Category: SoccerTalk with Paul Gardner

In gentler, less clever days, there really wasn’t too much to know about soccer tactics. In England, anyway. Team formations were cast in concrete, immutable, a 3-4-3 with three fullbacks, four midfielders and three forwards. We never called it a 3-4-3 though. It was always a W-M formation.

I’m sorry guys — I’m talking to whoever it is who writes the stories that go up on the UEFA website — but you’re just not paying attention.

“I don’t get no protection!” might well be the theme song for soccer’s star players. It is a theme that is very much in the air at the moment. Alex Ferguson has complained that English referees are not doing enough to protect Cristiano Ronaldo, and that the Portuguese star is being systematically fouled. “It has become a tactic,” says Ferguson, “someone fouls him, then someone else.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to judge the worth of a soccer league by looking at whether coaches like it or not, but since Jose Mourinho brought the subject up recently I’ve given it some thought.

It looked like a burned-out aircraft hangar. It was certainly big enough, a towering hulk of intertwined metal beams with a gaping hole in the middle. A huge metallic donut.

The extraordinary attack on ESPN TV commentator Tommy Smyth that appeared Wednesday on the web site of the English newspaper The Guardian stirs me to make a case for the beleaguered Tommy.

Bayern Munich and Coach Juergen Klinsmann took a hammering last week from Barcelona. The soccer played by Barca was a delight to watch — skillful, swift, powerful at times, artistic at others, even both simultaneously, soccer at its most effective and its most beguiling.

Let me dismiss the coaches, for a start. I do not believe that any of the eight coaches involved in the first-leg Champions League games this week played a particularly significant role. The games — and what superb games they have been — were largely controlled by the players.

Sadness and weariness … those were my feelings as I watched the despairing video of Bruce Arena trying to say something meaningful about the Galaxy’s abysmal showing against the almost equally abysmal Colorado Rapids.

Professional soccer in New York City? Now there’s an idea. I’ll buy that. And that’s what the United Soccer Leagues, the USL – which likes to define itself as an “alternative league” to MLS – is promising us.

Three years back, in the lead up to the 2006 World Cup, Julio Grondona — that’s Don Julio, the man who runs Argentine soccer — had some scornful things to say about some of his own players. It had been pointed out that the Argentine roster might well include a quartet of highly skilled attacking players — Lionel Messi, Carlos Tevez, Javier Saviola and Sergio Aguero — all of whom were decidedly on the short side, with an average height of around 5-foot-6.

Goalkeepers. Once again getting special treatment. This time it’s Brad Friedel. An American keeper who has had — continues to have — a wonderful career in the English premier league. Unquestionably one of the top goalkeepers in the league, widely respected as the consummate professional.

As you’d expect, the seven games of the opening weekend of MLS had a bit of everything — the good, the bad, the remarkable, the absurd and whatever else you can think of.

Just ten days ago I was taking a decidedly jaundiced look at the Blackburn Rovers’ coach Sam Allardyce and what I called his “rather snide criticism” of referees. Big Sam had been implying, without actually saying it, that referees did not really understand the game — their main fault being that they never played at the pro level.

I was recently asked — by a foreign newspaper — a number of questions about MLS. Pretty straightforward stuff about players and coaches to which I supplied brief, mostly accurate, answers. I romped along, without too much hesitation, until I came to the final question. That, too, was actually pretty straightforward, the simplest of questions: who will win the 2009 MLS Cup?

In its 16 years of existence, the English Premier League has been won by only four different clubs. You could really make that three — for Blackburn’s win in 1995 was something of an aberration. Otherwise, it’s been Arsenal (3 wins), Chelsea (2) and Manchester United (10) all the way.

A week or so ago Blackburn Rovers coach Sam Allardyce, sounding as genial and reasonable as ever, had a few things to say about his team’s upcoming game against Everton.

This is an unfortunate moment for MLS. With David Beckham quietly trashing the league, either directly or implicitly, every time he opens his mouth, with Landon Donovan letting it be known that he’d prefer to play in Germany, with FC Barcelona withdrawing its bid for a Miami franchise, the league’s image (at least in the eyes of foreign observers) has been suffering.

They had a little bash out at Franklin Square on Friday. Franklin Square, that’s just outside New York City, the beginnings of Nassau County. An area I don’t visit too often.

Four key Champions League games played this week have served up some pretty remarkable, and rather disturbing, stats.

After his Galaxy had lost a rather tedious Pan-Pacific final to the Koreans of Suwong Samsung, Bruce Arena gave his opinion of the red card given to Galaxy defender Sean Franklin. He was terse: “I didn’t see the play, whether he showed studs or not or whatever … I don’t know.”

I suppose there is such a thing as Beckham-fatigue. I don’t mean his fatigue — though we got a demonstration of that yesterday, with poor David sitting disconsolately on the sideline in the San Siro, watching his beloved Milan lose to Inter, and looking, well, fatigued. As he should. After all the guy is 33 years old (yes, yes, I know — his teammate Paolo Maldini is 41!).

With a great sense of drama and timing, MLS commissioner Don Garber has pronounced Doomsday for David. It will be tomorrow, Friday the 13th. Either Beckham and his clan (his army of advisers, lawyers, consultants, managers, assistants and hangers-on), and AC Milan with all their various experts, come to an agreement with the Los Angeles Galaxy (which means AEG and all their high-powered business guys) by tomorrow, or any deal selling the player to Milan is off, finito, and Beckham — with great reluctance one imagines — will return to California.

It’s a puzzling thing to me that what I see as a major problem for referees is one that they always tell me is no problem at all. Call it the reputation problem. When a referee knows — as he must know, he is after all intensely involved in the sport — of the reputation of certain players as dirty or as divers, does that knowledge affect his calls? Would he, for instance, be more likely to card a known violent player than he would a player without such a reputation?

Yawn, yawn, YAWN!!. Here we go again, wrestling with soccer’s eternal Olympic mess. The details are always the same — which players should be permitted to play in the tournament? The overall question — should the tournament be dropped from the Olympics? — hovers always in the background.