Revolution v. Houston Dynamo, 5.19.12

In 1990, the Dallas Cowboys were coming off a 1-15 season, their first under coach Jimmy Johnson. I recall reading a mid-season article that year in The Washington Post in which a Redskins offensive lineman—I think it was Russ Grimm—was quoted about the Skins’ upcoming schedule. He said something like: First we have to go to New York and then to Philly. And then we have to go down to Dallas, and that ain’t no weak-ass Dallas team anymore. Grimm (or whoever) was right about Dallas. The Cowboys went a respectable 7-9 that year and would go on to win NFL championships in 1992 and 1993.

The New England Revolution are coming off their worst season ever, having won fewer games (five) in 2011 than any other MLS team. Their goal this year should be to have well-respected players grumbling about how they have to go up to Gillette, informing media members that New England “ain’t no weak-ass team anymore.” The Revs are not quite there yet, but they’re getting close. They tied (I was about to say “lost to,” because that’s sure how it felt) the Houston Dynamo 2-2 on Saturday, and for the most part they played hard and well. New England led 2-1 from the 57^th minute to the 87^th. Had they hung tough for just a few more minutes, the three points would have been theirs. But they suffered a letdown late, just as they did against Houston (and so many other teams) last year.

From a New England point of view, conceding that final goal on Saturday was painful, weak-ass. Houston’s center back Bobby Boswell played a long, harmless ball towards the New England box. Stephen McCarthy headed the ball towards Chris Tierney on the left. Tierney took the ball off one bounce and headed it, not towards the sidelines as he should have, but towards the center of the midfield. Ryan Guy couldn’t (or didn’t) do much more than raise a foot to try to collect Tierney’s weak clearance before it fell to Houston substitute Luiz Camargo, who quickly played the ball upfield to Brian Ching. Revolution defenders McCarthy, Kevin Alston, and A.J. Soares all collapsed on Camargo’s pass like moths on a switched-on light bulb. Meanwhile, Camargo ran unmarked towards the back post, received a lofted pass from Ching, and used the outside of his left foot to knife a pretty shot past New England keeper Matt Reis. How many times must players, coaches, and fans be reminded? If you’re going to be a strong, winning team, you have to play hard and smart on defense for the entire game.

So the Revolution have work to do, and you can be sure coach Jay Heaps told them so after the game. But after Heaps’s rage settles, he’ll probably be happy with many of his players’ performances, particularly Saer Sene, who scored both New England goals, and Lee Nguyen, who saw a lot of the ball and looked good with it at his feet. Nguyen juked and blew by Jermaine Taylor in the 5^th minute to nearly set up a goal by Sene (Nguyen’s relatively slow-moving cross unaccountably went right under Sene’s lifted right foot). Nguyen undressed Calen Carr in a similar fashion in the 61^st minute to draw a foul. Maybe I’m looking back through compost-smeared glasses, but I don’t remember many Revolution players last season blowing by opponents with the ball at their feet.

Guys like Nguyen and Sene are slowly lifting the Revs from weak-ass to respectability. Veteran defensive midfielder Clyde Simms, who has also made contributions so far this year, is another cause for hope, though maybe only in the short term. This is Simms’s eighth year in the league, and he didn’t play on Saturday due to ankle tendonitis. I’m sure I’m not the only one who wondered if that final Houston goal might’ve been prevented had the tough and cagey Simms been on the field.

Revolution v. Vancouver Whitecaps, 5.12.12: Is Scoring Early a Good Thing?

It is common, or seems common, for an NFL team that returns an opening kickoff for a touchdown to go on and lose the game. The announcers often call this “suffering a letdown.” After the Vancouver Whitecaps scored in the 5^th minute of last Saturday’s game against the New England Revolution in Foxboro, the Whitecaps suffered a letdown of their own, ultimately losing to New England 4-1. This reminded me that last month, New England went up 1-0 in the 6^th minute against D.C. United, but lost 2-1. I wondered: Do MLS teams that score within the first six minutes of a game typically “suffer a letdown” in the manner of NFL teams that score touchdowns off the opening kick?

I decided to look at all the MLS regular-season games that have been played so far this season to see if any pattern emerged. Here’s what I found. (As I wrote in a similar statistics-related post last year, I wouldn’t swear in a court of law that these numbers are accurate, but I’m reasonably sure they are.)

·      Of the 96 games played so far this season, nine have involved a team scoring at the six-minute mark or earlier, about 9% of games played.

·      The record of the teams that scored first in these games is 5-2-2; in other words, teams that score very early do not typically “suffer a letdown,” in fact they usually go on to win.

·      The Revolution played in the only two games of the nine in which the team that scored first lost. As I already mentioned, the Revs won one of those games (against Vancouver) and lost the other (against D.C.).

·      New York has scored early more than any other MLS team this season, twice scoring at the three-minute mark (both wins) and once scoring at the five-minute mark (a tie). Though I only counted games in which a team scored in six minutes or less, I noted that New York has twice scored at the seven-minute mark. Both of those games ended in 1-0 New York victories, one coming against New England on April 28. If you count those games, the record of teams that score early is 7-2-2.

That’s enough of that. The big story of this game was not its capacity to summon dry, meaningless statistics, but the play of Vancouver castoff and current Revolution midfielder Lee Nguyen, who scored two goals and assisted on another. The 79-minute performance was good enough to earn Nguyen MLS Player of the Week honors. He’ll probably also get Goal of the Week for his second strike, a wicked long-range volley that you can check out below, courtesy of mlssoccer.com.

Nguyen’s assist was also high-quality stuff. In the 24^th minute, he received a pass from Chris Tierney on the left, ran at and through two Vancouver players and sent a perfect ball between two defenders and onto the outside foot of Saer Sene. Sene turned and scored off a clinical strike, low and to the far post. Sene had another good and varied game. He’s a fun player to watch, combining as he does great size and good foot skills, but also a knack for scoring and creativity, often flicking passes to himself and others with the back and outsides of his feet and sometimes putting me in mind of former NBA player Jason “White Chocolate” Williams. Sene also loves to get wide and cross the ball, as he did in the 33^rd minute of this game. That pass led to the Revolution’s third goal, this one by Shalrie Joseph.

So the new guys are producing, the back line continues to play well, and Joseph and Clyde Simms look strong in the midfield. About the only downside of the match for the Revs was the performance of Blake Brettschneider; he didn’t see a lot of the ball after his strong performance against Salt Lake. Of course, the Revs played quite well enough to win, whether or not every player shined. It’s great to see New England paste an opponent, and their fans will no doubt be eager to see if they can string together a couple of good games and not “suffer a letdown” as they did after beating L.A. in March.

Revolution at Real Salt Lake, 5.5.12

Bill Parcells once famously said, “You are what your record says you are.” The statement has the ring of truth, and on at least one level it’s inarguable: you’re not going to make the playoffs if your record isn’t good enough. Looked at another way, it’s b.s. Sometimes a good team suffers bad breaks and its record doesn’t reflect its quality. Sometimes a bad team goes on a lucky run, like a newcomer at a craps table, and its record doesn’t reflect its deficiencies.

I think back on some Washington Redskins teams over the years whenever I come across Parcells’s reductive dictum. Joe Gibbs’s first Redskins team started 0-5, but fans just knew the team was tough, that other teams didn’t want to play them, that things would come around eventually. That team ultimately finished 8-8, which is a mediocre final record. But we all knew that was no mediocre team. And the next year, the Skins won their first Super Bowl.

 By contrast, Norv Turner’s Redskins teams sometimes shot out of the gates and won a string of games early in the season. But those of us who actually watched every game just knew those teams were soft, that they’d eventually fold. The 1996 Skins under Turner, for example, started 7-1. In week eight, by Parcells’s logic of “You are what your record says you are,” that team was up there with the ’78 Steelers. Which was, even at the time, quite obviously not the case to anyone paying attention. Those ’96 Skins finished 9-7 and out of the playoffs.

This same kind of logic can apply to individual games. Sometimes teams get lucky and win or tie when they should lose. Last year, for example, New England went to Salt Lake and got thoroughly dominated by an undermanned RSL side, yet the Revolution still managed to come away with a 3-3 result and go home with a point. Yesterday, by contrast, the Revolution went to Salt Lake and lost 2-1. However, the Revolution played well and almost certainly should have come out of the game with a tie.

Salt Lake can credit their win to a red-hot Alvaro Saborio, who scored both of their goals, and to the consistently excellent Nick Rimando, who made two wonderfully quick reaction-saves within a minute of each other, first to deny a Fernando Cardenas shot reminiscent of the one that led to a goal against Colorado a few days ago, then to deny a powerful Blake Brettshneider header off the ensuing corner kick. I should add here that Rimando’s counterpart on the Revs, Matt Reis, had some stunning saves himself, and it’s remarkable that Saborio didn’t score a hat trick. The fearless Reis took one point-blank shot from Saborio off the face.

By far the most frustrating moment of this game for New England fans came about ten minutes into the second half. A. J. Soares was called for a foul about twenty-five yards from goal for making contact with Fabian Espindola, who, replays showed, sold the non-foul to the ref and then unaccountably paid the ref back by giving him a harangue during the free-kick set-up. The kick was eventually played to the back post and found Saborio, who’d lost his marker (John Lozano, in for Stephen McCarthy) by pushing him away from the goal as the ball was kicked. The ball skimmed inches from Shalrie Joseph’s dreadlocks before finding Saborio.

Along with some memorable saves, the game also feature two straight red cards, one (on Salt Lake’s Will Johnson) deserved, one (on Cardenas) not. Brettschneider scored a quality goal early, taking a Joseph pass, driving to the end-line before cutting the ball back to his right foot and curling a shot into the side netting of the far post. Soares had another good game, unfortunately cut short by a clearly unintentional poke in the eye by Saborio around the 80^th minute. Due to his ejection and the fact that he came on as a sub, Cardenas played only about twenty minutes, but I thought he had another very good game, including that shot I mentioned earlier that so easily could have found the back of the net. Clyde Simms continues his solid, unspectacular play in the defensive midfield, and Kevin Alston was his usual solid self on defense.

There were some negatives to this game for New England that went beyond the final score. Kelyn Rowe had his second unmemorable match (he came off for Cardenas in the 59^th minute), Lazono didn’t impress, Benny Feilhaber gave away too many balls trying to force passes into tight spaces, and Alston punctuated a good run up the right sideline with a poor cross, squandering a promising opportunity.

But the Revs did come on late and gave a very good Salt Lake team playing at home all they could handle. And this was, we should remember, the third game in eight days for New England. So while New England’s record now stands at a poor 3-6, I think that, pace Bill Parcells, they are actually better than that. Newcomers Saer Sene, Lee Nguyen, Cardenas, Brettschneider, Simms, and Rowe have all showed promise this year, as have New England’s veteran starters. If they all stay healthy, this revamped team should improve with more time playing together, and might even make a run at the playoffs this fall.

The 1991 Washington Redskins: One of the NFL’s Greatest Teams

Twenty years ago today, the Washington Redskins beat the Buffalo Bills 37-24 in Super Bowl XXVI in the Metrodome. I was living in San Francisco at the time, but I flew to Minneapolis for the game and was in the stands that day. The Super Bowl was the only NFL game I saw in person that season, but I and three displaced Skins fans in San Francisco watched every minute of every Redskins game on TV that year (no easy task in those days, but one of our group was a bartender who worked at a place with a satellite dish).

I had closely, religiously, followed other Redskins teams in the decade and more before 1991—including its Super Bowl championship teams of the eighties—but the greatest Redskins team ever was certainly that 1991 group. In my opinion it ranks with the five or so best NFL teams of all time. The players were remarkably dedicated to each other and to winning, as their Super Bowl victory and 17-2 record attest. (For evidence of just how committed the players were to each other, check out the articles, interviews, and video in today’s Washington Post Sports section commemorating the team.)

I mentioned in another post of this mostly soccer-themed blog that the 1991 Redskins were stacked top to bottom with above-average players. However, the team had no superstars. It is true that it boasted three future Hall of Famers in Art Monk, Russ Grimm, and Darrell Green. But no one ever thought of those guys as “superstars,” in fact that may be the first time the word’s been used in the same sentence with any of their names. If one were cynical, he or she might even dismiss them as boring players, which is more or less why it took so long for a guy like Monk to get elected to the Hall of Fame. His under-the-radar demeanor on and off the field made it easy to forget that he played on four Super Bowl teams and three championship teams, held significant NFL receiving records, was a willing and savage downfield blocker often used more like a tight end than a wide receiver, and was an acknowledged team leader. The New York Times appropriately reported his retirement announcement thus: “Art Monk quietly became one of the best wide receivers in National Football League history. Just as quietly, he retired yesterday.”

If I were to pick a single fact about Washington Redskins fans that shows them to be a knowledgable bunch, it’s the fact that Monk is their most beloved player, past or present. When the Redskins played the Cowboys on the last day of the 1996 season—their final game at RFK stadium—the team trotted out all the great ones during halftime. Charismatic Hall of Famer John Riggins may have brought the house down when he was introduced, but Monk positively demolished it.

Monk went for over 1,000 yards in 1991, and fellow receiver Gary Clark—my candidate for the most underrated football player ever—went for over 1,300 and averaged over 19 per catch. If you think I’m looking back at Clark through rose-colored glasses, go check out Hall of Famer Michael Irvin’s statistics and compare them to Clark’s. Clark’s stats are very similar to Irvin’s—each caught 65 career touchdowns and averaged between 15 and 16 yards per catch, for example—but you never, ever hear Clark’s name in connection with the Hall of Fame. This is particularly unjust, since Clark toiled for two full years in the USFL before being taken in the supplemental draft by the Redskins. Clark—quietly excellent, quickly forgotten—can be seen as yet another player that embodies those ’91 Skins.

The 1991 squad was not built around Monk and Clark, though, but around its offensive line, which remains one of the league’s greatest units. It yielded only nine sacks, allowing quarterback Mark Rypien to throw for over 3,500 yards and 28 touchdowns, and allowing running backs Earnest Byner, Ricky Ervins, and Gerald Riggs to combine for 21 touchdowns and over 2,000 yards on the ground. You could make the argument (and many Skins fans have) that Joe Jacoby was an even more dominating lineman over the course of his career than Hall of Famer Grimm (and Jake should almost certainly also be in the Hall of Fame). You could also make the argument that tackle Jim Lachey was in 1991 better than both of them, which should give some indication of the group’s quality. Grimm, a little long in the tooth by then, was actually a backup, which gives some indication of the group’s depth. Mark Schlereth, who would go on to win more Super Bowls with the Broncos, was the starting right guard.

I could go on about the offense, but I haven’t even mentioned the defense. I read in the Post today that the 1991 Redskins defense shut out their opponents three times in their first five games that year, a particularly amazing stat when you consider that since 1991 no Redskins team has shut out an opponent even once. Wilbur Marshall was sublime. His combination of size, speed, and athletic talent would have allowed him to dominate in any era. But how many fans today so much as remember that Marshall played for the Redskins? I’m reasonably sure that most football fans outside D.C. remember Marshall, if they remember him at all, as a guy laying waste to opponents with the 1985 Chicago Bears. But Marshall was every bit as good with the Redskins. In ’91, he recorded 135 tackles, 5.5 sacks, and 5 interceptions, one for a TD. The touchdown run was particularly memorable; Marshall looked like Walter Payton streaking down the left sideline, running half the field and freezing a defender brilliantly with a fake lateral just before running it in.

One of my favorite defensive players that year was role-player James “Jumpy” Geathers, whom as I recall the Skins picked up for nothing from the New Orleans Saints. Matt Millen said that Geathers and Jacoby were the strongest players he’d ever been around, which is saying something given Millen’s pedigree as a player. Geathers had a move he routinely used that year that I’d never seen employed before and haven’t seen since. He called it “the forklift.” Though Geathers was a rather wiry, tall defensive tackle, he was so strong that he could run at an offensive lineman, extend both his arms, and quite literally pick up the opposing player and drive him into opposing quarterbacks. It was positively degrading, and amazing. Geathers had only 21 tackles that year, but 4.5 of them were sacks.

I’m almost driving my fingers through the keyboard as I think back on all those players from twenty years ago. I suppose this modest reminiscence is in effect a thank-you note to them for performing so well and with such dedication. I appreciated watching them then, and, given the Redskins problems since that time, I appreciate them almost as much now, reflecting from my house outside Boston, Mass. So bravo, guys. Some of us still remember that season with striking clarity and remain grateful to have witnessed a collection of very good players willing themselves to be a great team.

Will You Come to My Pro Bowl Party, Will You Come?

Virtually everyone who follows the NFL regards the Pro Bowl as a joke. This is not just a prevailing sentiment, it is a monolithic one, as though Communist Party-type snitches lurked on every street corner ready to drop a dime on anyone with a dissenting view. I can’t recall a single line in defense of the Pro Bowl ever being written or uttered by a football writer, player, coach, talking head, or fan. Richard O’Hagan’s lead for a 2011 article in Bleacher Report speaks for millions: “Is there a more meaningless contest in professional sport than the Pro Bowl?” he writes. “As an exercise in utter pointlessness, it appears to be without equal.”

I don’t intend to challenge this take on the Pro Bowl and its cultural irrelevance. But I’ll admit that I’ve always been drawn to the game, or at least to its potential to be something exciting and fun. I still have a vague but deep-rooted memory of turning on the TV as a child and watching my first Pro Bowl, sometime in the early or mid-1970s. I was first of all delighted and surprised that there was more football to be seen that season after the Super Bowl. Since then, I’ve come to regard the Pro Bowl as a metaphor: it’s like methadone for a heroin addict who’s going off the stuff but still needs a fix, no matter how ersatz. (For this reason, and because Super Bowl players are now precluded from playing, I think it’s a bad idea to move the Pro Bowl to the week before the Super Bowl, as the NFL did a few years ago.)

When I was a kid I also thought it was fascinating that the NFL—a paragon of regimentation even in the long-haired, rough-and-tumble seventies—would condone players from the same team wearing helmets with different designs. The different-helmet-same-team thing is inexplicably cool to a football-card-collecting boy in elementary school. I still feel vestiges of excitement when I see all those variously colored and logoed helmets in the Pro Bowl. (Pro Bowl jerseys are, unfortunately and for no good reason, always ugly.) Finally, it was somehow life-affirming to see division rivals putting aside tribal hatreds in Hawaii to win one for their conference or for each other or for the winner’s bonus or for the love of the game.

At some point a decade or more ago, I began thinking about throwing a Pro Bowl party. I thought it might be fun in part because I find the very term “Pro Bowl party” borderline hilarious—so close and yet so very far from the ubiquitous “Super Bowl party.” I also thought a Pro Bowl party might have some real advantages over a Super Bowl party. Super Bowl parties tend to be fractured. Devoted football fans are on one side, irritated by all the distractions caused by the non-fans chit-chatting and strolling in front of the TV at critical moments. Non-football fans are on the other side, bored by the game and paying attention only to the newly unveiled commercials or to the bloated halftime show or to their own conversations.

At a Pro Bowl party, I reasoned, no one would care about the game and no one would feel compelled to watch, creating a more agreeable party atmosphere. Everyone could feel free to wear leis and the jerseys of their favorite teams, or to ignore the game altogether. And since virtually all teams are represented at the Pro Bowl—even teams like my currently dismal Washington Redskins—all fans could in some small way feel like they’re cheering on their respective squads in a post-season matchup. Furthermore, Pro Bowl games have the potential to generate more jokes than a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. Guests could even stockpile material beforehand, like: “Quiet down, everyone! This is an important series for the NFC!” or “It’s close to halftime of the Pro Bowl, when dozens of toilets all across America will be flushing simultaneously!” or “Where were you during Pro Bowl XXII, when a young Ken O’Brien of the Jets brashly predicted victory?”

Not surprisingly, most of my friends expressed only mild amusement at the idea of a Pro Bowl party. So I sat on it for years. Then, late last football season, I saw an opening. My wife—who hasn’t watched a football game from beginning to end in her entire life—joined a fantasy football league with some of her coworkers, almost all of whom were younger women with a similar lack of interest in and knowledge of the game. After last year’s fantasy season, I suggested that this bevy of good-natured women and their significant others might be the perfect group to invite to America’s First Ever Pro Bowl Party. My wife, who is a good sort on a party, agreed and sent out a completely non-ironic evite to her coworkers. Almost everyone accepted, and there was only one perplexed comment. “Wait,” it read. “Are you sure you mean the Pro Bowl and not the Super Bowl?”

Despite the initial confusion, the party went off reasonably well. We had fifteen or so guests, all of whom were endearingly game for the rather odd affair. They arrived with smiles and treats: craft beers, bourbon, wine, desserts. One woman wore a sarong, or kikepa, another a Tom Brady jersey. Either my wife or I (I can’t remember who) wore an old Darrell Green jersey of mine. She made coleslaw and macaroni and cheese among other dishes, and I smoked a ten-pound Boston Butt in sub-freezing Boston weather so we could serve pulled-pork sandwiches. All of the good food, drink, and company pretty much rendered the Pro Bowl broadcast that evening even more irrelevant than it might have been otherwise, even in my house.

When the game finally did kick off, just over half the partygoers continued to sit in the dining room or mill about in the kitchen, talking and eating and drinking and doing what hundreds of millions of other Americans were doing at that time: ignoring the Pro Bowl. The rest of us actually sat down to watch. After my wife’s bare-bones electronic invitation, I tried to gently reassure my fellow viewers that I understood no one actually cared about the Pro Bowl, that I wasn’t just off the boat from Estonia or wherever and confused about what TV broadcasts were appropriate to invite fellow Americans over to watch, that I wasn’t off my rocker. Things loosened up after a few jokes, and soon all felt comfortable joining in the mirth. It was a long game, though, and its grip over the people in my living room was needless to say loose from the start and never tightened. Witty banter in such situations is hard to sustain, especially when those gathered together aren’t old friends and/or completely sloshed. Most guests left before the game ended. It was after all a Sunday night, and it was only the Pro Bowl. Everyone assured my wife and me that they’d had a good time and wanted do it again next year, but I sensed they were mostly being polite.

The game was predictably unmemorable even for the host of America’s First Ever Pro Bowl Party. Still, I’d like to close by saying something about the 2011 game and something more about the Pro Bowl in general. First, it was heartening to see Redskins linebacker London Fletcher make his second appearance as a Pro Bowler in 2011. (He’ll get another chance in this year’s game.) He played hard and often with a smile. Being a fan of his, I actually expressed some mild excitement after one of his tackles. Expressing anything but contempt over anything related to the Pro Bowl is pretty much the acme of uncool, and I thought I sensed some of the guests stiffen at my unsophisticated reaction. After all, even Hall of Famers want nothing to do with the Pro Bowl. In a broadcast a week before last year’s game, Troy Aikman gave advice to first-time Pro Bowlers. Don’t go into the locker room before the final gun, he laughingly said, because the commissioner doesn’t like that. After the game, AFC coach Bill Belichick said dismissively of the Pro Bowl, “It is what it is.”

While I don’t feel much warmth towards the taciturn Belichick or his erstwhile boss with the Giants, Bill Parcells, the latter once said something about one of his former players that has always stuck in my mind as fantastic. Parcells talked about how Lawrence Taylor—maybe the best defensive player I’ve ever seen—was a “parking lot guy,” meaning someone who would play football in the parking lot after a game without anyone watching, just because he loved playing. I don’t vividly recall Taylor’s play in any Pro Bowls, but I’ll bet he played hard and had fun, a lot like 13-year veteran London Fletcher did last year. Another Redskin—the late Sean Taylor—was also a parking lot guy. His hit on an AFC punter trying to run for a first down in the 2007 game is maybe the only Pro Bowl highlight that has ever attracted a significant number of viewers on YouTube. It certainly attracted genuine applause at the game itself, as the video attests. Even the blown-up punter pops off the deck to congratulate Taylor.

I submit that the NFL should insert a Parking Lot Guy clause into its Pro Bowl player contracts. Give each player the right to opt out of playing. Tell him, in essence, that you had a great year, you’re going to get this Pro Bowl Selection honor and you’re going to get the money that comes with it. HOWEVER, the NFL is not going to fly you and your family to Hawaii and put you up in a hotel unless you actually want to play in the game. If you do not want to play in the game, then thank you for your honesty and please stay home and accept the check (less any winner’s bonus) with our compliments. We will move down the list of players at your position based on Pro Bowl votes until we find someone who does want to play in a game with the other best players in the world, someone who will play for free plus any winner’s bonus, someone who will leave the game early only because he’s been taken out by the coach and wants to go play pick-up in the parking lot.

If the NFL did that, then throwing a Pro Bowl party might not be such a laughable idea. 

POSTSCRIPT: Last year’s First Ever Pro Bowl Party may have been more of a success than I realized. As I was proofreading this post, I received an email from my wife, who is now at a sales conference in Florida with most of the attendees from last year’s soiree. Her email reads, in part: “Everyone is asking about the pro bowl party. Do you want to draft the invite?”

Revolution at Toronto FC, 10.22.11: Steve Nicol’s Last Game

Steve Nicol is no longer coach of the New England Revolution. He coached the same team for ten years, an MLS record. He leaves New England having won four conference championships, though he didn’t win an MLS title. Fans of both American football and soccer will have already placed Nicol in a cosmically jinxed club that includes avuncular erstwhile NFL coaches Marv Levy (Buffalo Bills) and Bud Grant (Minnesota Vikings), both of whom hold 0-4 Super Bowl records. Only a truly cold-hearted person would fail to feel sympathy for these guys, who ought to form a support group. Had a ball here or there bounced another way, each would have coached a championship team and their legacies would be almost infinitely more satisfying to both them and their respective teams’ fans.

It should be noted that Nicol’s 2007 New England team won the U.S. Open Cup, and his 2008 team won the SuperLiga title. The SuperLiga competition, which consisted of four teams from MLS and four from Mexico’s first division, is gone now, and few in the soccer/fútbol world will mourn its passing. I, however, heartily enjoyed those hard-nosed Primera División v. MLS matches, and can remember at least one Revolution SuperLiga match ending in a fistfight, complete with a Mexico league team trainer coming off the sideline to throw some haymakers. It’s appropriate that one of Nicol’s teams—known more for their grit than their grace—is the only MLS team to win a SuperLiga title during that competition’s brief four-year run.

There are many soccer authorities more qualified than I am to render judgment on Nicol’s tenure with the Revolution. One such authority, whom I’ve mentioned in a few of these posts and who happens to be a teetotaler, texted me the following message on the day Nicol was released: “I think I’m going to drink 2nite. Nicol is done.” While it will take a lot more than Nicol’s departure to truly drive my friend to drink, he has long disdained Nicol’s teams’ style of play, finding it infuriatingly drab, if occasionally effective.

My friend may be right about Nicol’s lack of coaching prowess, but I wonder to what degree Nicol simply coached up or down to his players’ abilities. This season, for instance, his roster changed almost continuously, with new players coming in (like Benny Feilhaber, Rajko Lekic, and Milton Caraglio) and other players going out (like Didier Domi, Ousmane Dabo, and Marko Perovic). It is true that Nicol failed to overcome these challenges. His team ended the season at the bottom of the standings and won only 5 games in 34 attempts.

That said, how many other coaches would have fared better? In soccer perhaps more than any other sport, a coach can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. We shouldn’t forget that Nicol enjoyed success with players like Clint Dempsey and Taylor Twellman under his tutelage. As for this year, New England’s set pieces were usually dangerous and often unfolded as carefully orchestrated “training ground” sequences, surely to the credit of Nicol and his staff. You have to play with what you have, and I can’t point to many areas where I would have made decisions other than those made by Nicol. I probably would have played Chris Tierney exclusively at left back, and asked him and Kevin Alston to make at least five attacking runs per half, but other than that, Nicol’s player-related decisions struck me as mostly logical.

Along with dictating a style of play—whether it involves booting long balls to the flag and crossing them, tiki-taka-style short passing and possession, or something in between—and choosing what players to use and where to use them, another aspect of coaching is what is often called building a culture or mindset of winning. Nicol’s early record proves that he could establish that kind of winning culture. But that culture seemed to crack and crumble during the last two seasons. Given the team’s recent slump, Nicol’s departure makes sense. And for once I believe that both a coach and upper management told the truth when each side reported that the parting was amicable and mutual.

It might be worth noting here that the soccer coach who is probably most associated with creating a culture of winning—Nicol acquaintance and fellow Scotsman Sir Alex Ferguson—coached Manchester United in a 6-1 home loss to Manchester City the day after Nicol was let go. I mention this to again stress the overwhelming importance of player talent to winning soccer games. Manchester City currently has a crazily talented roster, and they’re winning. Arsenal, by contrast, has lost Cesc Fàbregas and has been forced to start a player on the back line this season that many life long Gunners fans had never even heard of, and they’re losing. In other words, the two teams’ respective fortunes haven’t changed because Roberto Mancini is a mad genius and Arsène Wenger has suddenly forgotten how to coach. They’ve changed because of the players on the field.

In American football, a great coach like Bill Belichick really can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, overcoming player-talent limitations by employing complicated strategies (virtually every American football play is a mind-bendingly complex “training ground” sequence or set piece), synchronized precision, and brute force. Soccer has both too many and too few limitations for a coach to have that kind of impact. Individual creativity and technical skill take the place of the synchronized precision and brute force of American football. A soccer coach is helpless to instill individual creativity, and you can’t physically beat another soccer team into submission, nor can you win by a too-heavy reliance on choreographed set pieces.

But to return to Nicol: I for one will miss his red-faced British passion, so often in evidence on the sideline as he disputed a call or fumed over a defensive lapse. I’ll miss his naked loyalty to his players and his curt valedictory “cheers” after his first-half sideline interviews with Brad Feldman and Jay Heaps. Nicol had a near-perfect affect for a Boston-area coach, maybe even more suitable than Belichick’s—Nicol looks intelligent but unpretentious, and hard-nosed. I haven’t the faintest notion of who might be interested in hiring him, but I can see Nicol’s bring-your-lunch-pail-to-work personality fitting in well in a town like Chicago, and I understand the Fire may be looking for a coach.

And what of Nicol’s last game as coach of the Revolution? It was a predictably flaccid end to this lifeless season, a 2-2 draw in Toronto under chilly, gray skies, a game marred by defensive breakdowns and a lack of technical quality on both sides. Alston did play well for the Revolution’s back line and was probably New England’s man of the match, which is appropriate given that Nicol himself was primarily a right back during his playing days. Alston played solid defense and made numerous attacking runs throughout the match, some of them effective. Monsef Zerka also had his moments against Toronto. In the 40^th minute, he scored a nice header off a corner kick from Benny Feilhaber, though he was poorly marked on the play.

The Revolution actually went up 2-1 in the 46^th minute on a Milton Caraglio goal, courtesy of another Feilhaber assist. But of course they couldn’t hold the lead, and were in fact fortunate to get the tie, as Toronto was still on the front foot after pulling level in the 83^rd minute. In the 89^th, Zerka, Feilhaber, and Caraglio were all in the final third with the ball, seemingly poised to create a game-winning chance, but no. They were all too obviously spent.

Enough about the Toronto game. I hope Nicol is able to forget it, and most of this season, when he looks back on his long and mostly successful coaching career in New England.

Revolution at Portland Timbers, 9.16.11: Building from the Back

Many years ago I read one of John Madden’s books about football (I suppose I should say “American football”). In one interesting passage, Madden recollected his time as Oakland Raiders head coach. Madden would sometimes get into friendly arguments with his boss, Raiders owner Al Davis, about which is the most important unit on a football team. Madden contended that you build a successful football team around its offensive line, whereas Davis felt that you should build a team around its cornerbacks. Neither man ever wavered in his opinion, though as I recall Madden considered cornerbacks to be the second-most important unit on the field, while Davis considered the offensive line to be the second-most important unit, so they were both pretty much in agreement. (Fascinating that the position of quarterback, let alone running back or wide receiver, never entered the argument.)

I thought about Madden and Davis’s old argument last night while watching a replay of the Portland Timbers’ 3-0 defeat of the New England Revolution in Portland. (The game actually took place last Friday). How do you best build a soccer team? Do you start with the midfield line? With the forwards? With the back line? With the goalkeeper? Which of those units is most important to a team’s success?

I happen to think the answer is defense. Let me digress just a moment and say that I’ve always taken the old soccer adage about “building from the back” to refer to what happens during games. That is, I’ve understood “building from the back” to mean that effective buildups—and eventually goals— start with a good defense, with defenders that can defend and effectively distribute. But maybe I’ve misinterpreted the old saying. Maybe it actually means that you build good teams by first installing a good defense and then by building around that particular unit, just as Madden thought that you build a good football team by first assembling a good offensive line.

Whatever “building from the back” means, anyone who has ever coached soccer at any level will know that a team’s chances of winning a game are grim if that team plays with even a single bad defender. I’d argue that New England’s dismal record this year (5-12-12 so far) can be attributed to a constantly changing and often below-average back line. It’s not that all of New England’s defenders are bad—they’re most certainly not—but the unit has had a near-constantly changing lineup, and it is missing a true left back.

Let’s start with the positive. Two of New England’s defensive starters this season have been good and for the most part injury free: center back A.J. Soares and right back Kevin Alston. They are dependable, but it should be noted that they lack experience; Soares is a 22-year-old rookie and Alston is still only 23.

As I’ve mentioned, the other positions along New England’s back line have been in a near-constant state of change. Darrius Barnes, only 24, has been mostly dependable this year. But he’s a central defender repeatedly miscast as left back. (He does occasionally get to play in the center, but that’s usually because would-be central defenders Ryan Cochrane and/or Franco Coria are unavailable.) Didier Domi was a natural left back—and might have spared Barnes the task of playing out of position—but Domi was old, often injured, and is in any event now long gone from New England’s roster. Chris Tierney prefers to play midfield, but he’s sometimes pressed into service at left back. The same can be said of newcomer Ryan Guy. I’m no doubt forgetting other players who have been asked to play left back this year for the Revolution, but it should be clear that the position has yet to be adequately filled.

As for the center back position, Cochrane and Coria have been inconsistent alongside the steady Soares. Last night, for instance, Coria had one of the most perplexing unforced errors I’ve seen by a Revolution player this year. In the 72^nd minute, with no pressure on him whatsoever, he tried to switch the field of play and his pass flew over Alston’s head and out of bounds. Alston appeared to stare back at Coria in disbelief. Dude, he might have been thinking, aren’t you from Argentina? And Cochrane—a native of Portland who presumably desperately wanted to play in front of his hometown crowd— didn’t even get on the field despite the back line’s poor performance in the first half.

Top to bottom, the New England starting lineup against Portland on Friday was actually a pretty good one. A midfield consisting of Benny Feilhaber, Shalrie Joseph, Chris Tierney, and Monsef Zerka is probably above average by MLS standards (though Zerka is still not in shape and was obviously exhausted after an hour of play in Portland). New England’s striker tandem of Milton Caraglio and Rajko Lekic is also respectable, though I’d like to see a lot more hustle when defending by both of them, particularly Lekic. And of course Matt Reis is a virtual MLS living legend. He’s leading the league in saves and generally having a stellar year even by his standards; the Revs’ problems have nothing to do with him. No, the Revolution’s problem is its back line.

New England coach Steve Nicol said it himself after the Portland game: “Our back four in the first half, that's why we lost the game tonight.” In fact, that’s why the Revolution have consistently lost all year long. Playing regularly with only two dependable defenders—and both of those young and inexperienced—is a recipe for a lost season. The back line in soccer is a lot like the offensive line in football that John Madden considered so vital to any successful team. Just like football offensive lines, soccer defenses must not only play well at the individual level, they must—more than any other unit on the soccer field—learn to play in concert, to communicate, to ensure that no attacker is left unmarked, to know when to clear the ball and when to settle it and make the short pass, when to make an overlapping run and when to maintain position, when to hold the line to create an offside call and when to sprint back and get between an attacker and the goal, and on and on.

Revolution management has made a great start building the team’s defense by drafting Soares and Alston. Coria is yet another youngster at 23, and he may yet work out for the Revs. He’s big and strong and good in the air. It’s conceivable that current emergency left back Barnes may move inside permanently, rotating with Coria and Soares. This would make sense. One of the Fox commentators of the Portland match made the good point that Barnes simply doesn’t like to play with his left foot and is incapable of making effective overlapping runs from the left side, as Alston does on the right. It’s tough to be a good soccer team if both of your outside backs aren’t comfortable making those attacking runs.

Management no doubt thought it could stabilize this year’s young defense by bringing in Domi and Cochrane, but that plan has failed. Domi has been jettisoned, and at 28, Cochrane is probably not in the Revolution’s long-term plans either. But whether Cochrane is here next year or not—and God knows they could use his experience—there is still a glaring hole at left back. This hole must be filled in the offseason unless the Revolution want to see continued declines in wins and attendance and a continued increase in on-field chaos.

Revolution at Sporting Kansas City, 7.30.11 (A Game for Albert Haynesworth to Watch)

The Revolution’s recent strong showings against D.C. United and the Colorado Rapids carried over into the first half of this game, which ended with New England ahead 1-0 and (shockingly given their recent statistics in this area) virtually even with Kansas City in terms of time of possession. The Revolution showed good form early on, including a nifty give-and-go between Rajko Lekic and Shalrie Joseph in the 9^th minute that led to a scorching attempt by Joseph. Thirty minutes later, Lekic took advantage of a Kansas City defensive miscue to give New England the advantage. He ran onto a long clearance from Matt Reis that skipped over the head of Kansas City’s Matt Besler. Lekic positioned his body perfectly between the ball and the beaten defender and then used the outside of his right foot to bury the shot far post. He celebrated by running to the sideline and making a sweeping motion with his hand, as if indicating the exquisiteness of his craftsmanship. Given the quality of the goal, the gesture wasn’t overdone.

In the second half, things fell apart for the Revs, and Sporting KC dominated the run of play. Kansas City held the ball 65% of the time over the course of the entire match, remarkable given that they held the ball a modest 51% of the time in the first half. But despite their second-half dominance, it seemed for much of the night as if Sporting KC were destined to lose. They failed to finish time and again, a pattern set early in the second half when ex-Revolution defender Seth Sinovic biffed a wide-open shot over the crossbar. But Kansas City persisted, throwing everything they could at the Revolution in an attempt to equalize. They showed the depth of their roster by subbing in Omar Bravo in the 56^th minute, Teal Bunbury in the 80^th, and Birahim Diop in the 88^th.

Bravo, Bunbury, and teammates Kei Kamara, C. J. Sapong, and Jeferson all looked impressive in the second half, but it wasn’t until the 89^th minute that Kansas City actually managed to score. Bunbury got the goal, which was fitting given that it came on Teal Bunbury bobble-head-doll night at LIVESTRONG [sic] Sporting Park. It was a garbage goal, a rebound that fell to Bunbury’s feet at the six. After putting the ball into the net, Bunbury ran to the flag, smacked his head with his palm, and bobbled his head around for the fans—a man imitating a doll that represented the man. The semiotics majors in the crowd must have loved it, but for Revolution fans it was painful to watch, particularly knowing the Revolution had just let two crucial points slip away. If the Revs don’t make the playoffs—and the standings indicate that they probably won’t—they may look back on Bunbury’s goal as the season’s death knell.

There were other painful moments for Revolution fans over the course of the game. Benny Feilhaber had two inexcusably bad giveaways in the 6^th and 12^th minutes and then wasted a corner kick in the 30^th minute when he lofted the ball into the top of the net, as if performing a parlor trick. Zack Schilawski extinguished a nice Revolution build-up in the 7^th minute by needlessly sailing a one-time pass from the wing to no one, and then in the 51^st minute he lost the ball off a wretched touch. Schilawski’s lack of skill on the ball against Sporting KC was apparently contagious, as his replacement Sainey Nyassi (who came on in the 72^nd minute) simply and rather pathetically gave the ball away on two separate occasions while trying to run at and juke defenders, once in the 75^th minute and then again in stoppage time.

But that’s nitpicking. With the recent departures of Marko Perovic, Ilija Stolica, Didier Domi, and Ousmane Dabo, the Revolution’s current roster has all the depth of a baby-pool. Against Kansas City, the roster situation started bad and got progressively worse. First, the Revs had to play without the versatile Chris Tierney due to a red card in the previous match. Second, Stephen McCarthy had to leave the game in the 34^th minute due to a shoulder injury incurred while getting fouled. Third, iron-man Kevin Alston had to come off in the 74^th minute due to a re-aggravated turf-toe injury. Fourth, A. J. Soares was given a straight red card in the 82^nd minute for tackling Sapong from behind just outside the box. At that point, the Revs were basically operating with only two true defenders—Franco Coria in the center and Darrius Barnes on the left.

The Revolution limped through the game’s conclusion using new midfielder Ryan Guy in Alston’s right back spot, moved Barnes inside to play alongside Coria, and dropped winger Kenny Mansally back into Barnes’s spot. Given the circumstances, Steve Nicol had little choice but to make these moves. But given the importance of the match and the minimal time left on the clock when Soares was carded, I would have liked to have seen Joseph—the Revolution’s best player in the air and best at winning fifty-fifty balls—take Soares’s center-back position, leaving Barnes on the outside. That point’s academic, though. After Soares left the game, you could just sense Kansas City was going to equalize.

Alston’s performance against Kansas City merits special mention. He came into the game with an injured toe, and in the 13^th minute Sapong stepped on that toe very hard. Though in obvious pain, Alston stayed with the play, won back the ball, and remained in the match for as long as he could physically stand to do so, almost until the end.

New England Revolution and Patriots owner Robert Kraft might do well to show his shiny new Patriot acquisition Albert Haynesworth a video of Alston’s gritty effort as an example of a particularly dedicated and hard-working member of the Kraft Group in action. Kraft might also inform Haynesworth that Alston’s base salary is a modest $100,000. Kraft might have to explain—perhaps with the use of simple diagrams—that Alston gets paid $100,000 per season, not per play. American football fans will remember that Haynesworth fleeced his previous employers—the Washington Redskins—when he signed a $100 million contract in 2009, then proceeded to record a grand total of 43 tackles in his two sorry years in Washington. (Incidentally, Alston grew up in D.C., and his uncle Mitchell Johnson played for the Redskins. I wouldn’t expect Kraft to go into all that.)

MLS and Media Coverage

A friend of mine who directs the Center for Court Innovation in New York City (and who writes a varied and excellent blog) lamented in an email to me this week that his two favorite sports leagues—the English Premier League and the NBA—are dormant. I suggested now might be the time for him to turn his attention to the New York Red Bulls. He wrote back that the Red Bulls are playing some frustrating soccer lately, letting opponents back into games and settling for draws. He also noted that the New York papers don’t regularly cover the team.

His last observation reminded me of how important media coverage is to almost all sports fans, whether they’re highly educated professionals who read the New York Times or tradespeople who read the New York Post. No one wants to follow a sports team in a cultural vacuum. Simply watching the games isn’t enough for most us. We want to read about the team in the local paper, watch analyses of the team on TV shows, listen to commentary about the team on sports radio. This kind of coverage leads to more personal social exchanges: barstool and water-cooler talk, exchanges of opinions between friends over email, blog posts, etc.

I grew up around Washington, D.C., and after I moved to Boston I used to watch Redskins games by satellite at a Brighton pub. This was in the days before the Internet, and one particular fellow Skins fan would usually show up with a fat Washington Post under his arm, purchased at a premium from the old Out of Town News in Harvard Square. He would kindly let other Skins fans read the sports section. The sports section of the Post seen outside the D.C. area had a numinous aspect to me back then, even if it was a week old (as it usually was). My God, I used to think when I went to the pub, I can read about the Redskins! And talk about them with other informed individuals! To repeat: reading and exchanging ideas are crucial aspects of the fan experience and almost as much fun as watching the games themselves. (Actually, watching those Charmin-soft Norv Turner-coached teams was often torture compared to reading and talking about them.)

If we accept this as true, then the continuing lack of MLS-related coverage in traditional media outlets is a serious impediment for most potential fans. To take a recent example of skimpy MLS coverage, I found out today that last year’s Revolution MVP—the injured Marko Perovic—is no longer a member of the team. (And unfortunately neither is fellow Serbian Ilija Stolica.) On June 30, Revolution management chose not to renew Perovic’s contract, which seems a rather ruthless thing to do to an injured former star. I discovered this from the MLS website, which referenced a post from The Bent Musket blog about Perovic’s release. I then went to the Boston Globe’s/boston.com’s Revolution section homepage, where there is currently no link to any article about Perovic. This is borderline amazing; surely New England’s decision not to renew its MVP’s contract must be the biggest Revolution-related story of the last seven days, if not the entire sorry season? (I eventually found a July 1 Globe article about Perovic’s release by Googling it.)

Imagine if the contract of last year’s Patriots or Red Sox MVP was not renewed? Seemingly everyone in the Boston area would be talking about it, and there would certainly be wide, long-lasting coverage in newspapers, on sports radio, and on TV. Yet when the Revolution actually do lose their skillful, still-young, and productive MVP—a real blow to New England sports, in my opinion—no one seems to care. Kudos to the Globe for reporting on it at all, but one would have thought that Perovic and Stolica both essentially getting cut from the team would warrant more than one 400-word article (with no picture) that’s quickly dropped from the website’s soccer section. (By the way, this paltry media coverage can work to a fan’s advantage in one important way: there is virtually no need to impose a personal media blackout if you plan to watch an MLS game on your DVR or your computer after the game has been played.)

Blaming the media—itself an old phrase, at least as old as the Viet Nam war—is almost always a mug’s game. Newspapers, radio, and TV cover sports teams insofar as they think doing so will generate an audience and therefore ad revenue. The Globe doesn’t have extensive Revolution coverage not because it’s a backward or inept organization, but because its editors are running a business and they think there’s no demand for extensive MLS coverage. It’s hard to argue with them, given the poor attendance at Revolution home games and what I take to be a general lack of interest in MLS among my own Boston-area friends and acquaintances. 

Still, given rising league-wide MLS attendance, widespread and increasing American interest in the World Cup and other international soccer competitions and foreign leagues, and potential readers/viewers/listeners like my New York friend and me, traditional news outlets may be underestimating demand and missing an opportunity by not devoting more of their resources to covering MLS.

Revolution v. Sporting Kansas City, 4.23.11

Benny Feilhaber made his debut for the Revolution against Kansas City and had a good game, making a number of impressive one-time passes in the quick, thoughtful-yet-instinctive manner of the natural athlete. Watching Feilhaber, it was hard for me, having grown up watching American football, not to think of Dan Marino and his famous (or if you prefer clichéd) “quick release,” in which there is almost no time between the passer seeing an open receiver and the passer’s body delivering the ball.

Feilhaber’s most memorable play came in the 12^th minute when he set up Marko Perovic with a backwards pass near the top of the box. Perovic’s blistering left-footed strike gave the Revs’ the first goal of the game. That goal came off a series of passes between Perovic, Feilhaber and Rajko Lekic. Those three players and Didier Domi—three of them newcomers this season—give the Revs an impressive quartet of skilled players. They all contributed to this 3-2 come-from-behind win, which may be cause for optimism for the Revolution. The players themselves certainly looked genuinely happy after the win. I was almost jealous of their display of camaraderie as they left the field. You don’t experience that kind of backslapping exhilaration after sitting behind a desk all day, even if you get your “deliverable” in on time.

My man Domi, I’m afraid, didn’t have a great game. KC’s first goal, a low strike to the near post, looked to me like the result of lackadaisical play by the Revs’ left back. And later in the game Domi carelessly gave away a ball near midfield that nearly led to another KC goal. More proof that foot skills don’t mean much unless they’re matched with hustle and concentration.

One Revs’ player who will probably never be accused of dogging it is Domi’s defensive mate A.J. Soares. Soares is remarkably composed and solid in the center, pairing with either the big Argentine Franco Coria or the equally solid MLS veteran Ryan Cochrane. I don’t recall Soares making a single costly error this season, and he has laudable fire. I wonder if Tim Ream, the up-and-coming Red Bulls and national team central defender, is looking over his shoulder at Soares?

But I mentioned Ryan Cochrane, another hardnosed Revolution defender. When I first saw him play this year I thought to myself, “Who is this guy that looks exactly like every saloon keeper I’ve ever seen portrayed on screen in a Western movie?” Cochrane’s saloon-keeper look has a little to do with his close-cropped hair and laconic on-field demeanor, and a hell of a lot more to do with his large and dense mustache, which looks like something a fur trapper might sling over his shoulder and take down to the local trading post. I felt smugly pleased with my powers of observation until the announcers began making frequent references to the numinous 'stache, even indicating that it has a number of fans and its own Twitter account. That brought me down to earth.

Revolution v. Real Salt Lake, 4.9.11

There comes a moment watching any sporting event when the fan will think, or rather instinctively know, that one team has zero chance of winning. That moment may come during the first minute, at the final whistle, or at any point in between. After watching the Revolution fall behind 1-0 early against Real Salt Lake, then fail to get a serious shot on goal against what amounted to RSL’s B-team, the Revs’ certain fate dawned on me in the 45th minute. The epiphany didn’t come about as a result of a single dramatic play, but rather through a slow and steady demonstration of one team’s superiority over the other. I almost felt pleased with my firm grasp of soccer reality a minute or so into the second half when RSL went up 2-0 off a world-class strike by Paulo Jr. The game really was over at that point.

Real Salt Lake may not be a match for a top-flight La Liga club, as its somewhat absurd and pretentious name suggests, but it may be the best club MLS has to offer, as evidenced by its recent run to the CONCACAF champions’ league final and its current gaudy MLS record. They move the ball well, often stringing passing together in tight spaces, and they close quickly defensively all over the field.

Apart from the dreadlocked and charismatic Kyle Beckerman, who baited fellow dreadlock-wearer Shalrie Joseph into a dubious red card late in the second half of this game, and the recently seriously injured Javier Morales, RSL doesn’t have much star power, just remarkably solid players who work professionally together.

Watching Salt Lake play, I was reminded of a quote by former NFL linebacker Matt Millen about the Super Bowl-winning 1991 Washington Redskins, for whom Millen played after championship stints with similarly excellent Raiders and 49ers teams. Millen said that he thought of all team rosters as being comprised of players that could each be ranked on a scale of 1 to 10. He contended that he’d played on teams with more 10s than those ’91 Redskins, but that he’d never played on a team with more 8s. I suspect that RSL’s roster is similarly stocked with MLS-standard 8s. Maybe the only downside of building a team like RSL is that while such a team may generate wins and even championships, it doesn’t necessarily generate league-wide fan excitement and it is seldom widely remembered in the years following its inevitable decline. Few people today, for example, would rank those 1991 Redskins as one of the NFL’s best-ever teams. (But those of us who followed them religiously think we know better.)