MATCH REPORTS
On Solutions and Bad Teeth
June 07, 2007
By Aaron Stollar
This is going to be a rambles column in order for me to catch up with all my thoughts. My intent with this column was to write regularly - ahem, it hasn't been going that way - and I apologize.
I am deeply, deeply unhappy with DC United right now but I am going to keep it brief because I don't want to get into another discussion about why this guy keeps ripping United on a supporters' club website. But let me get into it briefly. Was the nil-nil snoozer that was DC v. Los Angeles last Saturday worth aggravating my girlfriend, spending money at a bar, and losing two hours of my life?
No, not even close.
Until United can find some kind of credible attacking threat from the outside of the field, this team has no chance at progressing deep into the playoffs. They are one part away and as of right now, show no sign of correcting it. I believe the 4-4-2 has helped the team solve its defensive struggles, so that no longer worries me. What worries me is that this team's attack is so one-dimensional as to almost be a parody.
But rather than bitching, I have a solution. I am not intimately familiar with DC's salary cap situation. What I do know is that they do not have a designated player, they have six MLS-caliber central midfielders, and not one MLS-caliber attacking outside midfielder. That, to me, would lead me to think of a DP signing and I believe one is out there for the taking.
Mr. Kaspar, go get DaMarcus Beasley. Go get him now. Pay him what he asks for. Do this now. Beasley is out of favor at PSV, is still a great player, and is a young, exciting, marketable African-American face for this team. He also has personal ties to United, making it even more likely he would accept an offer from the team and MLS.
This is a big splash, the kind United doesn't typically make, especially for American players. But right now this team needs Beasley. They need a dangerous attacking player who will force defenses and midfielders to spread out across the field rather than just crowd around Gomez and Moreno in the middle of the field. Signing Beasley wouldn't solve all the problems this team has, but it would go a long way in doing so.
But enough about DC, who, by the way, don't stand a chance in Youngstown of beating New York. I want to complain about England and our attitudes towards it.
I will put this simply: if I hear one more American soccer fan swoon towards anything and everything British, I will scream. American fans need to get their heads out of Good ‘Ol England's collective rump. Fans who say that if MLS were "only more like England, they'd be more interested in it" need to view the Premiership for what it is - a vast repository of great players, misbehaving fans, enormous cash reserves and bad management that is slowly attacking the sport like a blight that attacks from the leaves and digs deep into the root system leaving only a hollow shell.
The fact is that the US and its sports have been ahead of England and Europe in almost every major aspect of sports throughout the last century. All-seater stadiums, we had it first. Live televised games, we had it first. Players unions, we had it first. Free agency, we had it first. Salary caps, we had it first. Revenue sharing, we had it first. I tend to believe that the inequality that has just started to squeeze soccer in Europe will eventually strangle it, leading to UEFA-wide legislation mandating some of those competition initiatives I mentioned above. Then it won't be a matter of MLS stifling itself with a salary cap, it'll be MLS being a visionary by having a salary cap.
Just because something is done in Britain doesn't mean it's better than how we do it in the United States. Promotion and relegation are nice and they do make the conclusion of seasons more exciting, but the risk involved with relegation surely chases away deep-pocketed intelligent investors from smaller clubs and instead allows con artists like Ken Bates, Robert Maxwell and their ilk to send clubs into financial ruin.
This, of course, only solidifies the big clubs' hold on the silverware. By not having promotion and relegation, MLS provides an incentive for an intelligent investor looking to avoid risk to buy a team rather than an incentive for some flat-cap wearing, fake accent-speaking, faux-hoolie poseur nerd from buying a ticket. I'll take the investor over the nerd any day. The nerd can work out his adolescent "Who am I?" issues somewhere else.
This also applies to the media. British soccer commentators are no more knowledgeable about the game than American ones, despite what the BigSoccer poseur brigades will tell you. I listen to BBC Radio 5 almost every day and guess what; they have their own intellectual biases and blind spots just like an American commentator does. I'd take Eric Wynalda over all but one British color commentator (Andy Gray) that I've ever heard. Just because the guy has an accent and excess vowels in his name does not make him smarter than an American commentator. Good is good and smart is smart, whether they spell color with a "u" or not.
I can think of only two writers of British extraction who write about American soccer regularly whose writing is not total nonsense – Ian Plenderleith of The Guardian and ussoccerplayers.com and John Haydon of the Washington Times. Surely there are more, but those are the only two I can think of. Meanwhile, Grahame Jones is a curmudgeon well past his prime and Paul Gardner, who is totally correct when he says US Soccer needs to do a better job integrating Latinos into the game, has harped on this one point for so long that he reminds me of a virtuoso clarinetist who can play the most beautiful "A" anyone in music has ever heard. But you can only listen to "A" for so long before wanting to hear something else. Gardner has long since passed that point.
One of the most important things that can happen is that more Americans (and especially Latinos and minorities) get out there covering soccer and bringing soccer to the public in a way that isn't patronizing or says that you have to be foreign to "get it." There are so many smart Americans out there involved with this sport and I want to see more of them, not more of Tommy Smyth or Ray Hudson.
Not to crib too much from the "Let's be Jamaicans" speech in "Cool Runnings," but American soccer will only ever advance by being American, not by trying to be English or Spanish or Mexican or whatever. The last thing we need is another Brit or European patronizing us. We will only succeed with Americans out there leading the way on field, in the technical areas, and in the press box. Sure we may do it differently than in the "Old World," but throughout history, when Americans have tended to differ from Britain and Europe, America has been right.
You can add democracy to that list of things Americans did first too.
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