by 2002 Soccer ReCap
Another year of soccer and although I didn’t get to see as much MLS soccer as I would have liked, thanks to the miracle that is TIVO I saw just about all of the Korea/Japan World Cup. There’s not much you can add about the World Cup: a great cup, dramatic upsets, a solid final between two futbol giants and a nice performance from Ronaldo that caps his return from the still bizarre disaster of a performance in the France 1998 final. The United States made tremendous strides at the Cup.
What’s interesting is the MLS season where from what I can gather the league’s quality of play continued to improve and the league’s popularity for the most part remained stable. Which is not necessarily enough as it clearly would be better for MLS to increase attendance and television ratings share. We’re heading into the play-offs for MLS this week which may or may not be on tv. They start this Wednesday though with Colorado versus Dallas (safe pick – Dallas to win that series); Los Angeles versus Kansas City (LA will win); Columbus versus San Jose (SJ, of course) and on Thursday with Chicago versus New England (NE, just because you got to have one upset prediction).
DC UNITED had another horribly frustrating year. With new coach Ray Hudson though, the year feels somewhat positive though and I am much more optimistic about the teams future than under Rongen. Looking back on the season there were a few highlights. DC United opened its 2002 campaign with a non-MLS home and home against Comuniccacion of Guatemala. We got screwed in Guat and brought home a solid victory in RFK. If the CONCACAF could actually run a tournament where anyone cared who won (And if FIFA could get its stuff together on the alleged CLUB WORLD CUP it keeps scheduling and canceling) I might care we got eliminated. We almost hired Gazza, former English superstar and world class hooligan. And we were largely responsible for bumping the MetroScum from the play-offs by defeating them twice at the end of the season. I’m still disappointed we missed the play-offs, because it’s just about impossible to do that in the MLS. Hopefully the third year missing the play-offs will lead to MLS giving DC United a “you suck” allocation for next year. I’m not sure what the answer is – I hope Ray Hudson gets enough time to really mold the squad this time around and the club gives him free rein for another year to get DC back into the play-offs.
Germans Invent Offsides Computer
This is such a fantastic idea. As several of my buddies can attest I have pestered them with discussions of such a system for at least a year. Of course I haven’t spent 7 million to actually put it into place. If this allows referees to properly call offsides at the highest levels of the game I think we might see a true renaisance in scoring as the great offensive players of the world will be freed up to push defenses as never before.
