Daily Soccer Fix

Last entry for Daily Soccer Fix

2012-01-18T19:34:09Z

Sometimes in my life as a professional freelancer, I get stretched in so many different directions that I must stop and take account of my sundry platforms and obligations. So, let’s see:

Sports Illustrated.com (SI.com) … I’m on it.

For MLSSoccer.com, a weekly tactics piece … Check.

Soccer Today, my weekly radio show / podcast along with NBA scribe and Manchester City diehard Mark Stein … Double check.

Various, non-soccer contracts with publishing houses for soul-stealing corporate, fluffy-wuffy content … Uh, yeah.

Blogging at Daily Soccer Fix …

Hello … Daily Soccer Fix … are you there …?

Alas, the answer today will be different than tomorrow.

Yes, this will be the final entry for Daily Soccer Fix, the little blog I started in 2008.

I launched the blog to bind all my various media properties, kind of a clearing house for the other work I did, and as a means to otherwise empty the notebook, to say about domestic soccer whatever I couldn't on other outlets.

Sports Blog Nation absorbed the blog in 2009 as part of a deal to help them build out their soccer empire. Dave Clark and his excellent Sounder At Heart blog was my first recruit. If I had quit that day, his blog by itself would have made my time at SBN as "soccer league manager" a stunning success.

I brought a few other bloggers on board before passing along the managerial car keys, while retaining the blog (but not the recruiting duties). From there, I penned entries as often as possible.

Now … well, it’s time to move on. I’ll keep writing for other outlets. Meanwhile, I need the extra minutes and hours to explore some other opportunities out there (some in soccer writing, some not), and to make some headway on a (soccer-related) book I hope to write.

Thanks for reading. My biggest regret, honestly, is relinquishing the interaction with all the awesome, regular commenters. It’s so great to read wonderful opinions and to get dialogue going with sharp folks who love the game and have smart, reasonable thoughts to share. You know who you are … and I thank you.

Cheers, all.

Steve

A word to the ninnies who favor the term "Camp Cupcake:"

2012-01-17T16:13:06Z

Something has always flummoxed me in sports. It’s the propensity of lesser informed fans and a few media blowhards to stand on high, reeking of tough-minded and righteous superiority, and label some professional athletes as "soft."

This is especially bothersome in American football. To call a professional football player (or college athlete, for that matter) "soft" is the very height of bird-brained nincompoopery. As my friend and former colleague Jean-Jacques Taylor (now at ESPN) used to say, "I’ve never met a professional football player who is soft, because they don’t exist."

If you’ve ever stood on the sideline of an NFL game, the brutal brew of speed and violence is nothing short of jaw-dropping. If you were to stand 40 yards from somebody, then both run as fast as you can to collide head-first, with as much violence and aggression as you could possibly muster, you’d have some inkling of what happens on every single play of NFL contests. You would, that is, after waking up in the hospital and completing a full debriefing from the assembly of surgeons and medical officials charged with putting you back together.

Repeat after me: there are no soft football players. Some players certainly are more comfortable with contact, and are better prepared from a physiological standpoint to deal with the violent contact. But since we’re all human, fallen and imperfect, we sometimes take shortcuts. And rather than saying all that, we fall back on clichés and banalities … such as this misguided chestnut about players being "soft."

How does this affect soccer? Glad you asked.

I keep seeing references to Camp Cupcake, a pejorative term referencing the U.S. national team’s ongoing camp in Carson, Calif. It’s a relatively new term, and I’d love to know who launched it. My guess: someone who knows their cupcakes. In other words, someone who couldn’t run a lap around their own house without stopping once or twice for a cool cup of water. And if they did manage to complete the small task, they would certainly reward themselves with a sugar- and butter-filled cupcake!

I honestly don’t see the point in using terms of derision to diminish what’s going on with Klinsmann’s camp. Yes, these are "B" team players, but this is a valuable exercise as Klinsmann attempts to build depth and more thoroughly cultivate the ideas and concepts he wants to integrate throughout all tiers of the personnel pool.

And let me say this: No journalist who has actually seen a soccer practice at this level has any excuse for using such a pejorative term. If they’ve seen a practice and still don’t understand how silly and misleading such a derogatory term is here, they should have their little media maker card stripped immediately and be forced to sit in a small room with a video loop of Edward R. Murrow preaching the tenets of proper reporting.

Here’s the deal: If you take away the full-speed collisions in soccer, take away the crunching tackles, take away the fact that professionals are heading and smacking a ball that is inflated to a level that makes it harder than any ball most weekend soccer players have ever dared to deal with … even if you take all that way, there’s still the conditioning issue. I can sum it up in two words: brutally tough.

It’s anything but soft. Conditioning at a professional level would make most of us pass out straight away. Subjected to the (more rigorous still) demands of conditioning exercises at the international level, most of us would vomit, pass out and then die. More or less in that order.

Seriously, to watch these guys go through the conditioning paces, to see the most supremely fit humans among us pushed even beyond their own extended comfort zones, working through the stress and the pain, is to understand the bottom line here: even if the best of the best in the U.S. player pool is elsewhere, these practices are no cupcake.

Big choices ahead: where to stage U.S. World Cup qualifiers

2012-01-16T15:56:56Z

Difficult as this might be to swallow, one of the next big stories coming out of U.S. Soccer won’t have anything to do with Jurgen Klinsmann.

I know, I know … it’s all about Klinsi right now. Heck, I’ve written as much.

But this lies right around the bend in U.S. Soccer newsiness: the critical selection of venues for World Cup qualifiers.

The math has changed on this one, kids.

As we know, things move fast in the development of our game domestically. Nothing has been more important over the last 10 years than facility development in the professional game. As I wrote last week in another post, just 10 years ago this country had one – just one! – facility built specifically for Major League Soccer. Now there are 14. (In that total, I am counting facilities in Portland, Vancouver and Montreal, where major renovations were done expressly for MLS clubs.)

Previously, any facility built for MLS could count on reaping appropriate rewards: an MLS All-Star game, an MLS Cup final, a U.S. national team match or some combo thereof.

It’s not as simple now. It's just math (with more stadiums competing for roughly the same number of marquee events), plus the way some things are evovling. For instance, the 2012 MLS Cup final might have gone to one of the showy new parks, Livestrong Sporting Park, or possibly to Red Bull Arena, weather issues notwithstanding. Houston’s new facility or possibly even PPL Park in Philadelphia might be in the cue for that carrot on the facility-development stick. But a procedural adjustment now says Major League’s Soccer's top MLS Cup finalist will host the final, a change I have long advocated. So, there’s one less "biggie" to hand out.

The point is: competition is fiercer than ever for available gems. Not everyone will get a cherry on their parfait. And that makes World Cup qualifiers quite important. Read on for more whys and wherefores (and for where I’d like to see the qualifiers assigned).

The United States national team, assuming the Klinsi clan safely navigates semifinal World Cup qualifying stage, will host a total of eight qualifiers.

There are 11 Major League Soccer-specific facilities within U.S. borders. One has artificial turf, so toss it from the mix. (Yes, yes, I know that Portland once hosted a massive U.S. qualifier, back in 1997. I was there, it was among one of my top soccer experiences ever. But I’ve been told that temporary grass fields layered over arty turf are not an option for qualifiers. It’s still an option for friendlies, but no chances will be taken for qualifiers.)

So that leaves 10. Now you add other viable cities that have hosted qualifiers over the last four cycles. So we factor in Birmingham, Palo Alto, Washington, D.C., and Nashville.

There you have it. I count 14 before adding any potential wild cards. (I took away a couple of cities that did host qualifiers during that time, but are no longer viable, such as Gillette Stadium due to the artificial turf issue, and Richmond due to the lack of a suitable venue.)

So by my count, that’s 14 spots (at least) vying for eight potential dates. Other factors will be considered, of course, such as regional demographics and the connected ability to create true "home" crowds. But the raw numbers say this: there are big choices ahead in terms of picking winners and losers in the qualifier facility sweepstakes.

Where would I love to see the qualifiers? Here are my top five choices.

1. Livestrong Sporting Park: The best U.S. soccer park out there, one that already carries a proven ability to fill the place at the drop of a hat trick.

2. Red Bull Arena: Another great park, and it’s in the Big Apple. Enough said.

3. Columbus Crew Stadium: I love this place for its historical importance in U.S. qualifying efforts. Yes, it’s been lapped many times now in the "bells and whistles" department by newer facilities. But I still say it’s a fantastic place to make Mexico come play in winter months, if the schedule falls that way.

4. PPL Park: Same as above in terms of bringing Mexico, Central American or Caribbean sides in colder months. Plus, if fans in Philly can’t make visitors just a little uncomfortable, nobody can.

5. Rio Tinto Stadium: The smaller market helps make these qualifiers bigger events. You just can’t duplicate that feeling in bigger markets, where the game is swallowed up by everything else going on. That means something to the players and coaches, as Bruce Arena told us a few years ago during one tense, important qualifier in Salt Lake City.

Soccer on TV, Arlo White, and the splendid one-man broadcast booth

2012-01-13T16:44:25Z

Arlo White now has his boots in the booth for NBC Sports Networks, and his successor behind the microphone for Seattle Sounders FC has been revealed.

I’m sure Ross Fletcher will do a bang-up job, and I’m truly intrigued to observe how Kasey Keller makes the transition from player to TV analyst, especially considering he’s in the starting blocks at one of Major League Soccer’s more important and higher profile regional broadcast positions.

But I can’t help thinking the larger soccer broadcasting scene just went the wrong way. Not because Seattle hired the wrong personnel to replace (the somewhat irreplaceable) Arlo White. Rather, because they hired two men to replace one.

I’m not just blowing wind up White’s trousers here, although I do believe he does a wonderful job. And I'm sure he'll crush it at NBC. Rather, I’m talking about how much I loved White as a solo act in the booth.

Finding the right chemistry between a play-by-play voice and an analyst is such tricky math in soccer – and almost nobody in our country gets it right.

It’s really about the history of traditional American sports, in my opinion, and the wildly different pace compared to soccer. The two-man booth in other American sports made perfect sense because its history was rooted in football and baseball. What do you have in those sports? Down time. Lots and lots of down time.

So the play-by-play voice absolutely did need a helping hand, a complement for better booth balance. And the back-and-fourth could be conducted at a relatively smooth, conversational pace.

But soccer’s pace is so very different, with constant action that really doesn’t jibe with the two-man system, not the way it’s built in the United States, at any rate. So we get this rattle-prattle effect, with two men in the booth scatter shooting in a conversation that too frequently takes the focus away from the on-field action. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t go on about it.

Yes, it can has been done correctly. Mostly, however, the two-man booth becomes a distracting rattle-trap.

So the original (and bold) broadcast choices in the Sound were important, I thought. White was a one-man band who almost always nailed the right notes. Through efficiency of words and smart descriptive outlay, he provided the perfect blend of self-contained action-reaction. He showed that one man, well-prepped and well-chosen, could handle the job with a smart aplomb.

So I had this hope that more MLS clubs might follow. Alas, maybe we’re just not there yet.

Marc Stein and I had White on Soccer Today our weekly radio show/podcast last week. Click forward to hear what the former Sounders broadcaster had to say when I asked him about this matter. Not surprisingly, his answer was thoughtful and insightful.

First, we reached White in England, where he was part of the "Blue Army," en route to see his beloved Leicester City. The day was blustery, wet and generally miserable, and yet White couldn’t have been more excited about it, talking up the rare chance to buy his own ticket, to occupy the stands with his fellow Leicester fans and maybe even "shout at the referee every now and again," something he certainly avoids on the job. It was a pleasure (And a real hoot!) speaking to White. Only regret: that we didn’t roll tape on our 10 minutes of the off-air chit-chat and let everyone hear that, too.

You really should check out the entire interview from Soccer Today. (By the way, we’ve got U.S. international and Sporting Kansas City striker Teal Bunbury lined up for tomorrow, along with FC Dallas coach Schellas Hyndman. Getting top guests is our calling card on the show, so check it out. Here’s the link.)

As for White, here was his terrific answer about working a one-man booth for the Sounders:

"It’s Interesting because I have the experience of both, I suppose, at the BBC before I joined Seattle. When they told me that’s the route they wanted to go down, I was frankly a little concerned, and they had to persuade me a one-man both was away to go. Once the decision was made, I was happy to go along with it and I had confidence in myself that I would be able to pull it off. So it worked. Now, whether that’s the model for everybody I’m not entirely sure.

"The times in my career in Seattle when I found that having someone to bounce off would have nice, it was the big decisions, the big, controversial moments. Was that a hand ball? Was it not a hand ball? Was that a foul? Was it not a foul? Ninety-five person of the time I was loving every second of it. But just every now and then, it would have been nice to look over at somebody and say, "What did you think?"

"Because it’s not necessarily the play-by-play man’s job to come down on one side or the other. So you find yourself coming out with sentences like, "Well, I’ve seen it given," when it comes to hand balls, whether it was deliberate or not? Then you kind of lurch into clichés sometimes, which is something I don’t like to do.

"So, 95 percent of the time, absolutely fine. I loved it. Every now and then, would been nice to talk to someone.

"Now, whether that person is next to you all the time, chirping in all the time, I’m not entirely sure I would have liked that either. So there is a happy medium to be struck here. … There is medium in between letting the play-by-play man describe the action and the color man come in at pertinent moments and not just talking all the time. And I think that’s a situation I think we will achieve this year on NBC."

So there you have it from the man himself.

I’d still like for more clubs to try a one-man booth – but I suppose we’re just not quite there yet.

Previewing the 2012 MLS SuperDraft

2012-01-11T16:50:32Z

ALSO FILE UNDER: This thing might just go away in 5 or 6 years

As player acquisition tools evolve in Major League Soccer, January’s annual SuperDraft seems destined to shrink in relevance. Even this year the process already is shrinking, literally, reduced to just two rounds. That’s down from four rounds just two years ago.

The reduction in rounds is partially because more teams are participating now, 19 this go-round as expansion Montreal joins for Major League Soccer’s 17^th campaign. Just six years ago, only 12 teams were choosing from the litter.

But the diminishing draft is also about process evolution. Rosters now are increasingly stocked with signings from the teams’ youth academies. And clubs are filling more holes through the recently created re-entry draft (for players out-of-contract or those whose options have been declined by their current teams). And that’s not to mention the recently expanded Designated Player options. Why take a college kid, after all, when you can go pluck Robbie Keane from the English Premier League?

Check out my Mock Draft at SI.com. Yes, I'm just guessing, right along with all the other mock draft guessers. But let's not allow that to spoil the mock draft fun!

But the draft (it’s the "MLS SuperDraft" officially) still has its place. And based on last year’s proceedings, the top 6-8 players selected can have an immediate impact, either as a consistent starter or as one of the first names called off the bench.

It all goes down Thursday from the Kansas City, where Montreal, Vancouver, New England and Toronto (in that order) have the first four picks. (ESPN2, noon ET)

"This is still important tool," Chicago Fire coach Frank Klopas told me by phone earlier this week from Fort Lauderdale, where the annual MLS player combine was wrapping up. "Maybe two or three years down the road, as more teams get the opportunity to develop and sign more home-grown talent, maybe you’ll see more players getting signed that way. But for now, this is still important."

MLS commissioner Don Garber hasn’t minced words about it either, calling the draft and its place in things an "evolutionary process." Sure, seven of the Galaxy’s 11 starters during the successful MLS Cup final in November came originally from the draft. But it’s changing, and the commissioner hopes in 10-20 years that most roster spots will be filled through the teams’ developmental academies.

"In the early days of the league, almost every player came out of college or was an international star," Garber told MLSSoccer.com while in Florida. "Today there is really a nice mix of players that are coming out of the college ranks, they’re coming out of the Generation adidas program, they’re coming as youth internationals and all of those signings have an impact on what the draft looks like. But the draft is still an important part of our league’s structure.

For expansion Montreal, director of soccer operations Matt Jordan has shown little desire to trade out of that top spot, despite plenty of apparent interest (perhaps from clubs testing the new guys, hoping they might be hooked by something appetizing). Barring something unforeseen – and last-minute, draft-day trades do frequently happen – they’ll probably take University of Akron striker Darren Mattocks.

But it’s no slam dunk. Duke's Andrew Wenger, the ACC Defensive Player of the Year in 2009 and 2010 and a U.S. Olympic candidate, is the other consensus top pick. Wenger may be this year’s Perry Kitchen; the versatile Blue Devil looks like professional stock already, one who can play center back or right back, but who may end up as a holding midfielder. That’s just what everybody said last year of Kitchen, whose rookie year at D.C. United was a highlight around RFK in 2010.

Theirs is always the possibility of a curve ball. In this case, his name could be Chandler Hoffman, a UCLA striker whose instincts and timing around goal are drawing comparisons to Mexican international and Manchester United striker Javier "Chicharito" Hernandez. High praise indeed. No one would be too shocked to see Hoffman go ahead of Mattocks or Wenger, not after Vancouver stunned the room last year, defying convention and consensus and taking a flier on project-striker Omar Salgado. (The jury is still way out on that one.)

Andrew Jean-Baptiste, a big beast of a center back from UConn and Kelyn Rowe, a technical gifted creator from UCLA, are other likely top picks. And like Hoffman, South Florida’s Dom Dwyer also performed well at the combine, so he may have moved up on some lists over the last few days.

Others may have seen their stock drop while in Fort Lauderdale. But Klopas says the wise coaches, GMs and technical directors won’t read too much into a couple of bad days, where fitness or system unfamiliarity can gum up the works for some individuals.

"Like always, you have to make sure you have an opportunity to see players in their own environment," Klopas said. "Because you might not see them in top form at the combine. You have to have scouted them through the (college) season, see them two or three times before you even come here."

Despite the usual last-minute scuttlebutt over trades or hot names from the combine, Mattocks, technically sound and blessed with game-changing speed, would be the safe pick for Montreal. Not only is he the consensus as top selection, but everyone knows that Akron men tend to be safe choices. Clearly, whatever Akron coach Caleb Porter is doing in daily sessions, it is effectively preparing his men for a higher level. One year ago Akron’s Darlington Nagbe, Kitchen and Zarek Valentin became the second, third and fourth choices in the 2011 SuperDraft. Each one started at least 21 games in MLS last year.

While no team is likely to dominate this year’s draft the way Akron a year ago, Louisville, UCLA, Indiana, Creighton and North Carolina all figure to have multiple selections.

As always, Generation Adidas signees will be pure gold. The budding stars who sign as part of the league’s development initiative are salary-cap exempt, providing clubs the opportunity to develop them without denting the pay structure.

Toronto, with picks Nos. 4 and 12 overall, is the only club with multiple first-round choices for now. Ironically, it was TFC and coach Aron Winter who showed last year that gems can also be found toward the bottom of the selections. They took little-known, diminutive Ecuadoran winger Joao Plata. With three goals and five assists, and with Plata still just 19 years old, his future looks bright.

At the 10-year anniversary of very dark MLS days

2012-01-10T16:02:26Z

I love to see the MLS passion pouring in from these new ports of call. Devoted fans from Toronto, Portland, Vancouver, Seattle and, going a little further back, Salt Lake City, have done wonders to energize Major League Soccer, now going into its 17^th season.

And plenty of new fans from older markets are adding more air to the MLS baloon, too.

But we know that MLS isn’t perfect. Heck, neither is the NFL, the king-daddy of all U.S. sports, and it’s been around for almost 100 years in some form.

People see the dents and dings and understandably want better for Major League Soccer, so they raise a concerned voice. Others want it to be something completely different. (I’m not picking on new markets or new fans here; it’s just that they are less likely to notice the scarring from battles of earlier MLS days.)

As I’ve said before, my job as a journalist isn’t just to turn up news and spit out data. The more important element is layering in context and perspective.

So when fans begin pissing and moaning about how this or that is broken in MLS (or with the U.S. sides or in domestic soccer more generally), I often feel this reflexive need to tame the little brush fires of discontent with a cold-water bucket of historical perspective.

Here’s the deal: We’re right up against a 10-year anniversary that no one in MLS really celebrates. It’s one that we’d rather forget, in fact. "Just move along folks; nothing to see here."

I truly don’t believe people know just how close this thing came to shutting down 10 years ago.

We were this close to watching domestic soccer fold back in on itself. What remained might have resembled soccer here in the early 1990s, a desolate moonscape with the professional game reduced anew to outlier status. There would have been an indoor league and sprouts of pro soccer in USL markets. But who’s kidding who here? God bless the Rochester Rhinos and Richmond Kickers and such of USL, but David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Landon Donovan et al aren’t signing up for any of those markets. It’s really great AA and AAA baseball, so to speak, but it ain’t "The Show."

So we have MLS. Only, we almost didn’t have it.

Here, in a nutshell, is what Major League Soccer looked like 10 years ago:

The spiritual and cultural DNA of our country was changing right before our eyes in the weeks and months following 9/11. And who knew what would come of the economy?

Major League Soccer had just reduced itself to 10 teams. On Jan. 8, 2002, commissioner Don Garber and the league’s (tiny) board of directors made the painful decision to severe the Tampa Bay Mutiny and Miami Fusion. It was amputating a leg to save the man. (MLSSoccer.com columnist Jonah Freedman writes in excellent depth about the contraction and its ramifications choices here in this article.)

Remember, this was smack in the middle of massive financial suffering in MLS. The league lost $350 million between founding in 1996 and 2004, hemorrhaging that mostly fell on three investors. Yes, they are all rich. But who relishes losing money? I know that if I fumble away a $1 bill on the way out of the coffee shop, I'm pissed off all the way home.

As such, there was real talk of folding the entire operation. It was a well-kept secret back then; you surely can understand why. Things would only get worse if fans, media and sponsors knew the whole, grisly reality. But word has dripped out since that ceasing operations was a legitimate option on the table. Looking back, I think most people (such as myself) probably were going backwards as they considered the Florida contractions.

Yes, that left the league with 10 teams – which is barely a league. So most reactions tilted toward the grim and the dire. "If they are eliminating teams, and if they are down to such a puny sum of clubs, can the end be far behind?"

But I think now it was the other way around. I believe by the time the contractions were announced, Major League Soccer's own "Cuban Missile Crisis" was past. The nuclear option was off the table.

Contraction, painful as it was, and despite the obvious PR blow, was an essential part of the reconstruction plan. The thinking went something like this: "We simply cannot go forward under status quo. We can shut down. And maybe we should. Or we can push forward – but there must be changes, because this isn’t working."

That was 10 years ago. Or put another way, not so far back.

Those 10 teams and those ever so modest TV contracts of 2002 have grown into something that would have been unthinkable back in those days of somber austerity.

There was one stadium built specifically for MLS back then. One! Now there are 13.

TV contracts are providing reasonable revenue and still moving in the right direction. The L.A. Galaxy’s new 10-year regional television deal with Time Warner, for a whopping $55 million, is a real game-changer. (By the way, a source from AEG told me during MLS Cup week that the TV deal was never contingent on whether David Beckham returned for another season or seasons, which makes the new TV deal even better for MLS and the Galaxy.)

There are 19 teams now; that amplified national footprint means so much in the TV rights fee world. Attendance, by the way, keeps climbing steadily forward.

No, things aren’t perfect. And it’s always OK to want your league (and certainly your home team) to be better, to improve, to reach ever higher. But I sometimes bristle when I hear complaints about the operations, about budgets, about certain personalities at MLS headquarters. Not because they need defending, but because these things always deserve rooting in context and at least a little historical understanding.

You’d be plain ignorant today to exhort a German citizen to be more boisterously proud of their land – without considering the country’s dark history and its citizens' complex relationship with it all. You wouldn’t complain about American automakers’ conservative planning today without understanding yesterday's bailouts and effects of the 2008-2010 automotive crisis.

Nor should we rush headfirst into more aggressive changes, wholly different ways and means for MLS, without understanding the complex backdrop.

Personally, I look at domestic soccer and think it’s all in a pretty good place.

George John loan deal to West Ham nearly complete

2012-01-09T17:40:16Z

Looks like George John is getting the best of both worlds.

The FC Dallas center back will soon be playing at Upton Park as part of West Ham. But it won’t be as part of a full transfer as previously believed. Not just yet, at any rate.

I don’t have many details, but it looks like the first step here is a loan to West Ham through the end of February. Final details are being sorted now, from what I understand.

It makes sense for West Ham, which is bidding to get back into England’s top flight after last year’s relegation. Hammers defender James Tomkins is a transfer target for several EPL clubs, so Sam Allardyce’s club could use the cover that John would provide.

Nothing is set for Tomkins, but I would still expect John to get his opportunities along the back line under Allardyce.

What’s less clear is what might happen from there. From what I understand, this is just a loan deal for now. And it’s just through February. For now. The back end is open, apparently. So John might be coming back to FC Dallas Stadium for a fourth campaign. Or he might be staying in "East, East, East" London.

More details are surely to come. For now, just watch the TV listings for your next chance to see West Ham and their newest American signee.

For romance, drama and fascination, give me the FA Cup!

2012-01-09T16:37:56Z

When you break it down, what we love about sports are the memories they create.

You build stockpiles of those treasured days and nights. We all have our "Miracle On Ice" moments, even if all can’t rise to that level of cherish and intensity.

We fondly remember that special game at your high school. We recall the wonder moment of walking into a professional sporting event for the first time. We remember the moment our beloved team finally made the breakthrough.

Those reading this blog have their specific soccer memories. You remember your first MLS match – which friends were around you and who scored the mighty goal. You also remember the big goal you scored (or stopped) in youth soccer, no matter what level you happened to achieve.

I just bet you remember the moment you absolutely stopped breathing as Landon Donovan, bombing desperately forward with 40 yards of space and a nation full of hope in front of him, concocted that fabulous goal in the dying seconds against Algeria. Yeah, you remember.

Now, if you break down "memories" in some esoteric sense, it’s a beautifully blended mix of action and consequences, all set against a backdrop of romance.

Ah, romance. That’s the link that helps bind all these memories. And that’s why I love the FA Cup.

That’s why I spent a Saturday morning watching Macclesfied, a team I had never heard off three days ago, spending a few minutes to find it on the England map while the Silkmen took on EPL club Bolton. The ground at Moss Rose (capacity 6,000) was abuzz as their side fought off elimination. As I said on Twitter that morning (@SteveDavis90), I simply cannot resist a match televised live from a stadium smaller than most high school football grounds where I live.

That’s why I watched Peterborough-Sunderland on Sunday, although I have absolutely no allegiance to either club. It’s definitely why I’ll be watching this afternoon as once-great Leeds attempts to reclaim a modicum of its former glory, battling Arsenal at the new-day Emirates. (It's just a big ol' bonus that Thierry Henry is likely to feature off Arsene Wenger's bench.) It’s live on Fox Soccer Channel.

(Too bad, isn’t it, that it couldn’t happen at Leeds? How freakin' cool would that be? There’s always hope for a replay, I suppose, if Leeds can get the cup tie back to Elland Road.)

The Fourth Round pairings are already set. Chelsea might be visiting MK Dons (if the third tier side can overcome QPR). Nottingham Forest or Leicester City vs Swindon Town? Yeah, I’ll take some of that. Watford hosting Spurs? I’m in!

The romance of little dreamers taking on the bigger clubs is simply irresistible. But it’s more than that.

I can’t pretend to know what English football was like in the 1960s of 1970s, past what I can read about now and what I can gather as sporting men of a certain age wax nostalgic about George Best, Gordon Banks, Denis Law, Bobby Moore, Pat Jennings and the like. I don’t know much about it … but I know that watching third- and fourth-round FA Cup action is probably as close as I’ll ever get to understanding it, to getting a feel for the romance of the day, when the economy was in the crapper, when discontent was high, but when the grounds rocked with weekly reprieve.

The time, England’s so-called "lost decade," may not inspire fond memories in general. But the soccer from that time does. And the FA Cup, in all its peerless glory, brings a little bit of it home for us.