TNFtermath: Dallas has traded Abe Thompson for allocation money to the Wizards. It's as if Kansas City hasn't given up on the season, but Dallas and Colorado have. This is no time to be giving away warm bodies.

NAFTA SUPERHIGHWAY CUP
Guest previewer Ivan:

[quote]This weekend, Toronto FC will be without 9 players from a possible 28 man roster due to international duty, and others are missing for injury and other reasons. Toronto FC explored whether it would be possible to reschedule because of the competitive impact on their team. We fully understand that sentiment. But if we were to reschedule this game, which has been on the calendar all season, it would cause an avalanche of questions from other clubs. As just one example, shouldn’t the League also have considered rescheduling a recent match when Toronto’s opponent this weekend, Chivas USA, had 11 senior roster players injured? One can quickly see that is a slippery slope....click here to read more...

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I realize I contradict Shaka Hislop at my peril, but I still think there are more similarities between Ruud Gullit and John Carver than there are differences. (Apart from the two bank accounts, where I imagine Coach Carver wishes there were tens of millions of fewer differences.)

The major similarity?

April: "Well, this is a weird league, but hell, I've forgotten more about football than these picklemilkers could learn in twelve lifetimes, so I'll be fine."
May: "Yeah, see? How hard can it be."
August: "glerp"

Gullit had Take This Job and Shove It money, and Carver doesn't*, and Carver takes a good deal more pride in his coaching, but Gullit drove his team straight into a cliff, and Carver has TFC's playoff hopes flatlining.

It's actually very tempting to sympathize with Carver missing a bunch of players for callups, except (a) the game's been on the schedule for more than a couple of minutes, (b) his players by and large aren't rookies on their national teams, (c)...click here to read more...

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Well, the day we've all been looking forward to has finally arrived.

Today, the entire football world is traveling to Trinidad & Tobago to pay homage to Austin Jack Warner.

Tonight in Sepp Blatter Hall, the largest room in the Joao Havelange Center of Excellence, Sepp Blatter, Joao Havelange and everyone else from Michael Platini to Pele to - well, to anybody who's anybody - will break bread together at the T & T Football Federation Centennial Dinner.

Of course English FA chairman Lord David Trieman will be there, serving penance for his "insulting" Warner by not attending the England-T&T match this Spring.

Anybody want to lay odds on where Sunil Gulati will be eating tonight?

(Presumably not in attendance will be the head of the Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland FA's which Warner has been trying for 20 years to have abolished, thus making more room for Grenada, Antigua and St. Kitts, apparently)

The main topic of the evening's speeches will of course be what a great human being,...click here to read more...

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So we got to the airport in Miami at 6am this morning. We met our "contact" who supplied us with our tickets and tourist visas.

Which of course, we paid $50/each for. For those of you coming in late, our $70/ea. Journalist visas had not arrived at the time we were leaving.

I'm not sure that we really should have been issued "tourist" visas. Wade and I are two gringos with no family on the island. But it's a means to an end.



We went through the gate and both got the dreaded red bins through security. Which, in Miami, means you get the pat down and thorough bag check.

The AmericanEagle (!) turboprop hop to Havana was short and uneventful.

Oddly, our "gate checked" bags were not returned plane side.

We made it through immigration with our tourist visas. Our bags took a very long time to appear, but we met the tourist company and took and absolutely fascinating 20km trip to the Hotel.

Cuba is like some sort...click here to read more...

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Well, except every Western Conference game is crucial at this point, and in a just world the East would have seven playoff spots and the West one. So this game shouldn't matter, but, lamentably, does.

On the bright side - these teams despise each other. They've met in the playoffs so many times (although they almost certainly won't this year), had too many close games, and had the Dallas goalkeeper cheap-shot too many Rapids defenders. So Hunter Freeman, Jovan Kirovski and Kyle Beckerman are gone? I doubt that will matter to the fans at Pizza the Hutt. Especially when they can give Cory Gibbs a hero's welcome in his return to Frisco. Did he ever play in Frisco? I can't be bothered to check. Maybe it was in the Cotton Bowl or Dragon Stadium or whatever.

The Rapids are making a valiant attempt to save their season - new coach, new rules, Christian Gomez coming off the bench, Herculez Gomez sent packing. There's no reason to give up hope, though, if you believe the MLSnet preview:

[quote]The...click here to read more...

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If you're looking for a silver lining to the public thrashing Joe Public laid on the New England revolution - you're looking in the wrong place.

Shaka Hislop passes along some depressing information/salt-in-the-wound in HIS GUARDIAN COLUMN today.

Amidst his overall trashing of MLS, he points out that Joe Public, a team even younger than the Revs (and MLS), currently stands sixth in the T&T professional league, has a losing record in said league and carries a wage bill of around US$200,000, which is less than one-tenth of the MLS per-team salary cap.

And since that amount covers a 20 player roster, that means that the average JPFC player salary is - well, you do the math.


It should be noted though that Hislop had a somewhat less lucid column a week ago, wherein he COMPARED THE CAREERS AND FATES...click here to read more...

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Full crowd again and get ready to see interesting results this week as World Cup qualifiers will have teams dipping into their reserves...

Goal.com (Kyle McCarthy)
Fox Soccer (Keith Costigan)
ESPN.com
Blue Blooded Journo
AYL Soccer
Fullback Files
MLS Elo Ratings (Ryan Anderson)
[url="http://sidelineviews.blogspot.com/2008/09/labor-day-barbecue-rankings-sept-1.html"][color=#810081]Sideline...click here to read more...

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Things were a little thrown off with Labor Day weekend, but here are some notable standouts over the past weekend that you might otherwise not have heard of...

FRANCESCO VALIANI (MF - Bologna)


Bologna shocked AC Milan with a 2-1 win all thanks to this bald fellow's 79th minute strike. The 27 year old Italian midfielder has worked his way up the totem pole to Serie A from his hometown club Pistoiese in Serie C to Serie B with Rimini, a rise one can attribute to his work ethic and undeniable aggression on the field. In the January transfer window of this past season Valiani was transferred to a Serie A promotion candidate in Bologna. His presence in the midfield led the promotion push and Bologna finished 2nd in Serie B as the Rossoblu revisited Serie A once again. To sum him up, here's a snippet from the pre-AC Milan press conference on 8/29/08...

[i]"The game in Milan will...click here to read more...

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Frank Marcos, Tim Holt and the rest of the USL hierarchy can certainly be forgiven for walking around looking a little smug these days.

Meanwhile, over at MLS HQ, they can be forgiven if DC United's US Open Cup win last night elicited something closer to a gigantic sigh of relief rather than a champagne-popping victory celebration.

(And admit it: you were rooting for the Battery; nothing against The District, but how heartless do you have to be not to pull for the little guy?)

All-in-all it's been a great year for whatever MLS-USL1 "rivalry" there may be.

Not only did Charleston make the USOC Finals (after an All USL1 semifinal match) but unlike their supposedly "higher level" brethren, the two USL1 teams involved in the CONCACAF Champions League are still playing while the two MLS teams that have participated thus far have been dumped on their asses.

Joe Public's blowout of the Revolution was an eye-opener, but the really startling result was the Montreal Impact bouncing Real Estelí...click here to read more...

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Well, I'm in Miami. Theoretically I'll be in Havana tomorrow in time for lunch.



I'll believe it when I'm sitting on the veranda at the Hotel Nacional enjoying a nice glass of rum and a cigar.

For years I've desperately hoped against hope that the draw in CONCACAF World Cup Qualifying would create this game. Hey, I'm a journalist. How cool would it be to actually get to go to Cuba - legally!!!

Even knowing that this is likely the equivalent of going to East Berlin in 1988.

Well, the last two months of red tape hell has worn the shine off of that romantic notion.

In early July, Wade Jackson and I basically had to scan in our passports, credentials, and other documents proving that we 1) exist and 2) are journalists and send them to the Cuban Interest Section (they don't rate an actual Embassy or Consulate) in Washington.

At the same time we started working with a charter company in Miami that specializes...click here to read more...

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Josh owns Open Cup coverage. Read that to get yourself situated. You'll get this kind of tidbit few other places:

MLSnet actually plays up the inter-league aspect - has it been ten years since the Rhinos won the Cup? And has it really been that long since any USL team made it to the Final? I suppose it has. Feels like Seattle made it a couple of times, but nope. I'm a little surprised that MLSnet is taking this tack, but they need to get some league pride after last night's (totally...click here to read more...

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That sound you hear this morning is Jack Warner's phone ringing off the hook with calls from MLS coaches and GM's desperate to have Gregory Richardson fill a spot on their roster.

In case you were otherwise occupied last night, Mr. Richardson - nicknamed, for some unexplained reason, "Jackie Chan" singlehandedly took the Revolution apart at the seams last night, completing the Revs unceremonious crash and burn out of the CONCACAF Champions League.

It's absolutely true that Steve Nicol's side was woefully shorthanded. It's also true that shorthanded, longhanded or octopus-handed, the Revs simply had no answer for Richardson's speed or touch. Asking jay Heaps to try and cover the guy was like asking Rosie O'Donnel to take on Michael Phelps in the 100m fly.

Here, in case you were inexplicably participating in some form of normal life last night, is Mr. Richardson's evening:

In the 17th minute, he introduced himself to Mr. Reis:

(Youtube is killing me here; the clips have been up for...click here to read more...

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It occurs to me that maybe I've been approaching this blogging thing all wrong, going long once a week, when going short makes so much more sense. But that's another issue for another day...

...this issue for today is, HOLY CRAP! A bunch of guys from Trinidad and Tobago just ran off with the wallets and testicles of the New England Revolution's starting eleven!! I'll admit it: I turned this one off after Joe Public's second; things didn't look likely to improve and, sure enough, two more goals came and, I suppose, that's when the wallets got lifted. Or the testicles...does it matter when things get that ugly?

After shutting off the DVR (hello, 21st century...it was late coming in some parts), I tuned in Chivas USA v. Tauro FC...quite sadly, after Jonathan Bornstein's sending off...which led, probably directly,...click here to read more...

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Boy, sometimes doing the minimum of research pays off handsomely. I was all set with a "But you see, Michael Orozco PLAYED against a Cuba team just this year" defense, and then a little voice told me to make sure.

So you might as well have called up Tiffany whatshername with the bikini.

Still, I do approve of calling in Orojozco. He's taken heat for Olympic disappointment that needs to be spread out much more evenly, up to and including guys who took stupid yellows thinking they would miss a meaningless third game...all of whom were also called in for Cuba, or will be recalled to the Yaks at some point. While I agree that You Should Never Throw An Elbow, and while it was indeed a more violent swipe than what Khano Smith gave to David Beckham on Saturday, we've all seen that sort of maneuver let off with a warning, or totally ignored.

The US isn't so deep that we can toss Orozco overboard on the basis of one play....click here to read more...

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...there was one hell of a shopping spree last night, courtesy of the wonderfully endless pockets of the city of Manchester. The Citizens, backed by their new investment group the Abu-Dhabi United Group (ADUG, didn't this all happen way too fast?), went out and broke the EPL transfer record to pick up Robinho. Al-Fahim's intentions? To be the next Roman Abrahamovich. Citeh also overshadowed - and it's been a while - the Red Devils as Fergie got what he wanted, but had to pay a pretty penny for it. Dimitar Berbatov now has his chance to show his stuff in Red and United were keen to fork over $70 million for a guy with 4-5 good years left. Regardless of the price tag, I almost agree with Tottenham boss Juande Ramos on this one, why - if the season starts August 16th, do the clubs get 2 weeks on top of the full 6 weeks they've just had to purchase more players? I am all for last...click here to read more...

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