Week 7 Notes

• Columbus Crew stadium isn’t Wembley, but from where I sit it looks like a beautiful place to watch football. It was rainy in Columbus today, and the team is in a slump (to put it as kindly as possible), but the box score says 16,000 people were at the match. Is that accurate? They were celebrating the fifth anniversary of the opening of CCS, but on television, it looked pretty thin. 16,000 is more than Colorado and Dallas pulled in combined last week, by the way.

• Let me just promise right now: if Oklahoma City gets a franchise, Gary England will have to tell me a tornado is hovering over the stadium in a holding pattern, shooting out brimstone-laden thunderbolts from the midst of the vortex, before I’ll miss a game. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor gloom of night will keep my obsessive/compulsive butt from the stands.

• Kudos to Eric Wynalda. During ESPN2’s broadcast of the CLB/NE match, he was heavily critical of an offside call which cost the Revs a goal. But upon further review he realized he was wrong and said so. And did it without an ounce of irony or self-serving bravado. Classy. I wasn’t wild about the Stone/Wynalda team in the beginning, but I think they’re growing as time goes on. Or, at least, they’re growing on me. Your mileage may vary.

• Last week I made a snarky comment about the Crew’s tie with DC not being a sign that their season was turning around. This week they pull off an efficient, if not beautiful, 1-0 defeat of New England. In the spirit of Eric Wynalda, let me say that perhaps I was wrong. Jon Busch, by the way, played brilliantly.

• I am so very confused. With all the Freddy-mania going on, how can DC/KC not be on television? I’m not saying I want ESPN to show DC United every Saturday for the entire season; far from it. But you’d think a local station in either Kansas City or DC would have it covered, and by extension so would DirectKick (which to be honest, is all I care about).

• The previous observation is made even more annoying by the fact that Eskandarian and Adu are playing together tonight, which doesn’t often happen; they usually are each other’s substitute. For the record, yes, I’m listening to an internet feed of the radio broadcast of the match. And, yes, I desperately need to get a life, thanks for asking. I’m also watching DAL/SJ on DirectKick and watching CHI/NY via the Yahoo video feed. What of it?

• I don’t know what the deal is with ugly soccer balls, but it’s a disturbing trend and let me go on record here and now in saying I DO NOT APPROVE. The current MLS match ball is horrid. It belongs in the big wire bouncy-ball rack at Toys-R-Us. I saw highlights of a match the other day where they were playing with a silver soccer ball. Silver, I kid you not. Part of the appeal of this game is undeniably its inherent aesthetic qualities. Goofy looking soccer balls, just like players wearing white soccer shoes, are an eyesore, and detract from this aesthetic appeal. It’d be like taking a Sharpie pen and drawing a goatee on the Mona Lisa. Ugly and unthinkable.

• The guy on DC United who isn’t making half-a-mil a year is again carrying the offensive load for the team; Jaime Moreno scores the only goal in a 1-0 win over Kansas City Wizards.

• Überkeeper Henry Ring may have given up a goal this week against Metrostars, but he also robbed Amado Guevara in the 3rd minute of second half stoppage time to keep the draw in hand. If this guy’s not an All-Star this year, they oughta quit having an All-Star game. I’m forming a conspiracy theory in which the league is forcing Ring to give up a goal now and then to conceal his extraterrestrial heritage. Clearly he’s a keeper from another planet.

• Landon Donavan is makin’ the big bucks because he can score, but there are not too many forwards in this league who pass the ball as well as he does.

• Cobi Jones made like Jet Li and nearly decapitated Joe Cannon with a flying high kick. No yellow card was issued. Hmm. But the soccer gods had their revenge on the ensuing corner when Chris Albright’s shot, instead of going in the goal, bounced off the post and straight into Cannon’s hands. Heh heh.

• If you were watching LA/COL and wondered why Jean-Philippe Peguero showed his t-shirt to the crowd after scoring, the shirt had John Spencer’s name and number on it. Spencer, the Rapids captain, didn’t make the trip to LA because of injury. Class act by Peguero.

• Peguero scored because of a wonderful assist by Chris Henderson, who is the Pete Rose of American soccer. By that I mean he hustles more than any other player in MLS, not that he bets on the matches from the locker room.