“He came up to me … and said: ‘Listen, you better start learning Spanish’ because I ain’t got a clue.”
— Toronto FC coach Chris Cummins after Honduran Amado Guevara scored twice in TFC’s 3-1 win over New England. The Englishman told Guevara before the game that if he scored two goals his next pre-game talk would be in Spanish.
[MLS NAMES & NUMBERS] The Kansas City Wizards held runaway Western Conference leader Chivas USA to a 1-1 tie Saturday at CommunityAmerica Ballpark despite finishing with just nine players. Seattle’s injury woes continued, while Houston came out ahead of the Earthquakes in the increasingly bitter series between former and current San Jose teams. For the weekend MLS highlights …
[AMERICANS ABROAD] It was a big weekend for Americans abroad as Maurice Edu and Oguchi Onyewu, both U.S. national team players of Nigerian descent, captured European league titles, while Texan Jose Francisco Torres moved closer to winning the Mexican Clausura championship. On the final day of play in England, a pair of Americans were victorious in games that sent Northeast giants Newcastle and Middlesbrough packing from the Premier League
[GERMANY] Before the season, Coach Felix Magath didn’t believe his team his team had a chance of winning, but Wolfsburg won its first Bundesliga title when it beat Werder Bremen, 5-1, on the final day of the season and edged Bayern Munich by two points. Brazilian Grafite scored twice to finish as Bundesliga top scorer with 28 goals and Bosnian Edin Dzeko scored once to finish with 26, making Wolfsburg the first Bundesliga team to have two 20-plus goalscorers. Their 54 combined goals also set a new Bundesliga record.
The weekend was again dominated by ties — in four out of seven games. Los Angeles took its tally to eight ties in 10 games, while D.C. United has seven draws in 10 games. For all the game summaries, standings, leading scorers and this week’s schedule …
Two major European titles remained up for grabs. Bordeaux takes a three-point lead over Marseille into the final day of play in France, while Besiktas leads Sivas by two points in Turkey. For all the weekend results in the major European leagues and Mexico …
[WPS] The Los Angeles Sol defeated FC Gold Pride, 2-0, in front of a sell-out crowd of 6,280 fans at the downsized Buck Shaw Stadium and opened up a six-point lead at the top of the Women’s Professional Soccer standings.
[USA] Only half of the 24-player squad will be available Tuesday when the U.S. national team gathers in Miami to prepare for its fourth and fifth games of the Concacaf Hexagonal, to be played in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Chicago next week. For a look at the squad and who’s committed elsewhere for the next week …
[U.S. WOMEN] The USA made easy work of Canada in its first women’s international since the launch of Women’s Professional Soccer. The Americans got goals from Shannon Boxx (just 93 seconds into the match), Megan Rapinoe, Lindsay Tarpley and Lauren Cheney to defeat Canada 4-0 in front of 10,255 fans at Toronto’s BMO Field.
[MAKING A LIST] If you’ve been marking “X” on your 1-X-2 prediction card for MLS games this season, you’ve been doing well. Almost 40 percent of MLS games to date have ended in ties, making a tie almost as common as a home win. Tie results are significantly higher than they’ve been over the last nine years, while home wins and away wins have dropped correspondingly.
[WORLD 2010 QUALIFYING] Chicago Fire defender Bakary Soumare has been recalled by Mali for a pair of World Cup qualifiers against Ghana and Benin June 7 and 21.
[CONFEDERATIONS CUP] Ronaldinho won’t be playing in next month’s Confederations Cup. Nor will Ronaldo. But Brazil coach Dunga found room for three uncapped players who will part of the 23-player squad for World Cup qualifiers against Uruguay and Paraguay and the Confederations Cup in South Africa.
[UNDER-17 WORLD CUP] It looks like Nigeria will lose the Under-17 World Cup, which it is scheduled to host in the fall. Following an inspection tour, Concacaf president Jack Warner, who serves as chairman of the U-17 organizing committee, said he would give local organizers a month to get four prospective venues ready. Only two of the nine venues — stadiums in Abuja and Lagos — passed inspection and three others were scratched from the list.
The decision of D.C. United lead partner Victor MacFarlane to sell out to partner William Chang represents MLS’s first major ownership change since the freezing of credit markets in September. The move follows several setbacks in United’s efforts to get a new stadium project off the ground and was necessitated by MacFarlane’s need to concentrate on his real estate interests.
“For us, they’re champions already. We needed an escape from so much violence, and from living behind closed doors.”
— Housewife Adelina Terrazas, a fan of Mexican First Division club Indios, which reached the semifinals of the Torneo Clausura despite having the league’s lowest payroll and playing in Juarez, which is embroiled in a drug war. Indios lost the first leg of their series with Pachuca, 2-0, at home on Thursday. (Reuters)
[AMERICANS ABROAD] Jose Francisco Torres‘ Pachuca beat Marco Vidal‘s Indios, 2-0, in the first leg of their semifinal series in Mexico’s Torneo Clausura.
[MLS PREDICTIONS] Seattle and Real Salt Lake have flattened out after quick starts, and are on the road to play Colorado and D.C. United, respectively. The Galaxy has tied all four of its road games. Can it get at least a point again in Dallas? The matchup of San Jose with the former Quakes of Houston may be a mismatch, and the Revs play Toronto at BMO Field, where TFC has won only two of six games in 2009. Soccer America’s Ridge Mahoney breaks down all the weekend action.
[UEFA CUP] German and Ukrainian teams met in the championship of the 2009 UEFA Cup, but all the goalscorers were Brazilians. Jadson‘s goal in overtime was the difference as Shakhtar Donetsk beat Werder Bremen, 2-1, in the last UEFA Cup final on Wednesday and became the first Ukrainian team to win a major European trophy since the break up of the Soviet Union.
[MLS] New York Red Bulls midfielder Jorge Rojas was fined $1,000 and suspended for one game, in addition to the automatic one-game red-card suspension, for an “egregious offense” and failure to leave the field in a timely and orderly manner after being issued a red card in the May 16 game vs. the Houston Dynamo.
[CANADA] Vancouver moved into second place behind Toronto FC in the Canadian Nutrilite Championship, which determines Canada’s Concacaf Champions League qualifier, by stunning host Montreal with two early goals and winning, 2-0, at the Stade de Saputo on Wednesday.
[MLS] In the 2009 SuperDraft, the Los Angeles Galaxy selected Omar Gonzalez, who played two years at the University of Maryland and helped it win the 2008 NCAA title, as the third overall pick. This product of the Dallas Texans youth system is already playing a significant role for the Galaxy, which has lost just once this season. He has played all 810 minutes of Los Angeles’ nine games in central defense and even chipped a goal. Soccer America’s Bryan Alvarez profiles the 20-year-old defender in the MLS Rising Stars series.
[WPS] Boston Breakers forward Christine Latham was handed a two-game suspension — the heaviest in Women’s Professional Soccer’s short history — and Washington Freedom midfielder Joanna Lohman was suspended one game for an elbow thrown in Sunday’s Boston-Washington game. Meanwhile, Breakers coach Tony DiCicco, the dean of WPS coaches, was fined and ordered to do “community service” for saying, among other things, WPS refs were “over their head” after the game.
[U.S. OPEN CUP] For a change, the D.C. United fans were the ones agonizing over a dwindling lead. Rookie Chris Pontius scored twice in an eight-goal extravaganza as United blasted out to a 4-0 lead but had to scramble in the second half to walk out of RFK Stadium with a 5-3 U.S. Open Cup victory.
“If he were a young boy, I would tell him to go and play the flute or the piano, but give up playing soccer.”
— Franz Beckenbauer, during TV commentary, shares his opinion on VfL Wolfsburg’s Cristian Zaccardo. (Bild)
[TEAM OF THE WEEK] With five of the seven games played last weekend ending in ties, a lot of players turned in solid showings yet there were only a few outstanding performances. One of them, by Josh Wolff, earned him honors as MLS Player of the Week, yet there were several late goals, and admirable displays of ability.
