Author Archives: Paul Gardner

Listening in as coaches accuse each other of dirty tactics is a fascinating, if ultimately frustrating, exercise. If only because you know that while Coach A may today be accusing Coach B of encouraging roughhouse play, it won’t be long before Coach A will be accused of the same crime by Coach C, while Coach B will be finding the same fault with Coach D.

The first good thing about the MLS playoffs was that the Colorado Rapids didn’t qualify. I say that intending no disrespect for their players, but as a harsh criticism of the style and tactics adopted by their interim coach Gary Smith — the dreaded survival soccer that I excoriated here a couple of weeks back.

Preposterous! Diego Maradona the coach of Argentina? What can they be thinking? The guy has virtually no coaching experience, after all — so does this make any sense?

So the Beckham saga — if that’s what it is — staggers on, Failure after failure, mistake piled upon mistake, a farcical sequence of laughable bumblings and ineptitudes that have long since blotted out the basic fact that Beckham came here to play soccer and — his words — to help “make the sport as popular here as it is in the rest of the world.”

It is utterly perverse, and quite typical of soccer, that the French — the only country with a national anthem worth listening to — should come up with this choice example of utter buffoonery: if, when the anthem, La Marseillaise, is being played before a soccer game, someone boos, then the upcoming game should immediately be called off.

Well, well, there was I thinking that Jon Conway and Jeff Parke were just two average guys putting in average performances for the Red Bulls every week. Heavens, was I wrong! Turns out these guys are dangerous types, real desperados. Just listen to what they’ve been up to: they’re guilty of buying, and then ingesting, a dietary supplement. Gulp. As if that isn’t bad enough, they might even be in cahoots, so there may even have been a conspiracy to feast on dietary supplements. Gulp, gulp.

I suppose you could argue that Toronto coach John Carver had an excuse for making an ass of himself at the end of the Dallas vs. Toronto game on Saturday. His team, denuded by international call-ups, had played a remarkable game in Dallas and with only one minute left, was heading for an unlikely 2-1 win.

Survival soccer. An English term, of course. They invented it to describe the abysmal stuff played at the end of each season by the bottom clubs in all the divisions — the clubs that are trying, desperately, not to get relegated.

Michel Platini has had a vision that he finds unacceptable. He sees an English soccer club — Liverpool — with “an Arab sheikh as president, a Brazilian coach and nine or 11 African players.” He asks: “Where is Liverpool in that?” English clubs, he says, risk “losing their identity. We have to make some rules.”

Edward Grayson, a lawyer who died in London last week, was a problem person for the sport of soccer. He specialized in sports law — indeed, was the pioneer in the field. His book “Sport and the Law” has marched on through four editions, and is the definitive work on the subject.

Admittedly, there was reason to wonder whether Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger was in full possession of his faculties this past weekend. His team had been sensationally upended by Hull City — at home, in Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, no less. A result that ought to have been impossible, but there it was — Hull City, a newly promoted club, playing its first-ever season in the top league, with a bunch of players who can be politely described as non-household names — and they’d got the better of mighty Arsenal.

There is a campaign going on in the English Premier League this season inviting its players to show respect toward referees. Inviting — not commanding — it would be difficult to enforce anything as vague as showing respect.

Well, well, now here’s a surprise. On Tuesday evening, Middlesbrough’s Austrian midfielder Emmanuel Pogatetz committed an awful studs-up foul! On the receiving end of this shining example of how Pogatetz believes soccer should be played was Manchester United’s young Brazilian Rodrigo Possebon, who was making his first-team debut for the club. He ended up in the hospital where initial fears that he might have suffered a broken leg were happily proved to be wrong.

LONDON — Here are three things that I have been banging on about for decades now, three straightforward things that could quickly and easily be introduced into soccer. By a freakish coincidence, examples of all three have featured prominently during the past week.

English referee Mark Halsey is in trouble — when he should be receiving some sort of award for making a brave game decision. What Halsey did, this past weekend, was to red-card John Terry — the Chelsea and England captain.

LONDON — A weekend of World Cup qualifiers, with most of the world’s top teams taking aim at the greatest global sporting event. High  excitement then, great soccer?  Please, get your feet back on the ground.

There was a decidedly familiar air to Bruce Arena’s words as he made his first move at the Galaxy: “Unfortunately … in order to bring Eddie [Lewis] to the Galaxy we were required to make salary budget space available and our only available option was to move Carlos [Ruiz] …”

A weekend simply stuffed full of TV soccer, impossible to watch it all, both because of overlaps and because soccer-fatigue sets in sooner or later. Of the 16 games available over two days, the pick of the bunch, no doubt about that, was the first one, early on Saturday: the Olympic semifinal between Brazil and Cameroon. And, wouldn’t you know, this plum, this sure-fire barn-burner, turned out to be the worst game I saw.

The Olympic Dream — this distracting chimera that American soccer inflicts upon itself every four years — is over. Once again, it has ended in failure. A lot of time and money and effort has been spent — slap-bang, one has to notice, in the middle of the MLS season — and there is absolutely nothing to show for it.

It’s odd how the idea of entertaining soccer has become almost a dirty word, or a dirty two words. Try mentioning it any soccer discussion and you’re quite likely to get trashed as — take your choice — a romantic, a purist, a wimp, a know-nothing or just a plain idiot. Entertaining soccer, bah — the very idea!

Don’t rely on anything in soccer. Whenever you think you’ve got the sport sorted out, it strikes back with a sly sucker punch that flattens your theories. Just one year ago, the SuperLiga was a success at every level — good games, good soccer, good crowds, good atmosphere — and a good USA vs. Mexico (Galaxy vs. Pachuca) final. This year, things have been rather different. For a start the Mexicans have not exactly covered themselves with glory. Both their semifinalists — Atlante and Pachuca — turned inexcusably nasty at the end of their games. There can be no excuse for the way their players behaved in the face of defeat.

There was good news and there was not-so-good news to report from the MLS All-Star Game. Mostly it was good news. The soccer was good — attractive, attacking stuff, with five goals to show for it — and the sunshine, the color and the lively fans produced a terrific atmosphere. Everything combined to give — at least visually — a sparkling telecast.