“Alecko Eskandarian is in shock. Just found out I got traded from TFC to Real Salt Lake. Definitely did NOT ask for this so I’m pretty devastated right now.”
— Alecko Eskandarian, breaking the news of his trade from Toronto FC to Real Salt Lake on his facebook.com page before the trade was even made public
Filippo Inzaghi repaid AC Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti for his faith in him by leading Milan to a 2-1 victory over Liverpool Wednesday in the UEFA Champions League final. At 33, Inzaghi was considered washed up, having scored just two goals this season for Milan in Serie A, but he matched that total with two goals in the final to give Milan its seventh title in Europe’s most important club competition.
“I tried to take the satellite dish because I wanted to see the Champions League final,” an Italian man told the judge, who showed little sympathy and sentenced the foiled thief to six months in jail and fined him $500. The 46-year-old explained that the Italian Alps near his home in Lecco blocked the terrestrial signal told. But his attempt to remedy the problem by heisting the satellite dish from a campsite went awry when the owner of the campsite restaurant heard him as he tried to detach the equipment.
[REGION I YOUTH CHAMPIONS] Three FC Delco boys teams going to the Region I championship won titles at last weekend’s Eastern Pennsylvania finals. The U-15s followed up on their Region I Premier League title with a 3-0 win over Lower Merion Velez in the EPYSA final. The U-17 Dynamo III needed double overtime to overcome LDC, 2-1. The U-14 Roadkill lead YMS, 4-0. The U-14 Girls Force won the first State Cup of the 2007 season for FC Delco on Saturday by beating Vincent United, 3-1. For Region I state-by-state champions …
[REGION II YOUTH CHAMPIONS] Team Ohio won five boys divisions at the Ohio South championships. On the girls side, Ohio Premier won four titles and had two teams finish second. For Region II state-by-state champions …
[BOYS HIGH SCHOOL RANKINGS] Greenville (S.C.) High School remained the top-ranked boys team in the NSCAA/adidas spring rankings. The Red Raiders won the South Carolina Class AAA state championship with a 3-1 win over Socastee to finish 27-0-0. The difference in the final was two Socastee own goals. Sebastian Velasquez scored the other Greenville goal. No. 2 McIntosh won the Georgia Class AAAA state final with a 2-1 win over Whitewater.
[GIRLS HIGH SCHOOL RANKINGS] Undefeated Apex (N.C.) High School, the No. 1 girls team in the NSCAA/adidas spring rankings, faces New Berlin Wednesday in the semifinals of the North Carolina Class 4-A state championship. The Easterns winner faces the East Forsyth-Monroe Weddington winner in the state final. Top 20 girls teams to have wrapped up state titles include No. 5 Parkview (Georgia Class AAAAA co-champion), No. 12 Vestavia Hills (Alabama 6A) and Eastside (South Carolina Class AAA).
[GOLD CUP ROSTER] Panama, the surprise runner-up at the 2005 Gold Cup, has called up Colorado Rapids striker Roberto Brown for the 2007 Gold Cup. Brown, who played on the 2005 team, was one of nine foreign-based players called up by Coach Alexandre Guimaraes. Panama faces Honduras, Mexico and Cuba in the first round.
Another date has been added to the David Beckham traveling show. The Los Angeles Galaxy will head to Minneapolis on Oct. 10 to face a yet-to-be-named opponent in the Copa Minnesota at the 64,000-seat Metrodome.
Copa Minnesota, organized by the USL’s Minnesota Thunder, is Beckham’s only scheduled U.S. visit to a non-MLS city in 2007, but it will mean Beckham and the Galaxy will play exhibitions on the road on back-to-back Wednesdays just one week before the last week of the MLS regular season.
[TV PREVIEW] Six months ago, no one would have expected Liverpool and AC Milan to be meeting Wednesday in Athens in a remake of their 2005 UEFA Champions League final thriller. Liverpool and Milan had gone so far as to schedule a friendly game in Milan for their respective reserve teams. That game, of course, has been canceled as their “A” teams square off in the 2007 UEFA Champions League final. AC Milan began the 2006-07 season in crisis as it was slapped with an eight-point penalty for the 2006-07 Serie A season because of its role in the widespread Italian match-fixing scandal. Liverpool, for its part, was never in the hunt for the English Premier League title. But as has so often been the case in recent years, the finalists were allowed to concentrate on Europe’s top competition without the distraction of a domestic title race.
Liverpool and AC Milan meet Wednesday in the UEFA Champions League final in Athens. The game is a repeat of the 2005 final Liverpool won on penalty kicks after the Reds trailed, 3-0, at the half. Here’s a look at some of the key figures in this year’s final.
Former FC Dallas coach Colin Clarke has been named the head coach of the USL-1’s Puerto Rico Islanders, replacing Toribio Rojas, who will remain with the Islanders to work in their youth program.
Not all great goalscorers, or great players, think alike. Real Salt Lake has sent striker Jeff Cunningham to Toronto in exchange for Alecko Eskandarian and TFC’s first-round 2008 SuperDraft pick. Despite scoring 94 goals in his MLS career, Cunningham has bounced among several clubs, and his quirky personality doesn’t mesh well with that of Coach Jason Kreis, who has not wavered from the no-nonsense approach that enabled him to set a league record – since tied by Jaime Moreno – of 108 goals. Let’s just say Kreis didn’t ask to wear No. 108 on his jersey this season before deciding to retire and take over as head coach.
Cunningham’s jersey number last year (76) and this season (90) refer to his goalscoring totals. (He’s netted four this year).
“The feeling you get before doing a piano concert and the feeling before refereeing a big match are about the same, actually. You don’t quite know what awaits you, but you prepare yourself in the anticipation that everything will turn out all right on the night.”
— Herbert Fandel, the German concert pianist who will referee the European Champions League final between AC Milan and Liverpool FC in Athens on Wednesday. (uefa.com)
D.C. United, which was invited to take part in the Copa Sudamericana by virtue of its third-place finish in this year’s CONCACAF Champions Cup, will enter the Copa in the round of 16 and face Mexico’s Chivas Guadalajara. It was Chivas that eliminated D.C. United in this year’s Champions Cup semifinal (3-2 on aggregate). In 2005, D.C. United was the first MLS team to participate Copa Sudamericana. It lost in the round of 16, 4-3 on aggregate to Universidad Catolica of Chile.
In Iowa high school soccer, Waterloo West’s boys season came to an abrupt end because of its goalkeeper’s expletive, which was deemed red-card worthy by the referee, according to the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier. Keeper Alex Frank cursed when he gave up a corner kick. Iowa High School Athletic Association rules dictate that a team is disqualified from postseason play if it collects four red cards during the season. Frank’s ejection made it a quartet for the Wahawks and meant a forfeit in the regional game against Dubuque Senior while they were leading, 2-1.
[MAKING A LIST] Neven Subotic, an 18-year-old defender who represented the USA at the 2005 U-17 World Cup, became the youngest American to play in the German Bundesliga when he debuted for Mainz last weekend in a 5-2 loss to Bayern Munich. Subotic, a native of Bosnia, was discovered by the U.S. U-17 coaching staff playing pickup soccer in Bradenton, Fla. The youngest previous Bundesliga debut by an American came from Jovan Kirovski (age 20 in 1996 for Borussia Dortmund). Subotic’s appearance against Bayern came with Mainz already doomed to relegation to the Second Division for the 2007-08 season. He was one of six Americans to see German First Division action this season.
The New York Red Bulls drew another meager crowd (10,321) last weekend and has the second lowest attendance average. Bottom is Kansas City, which like New York is averaging fewer than 10,000 per game. New England’s Taylor Twellman didn’t connect in a 1-0 win over Houston, but remains atop the leading scorers’ list with six strikes. Trailing him are four players with four goals, Ken Cooper (FC Dallas), Maykel Galindo (Chivas USA), Clint Mathis (New York) and Chris Rolfe (Chicago). Mathis, who scored in the 4-0 tout of Columbus, has already scored twice as much as he did all last season for Colorado. In 2005, he scored three times for Real Salt Lake. For up-to-date MLS standings, schedules, leading scorers, attendance and goal-scoring averages …
[IRELAND ROSTER] Notre Dame’s Joseph Lapira, Soccer America’s College Player of the Year and the Hermann Trophy winner in 2006, joined the Ireland national team at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where it is preparing for the first of its two games on its U.S. tour against Ecuador on Wednesday at Giants Stadium. The Irish face Bolivia Saturday in Foxboro, Mass. Lapira led all Division I scorers with 22 goals during the 2006 season. Nicknamed the “Ragin’ Cajun,” the Louisiana product debuted with the PDL’s Baton Rouge Capitals on May 12 and is expected to train at Scottish club Aberdeen later in the summer before the start of his senior season at Notre Dame. Lapira, 20, qualifies to represent Ireland through his mother Kate.
[MAKING A LIST] Foreign nationals and foreign-born players dominated the German Bundesliga scoring charts. Of the players who ranked in the top 10 in First Division scoring, all but one was born abroad, including Germany national team strikers Kevin Kuranyi (born in Brazil) and Miroslav Klose (born in Poland). The only German-born player was 22-year-old Stuttgart sensation Mario Gomez, born in Riedlingen to a Spanish father and German mother.
[PDL RESULTS] The defending PDL champion Michigan Bucks opened their 2007 season with a pair of shutout wins. Khelli Dube scored twice and Nate Jafta scored a goal and added an assist in the 4-0 win over West Michigan. Doug DeMartin and Dube scored in the 2-0 win over Cleveland. St. Louis, Long Island and Carolina are the only teams that are 3-0-0.
[W-LEAGUE RESULTS] The Vancouver Whitecaps needed goals from Canadian internationals Jodi-Ann Robinson and Sophie Schmidt to overcome Seattle, 2-1, before 1,819 fans in their 2007 W-League opener. Erin Redwine had given Seattle the lead in the 25th minute.
“The paintball guns will be one of the weapons the riot police will use in case of fan clashes. They have the double aim of stopping trouble because they are quite painful as well as marking violent fans.”
— Athens police spokesman Panagiotis Stathis reveals security’s secret weapon against hooligans at Wednesday’s European Champions League final clash between Liverpool and AC Milan. About 50,000 Italian and English fans are expected. (Reuters)
Despite posting a 31-17-16 regular-season record in 2005 and 2006 while playing the most skillful soccer in MLS, United hasn’t returned to MLS Cup. United 2007 again features a glittering array of attackers – Christian Gomez, Jaime Moreno, Fred, Luciano Emilio – yet last Saturday it beat Toronto, 2-1, with the bedrock basics it had drifted away from: hard tackles, tenacious defending, fierce marking.
[GOLD CUP ROSTER] Mexico included Chicago Fire signee Cuauhtemoc Blanco in its preliminary squad of 28 players for the CONCACAF Gold Cup and the Copa America on Friday. Hugo Sanchez will take 23 players to each of the tournaments, his first major tests as national team coach. Barcelona star Rafael Marquez is expected to skip the Gold Cup but will play at he Copa America.
