Ridge Mahoney examines San Jose’s options
[MLS EXPANSION DRAFT] There’s a sprinkling of good players available in Wednesday’s expansion draft, as well as a few quirks regarding mechanisms thereof.
Brandon Haynes scored two goals in overtime to give Raleigh Broughton High School a 3-2 win over Greensboro Grimsley in the North Carolina High School Athletic Association boys 4-A final Saturday night and claim the No. 1 ranking in the final NSCAA/adidas Boys Fall Rankings, ahead of Indiana’s Evansville Reitz Memorial. Broughton finished the year with 27 wins in a row to repeat as state champion. For the final Top 25 …
A hat trick by Alaina Beyar and a goal by Megan Votke gave Rockville Centre South Side High School a 4-2 win over Pittsford Menton for its fourth straight New York Class A title and finish No. 1 in the NSCAA/adidas Girls Fall Rankings. Immaculate Heart Academy, the No. 1 in recent weeks, lost to Gloucester Catholic High School, 3-0, in New Jersey’s Non-Public Group A state championship. For the final Top 25 …
Key matches — including England-Croatia, Spain-Northern Ireland and Portugal-Finland — will be available on cable or pay-per-view on the final day of qualifying for the Euro ’08 finals.
[WORLD CUP QUALIFYING] Unbeaten Colombia came back from a first-half deficit to hand Argentina a 2-1 loss, its first defeat in South American World Cup 2010 qualifying, and set off wild celebrations Tuesday in Bogota.. The Argentines had to play the last 65 minutes with 10 players after Manchester United star Carlos Tevez was red carded. Venezuela also rallied from a goal down to beat Bolivia, 5-3, in a game that turned when Bolivia’s Carlos Arias was injured but had to remain in goal because his team had made all its substitutions.
Steve McClaren pulled a Greg Ryan Wednesday night. But unlike the Ryan, who lasted 25 days as U.S. women’s coach after his team’s 4-0 loss to Brazil following his decision to switch goalies, McClaren lasted all of about 12 hours after England’s shocking 3-2 loss to Croatia at Wembley before the FA dumped him as coach. Like Ryan, McClaren switched goalies with disastrous effect. But similarities between Ryan’s U.S. women and McClaren’s England don’t end there.
“The pitch is no good and not in the condition that Wembley used to be known for.”
— Croatia coach Slaven Bilic, criticizing the Wembley Stadium grass field before his team’s match against England in Euro ’08 qualifying. The field took a beating recently because of an NFL game between the New York Giants and Miami Dolphins and heavy rains. (BBC)
[MAKING A LIST] MLS Cup is headed back to the Home Depot Center for the third time. MLS announced that the 2008 final would be played at the Carson, Calif., stadium on Nov. 23. RFK Stadium, site of MLS Cup 2007, is only other other existing stadium to host the final three times.
Pat Onstad, Craig Waibel, Ryan Cochrane, starters on the Houston Dynamo’s 2007 MLS Cup championship team, are among the players left protected for Wednesday’s expansion draft in which the San Jose Earthquakes will take 10 players.
According to a source, New York Red Bull has asked, and been refused, permission to talk to Fire head coach Juan Carlos Osorio. But that’s not the end of it, not by a long shot.
MLS teams won’t have the option of adding a second Designated Player next year unless they trade for another team’s slot. The league’s Board of Governors rejected a proposal to add a second DP slot per team next year, perhaps because only four teams used the mechanism in 2007, and also because too much of a thing that might turn out to be good is not good.
In the last 18 months, Pachuca won the 2006 Mexican Clausura, 2006 Copa Sudamericana, 2007 CONCACAF Champions Cup, 2007 Mexican Clausura and 2007 SuperLiga, but the Tuzos have finally run out of gas.
“We all feel the same, that we don’t feel respected. Players had to take unpaid leave and some are now not able to sustain training because they don’t have the time because of the money lost in China. We are all grateful that we went to the World Cup but realistically we can’t sustain the level of progress because of employment issues.”
— Forward Eniola Aluko on the travails of players on the England national team that reached the quarterfinals of the Women’s World Cup in September. Since returning home, players say they have been unable to train properly since they have to work overtime to make up for lost wages while representing England in China, where they were paid only 40 pounds ($80) a day. (BBC Sport)
[ISRAEL-RUSSIA] There was gloom and doom last month when England fell to Russia, 2-1, compromising its chances of reaching the Euro ’08 finals. It was all but conceded that England wouldn’t be going — one report calculated the cost to the FA of not making the Euro ’08 finals at tens of millions of dollars — but it was based on the assumption Russia would beat Israel in Tel Aviv. A mistaken assumption, indeed.
[SOUTH AFRICA-USA] The U.S. national team finished 2007 on a winning note with a 1-0 win over World Cup 2010 host South Africa Saturday in the Nelson Mandela Challenge Cup. A well-constructed goal by right back Steve Cherundolo highlighted a solid first-half performance by the United States, which finished the year with a 12-5-1 record.
[USA-SOUTH AFRICA GRADES] Soccer America’s Paul Kennedy grades the U.S. players’ performance in their 1-0 victory at South Africa on Saturday.
Six more teams qualified for the Euro ’08 finals. Poland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands all clinched with wins, while Croatia, a 2-0 loser at Macedonia, and idle France both qualified thanks to the other results in their respective groups on Saturday.
[WORLD CUP HEADLINERS/VIDEO] Thanks in large part to Juan Pablo Riquelme, Argentina remained perfect in World Cup qualifying. Riquelme and Brazil’s Kaka made highlight reels around the world with exquisite strikes. Ecuador, a World Cup finalist in 2002 and 2006, is pointless at the bottom of South America’s 10-team competition after a 5-1 loss to Paraguay that cost Coach Luis Suarez his job.
Ridge Mahoney reporting from MLS Cup ’07
[Video] Houston maintained the status quo, and so did New England. The Dynamo is still a team that can win the final and the Revs aren’t. Joseph Ngwenya and Dwayne DeRosario scored to erase a 1-0 Revs halftime lead provided by Taylor Twellman‘s third playoff goal and retain the MLS Cup, 2-1, before a crowd of nearly 40,000 at RFK Stadium.
[MLS CUP ’07 GRADES] Soccer America’s Ridge Mahoney grades the Houston and New England players who took part in the Dynamo’s 2-1 win on Sunday.
[MLS BEST XI] Three first-year players — MVP Luciano Emilio (D.C. United), Juan Pablo Angel (New York) and Guillermo Barros Schelotto (Columbus) — are among the players named to annual MLS Best XI, its all-league team determined by equal voting from the media, MLS players and MLS coaches and general managers.
Argentina, Paraguay and Colombia won South America qualifiers over the weekend. Singapore, Syria, Thailand and Turkmenistan clinched berths in Asia’s group stage.Featuring MLS players Andrew Boyens and Duncan Oughton in the starting lineup, New Zealand escaped from Vanuatu with a 2-1 win on a stoppage-time goal in Oceania qualifying. For all the results and standings …
“It was a tale of two halves. In the first half, we outplayed them. We had quality chances. In the second half, we bunkered in and just didn’t get the job done.”
— New England star Taylor Twellman, bemoaning the Revs’ approach after they blew a 1-0 halftime lead and lost to the Houston Dynamo, 2-1, in the MLS Cup final.
[SCOTLAND-ITALY] They call it the Hampden Roar. In the old days, when the capacity of Glasgow’s Hampden Park exceeded 100,000, it was said the roar of the crowd could be heard for miles. The capacity of Hampden has been cut to a more modest 52,000, but the Hampden Roar was supposed to be Scotland’s home-field advantage when it took the field Saturday night in its decisive Euro ’08 qualifier against Italy.
Euro 2008 qualifying concludes Saturday with a full slate of games. Ten qualifiers will be available on U.S. cable or pay-per-view, most notably Scotland-Italy and Israel-Russia.
