The Soccer Thread (Version 8)

Good for Dax.

 

They've got some issues. I am (was) quite excited about MNUFC joining MLS because it would give me a team to follow since I moved to the state that would not require me to change allegiances from the Michigan teams (and the Packers) I grew up following. Watching the first two games has been rather painful, though there was about a 10-minute stretch there in Portland where I thought they might equalize before giving up the third and two in injury time. The whole enterprise has been thrown together rather quickly (they weren't confirmed to be joining MLS until last August) and on the cheap, unlike Atlanta on both counts. Listening to Twellman think aloud about how bad they were for a half-hour on Sunday was rather painful, but he's not wrong. I think they thought they'd be able to get away with some Quad-A talent for a while and be mediocre-bad on a budget for two years (the Chicago Fire plan!), move into the new stadium in 2019 and start spending, but right now they're not even close. To make things even more fun, they're down to one healthy goalie for this weekend at New England after Alvboge got spiked late.

It's embarrassing, but I don't think they even knew what they had and didn't have at the beginning of the season (some of Heath's squad selections have been criticized). If we get into May and they're still shipping goals by the bunches, they'll probably at least tighten things down over the summer so they can lose more 2-0 games instead of 6-1. They've managed to score in both games, which is something. They're an expansion team, and though the trend in modern sports is toward making those more competitive out of the gate, I've never rooted for one of those before so I can kind of talk myself down from the ledge on that. They drew 35,000 for a game outdoors in several inches of snow, so there's interest. At least everyone got to see the orange ball?

 

Schweinsteiger to the Chicago Fire. He was mediocre at best for Man United and he looked like he was carrying an extra 15 pounds around.

I don't see this ending well -- I can't see him keeping up with the speed of the league or playing 90 minutes in the summer months.

 

A 10:55 Eastern kickoff isn't exactly a great way to build a crowd for tonight's game. I guess you might get people turning over from hoops after UCLA v. Kentucky, but I think that they should have tried for an earlier start.

 

Damn, I love the way Christian Pulisic plays. And not just because he's a Hershey kid. Finally, a true "10" in the U.S.

 

They also had the hall of fame ceremony for Brandi Chastain tonight, which might explain the late ET start. That and wanting to avoid rush hour traffic in the Bay area.

 

He's so much better than this game, it's ridiculous.

 

Sooooooo, Bruce Arena gets the interim tag removed?

 

I believe he was bona fide from the get-go.

We had a whopper of an evening on the desk (nothing like 2/3 of the sports cover going into OT) so I didn't get to follow this one as closely as I would have liked, but damn. Honduras isn't fantastic but they've made the last two World Cups, and the US lit them up. Won't be all the way out of the hole yet until the Panama game next week but that game went a long way toward answering if November was more about the schedule (vs. Mexico, at Costa Rica is two of your three roughest Hex games right off the bat) than the state of the program. There isn't a country on the planet that wouldn't want Pulisic right now and he's 18 fucking years old.

 

I am so excited about Pulisic, I can't even stand it. We now actually have a world class type player. The US has never had a field player you could say that about.

I feel like someone who has had to take the bus to get around for thirty years, and now being handed the keys to a brand new, fully loaded Mercedes.

 

Christian Pulisic is the USMNT’s biggest star and his age doesn’t matter

 

I would put Dempsey — in his prime — a notch below, but a world class player in his own right. First Yank to score a hat trick in the EPL.