MLS All-Stars v. Chelsea in Philadelphia and Liverpool v. AS Roma at Fenway Park

It’s soccer-friendly season again in the U.S., a time when teams from England, Italy, Spain, and France play MLS teams and each other during what is in effect the non-American sides’ pre-seasons. It’s a little like those old mixed-“universe” comics from the 70s, joint Marvel/D.C. efforts that saw Spiderman or the Fantastic Four “teaming up” with Superman or Batman. They're not serious, not for the purist, but somehow for most of us they’re intriguing. I saw Liverpool play AS Roma a couple of days ago in Fenway Park, for example, and I thought the game had an appealing mix of hard and fair play. That is, the match didn’t have the air of a mere exhibition, with lazy play and smiling, backslapping opponents. And at the same time, it lacked flopping and other tedious gamesmanship (like time-wasting) that often mar competitive soccer matches.

I went into that match interested in Liverpool’s new, young coach, who evidently wants to play a more attractive and attacking kind of soccer. I hoped perhaps to find an English Premiership team to which I might affix my European-directed loyalties (which are now entirely with FC Barcelona). As it happened, I found myself at Fenway seated near an annoying Liverpool fan, the kind of follower (in at least two senses of that word) who feels that all fouls or potential fouls committed by players against “his” team are red-cardable offenses, and all fouls committed by “his” team’s players are egregious miscarriages of justice. As a result of his obnoxious bellyaching, and the fact that U.S. international Michael Bradley is now playing for Roma, I quickly glommed onto the Italian side. To my mild satisfaction, Roma won 2-1. They deserved the victory, too. Liverpool, down 2-0, pulled one back in the 80th minute, but the game failed to open up after that as I expected. Roma took it by the throat, thanks in part to Bradley’s hard-nosed work in midfield. (Bradley also scored the game’s first goal, by the way, a second-half strike that hit the far post and caromed into the net.)

To my mind, the most intriguing U.S. summer friendly is the annual MLS all-star game, which for some years now has pitted the MLS all-stars against a top-flight team, usually from the EPL, though a few years ago the all-stars played Celtic. This year’s game involved current Champions League winners Chelsea and took place in Philadelphia, shortly after the Liverpool v. Roma game on Wednesday night. A friend of mine emailed me yesterday saying he didn’t know what, if anything, to take away from the match, a 3-2 MLS all-star win. Indeed, many qualifications must be placed on such a match, all of which have been cited before. The MLS players are in midseason form and fitness, the European sides working to get in shape and knock off technical rust. The European teams’ players have mostly trained and played together before, whereas the MLS players are thrown together and have to figure out each others' tendencies over the course of a single exhibition game that sees numerous substitutions on both sides. There is really nothing to play for other than professional pride. Et cetera.

There are other points to be made against reading anything into MLS all-star games. And yet, I think you can draw some conclusions from Wednesday’s match, especially when you think about it in the context of previous all-star games. After years of performing well against mid-table EPL teams like Everton, and against Celtic, the MLS all-stars were indisputably outclassed in 2010 and 2011, getting drubbed by Manchester United both years. Man U’s quality and depth are of course matched by only a few soccer clubs in the world, and that fact was made clear against the all-stars, whether or not Man U players were in mid-season form and whether or not they were regular starters.

I was happy when MLS announced that this year’s game was against Chelsea. That club is somewhere between Everton and Manchester United on the quality spectrum—a more realistic standard for comparison than Manchester United but still a highly ambitious club with a well compensated roster. I became even more pleased with the choice while watching some of this year’s Champions League matches involving Chelsea. I grew to hate the club during that time. Their near-total lack of creative attacking players forced them to sit back and rely on an organized defense while hoping to score off a rare counter or set piece. Watching those Champions League games involving Chelsea put me in mind of being chained in a bathroom and forced to watch a person grapple with constipation. The fact that some fans and critics preferred Chelsea to Barcelona and Bayern Munich perplexed and almost enraged me, the kind of feeling I get when people support a certain kind of politician over another who seems to me to be the logical choice.

Wednesday’s MLS all-star game was evidence—perhaps a small bit of evidence, but still evidence—that this iteration of Chelsea is a team whose true nature was revealed in the Champions League. They’re uncreative and don’t know what to do with themselves if they can’t defend and counter against a better team. Their deficiencies were on display in the final minutes of the all-star game. With the MLS all-stars up 3-2, Dwayne De Rosario gave the ball away at midfield and exposed the MLS back line. The Chelsea right winger (I didn’t catch who it was) had virtually the entire final third at his disposal when he got the ball at his feet. Did he attack and shoot? No, he turned the ball back towards midfield. Man U would have promptly punished MLS for De Rosario’s giveaway, but in the event Chelsea didn’t even get a shot off. It may be cause for concern for Chelsea that the two goals they did score in this game came not from young players like Romelu Lukaku, but from old-timers Frank Lampard and John Terry. Both goals were, of course, scored off balls whipped into the box, one off a set piece.

To add to that, the MLS players looked comfortable on the ball, knocking it around with composure even in their own third. That’s in contrast to the 2010 and 2011 all-star games, when the MLS players rarely showed composure, in fact were mercilessly and efficiently cut up and run off the field. In short, the 2012 MLS all-star game will lead many of us to conclude that Chelsea is not nearly as good as Manchester United and that MLS has enough quality players to field a team (relative to the Blues, a very, very cheap team) that can at the least compete with Chelsea.