the past 6 months than it has in the past 6 years, and B) still counts the likes of Landon Donovan, Cobi Jones and Abel Xavier amongst it's ranks. Most USL 1 sides can bring that many people in for a league game…shouldn't His Ginger Majesty's "Superclub" outdo that easily?
4 comments:
what pisses me off is when say Man U or Arsenal goes down to the likes of stoke thumpingon-on-thmes in the worthington (worthless) cup, no one calls the EPL a 'mickey-mouse league'. yes technically this is our FA cup, but no one takes it seriously here, and DC had I believe 2 starters playing, and no superstars. The press will make it sound like 5k is an average attendance, or that that's our home stadium. What is should be noting is that div-2 teams here pull 5k, which is better than div-2 does over there.
Oh well, how's England doing in the under 20 world cup?
I actually agree with the original post. What's happening in the Open Cup grows from a number of things, most of them tied to MLS's too small rosters and the resultant over-working of their players. They need bigger rosters, or more likely, better pay for the rosters they've got so the depth on their benches has something better to offer. And it helps the smaller teams by making those wins look like taller accomplishments.
This has nothing to do with the quality of MLS rosters. This has everything to do with the fact all three of those MLS teams that lost qualified for Superliga, which pays its champion $1 million, while the U.S. Open Cup pays its champion a mere $100,000.
L.A., D.C. and Houston didn't want to bother with a tournament that nobody watches and pays only 1/10th as much, so they threw the U.S. Open Cup games to concentrate on richer tournaments. If the Open Cup winner made $1M, that wouldn't have happened.
Somebody read Bill Urban this week.
http://www.ussoccerplayers.com/exclusives/index.html?article_id=522
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