You may or may not know that one of my day jobs is working as a mild mannered, okay surly, newspaper reporter.
A lot of the stuff I cover is high school sports. Lately coaches have felt leery of talking to me, because they're afraid if I write anything positive their teams begin to lose. The term "mush" is used and we all laugh.
My standard response is that if I had that kind of power, I'd be sitting on a stool at a Sports Book in Las Vegas.
After this weekend's slate of Premier League games, maybe I'm not so sure. I write an ejaculatulatory post about Carlos Tevez' current form and lo and behold, he's limping around Goodison Park on Saturday in a 2-0 loss to Everton.
Lately I've been banging the drum and driving the Clint Dempsey bandwagon all at the same time, and Sunday he limps off the field at Ewood Park.
Weird, right?
More on Tevez and City below, but let's start fretting about Clint Dempsey, who had continued his amazing form, rattling the crossbar with an audacious bicycle kick earlier in the match.
After losing the "feed" of the game for a bit, I finally got it back and within a minute I heard the name Dempsey, only to see his walking off the field with an injury. Right now even the injury itself is vague. Most reports have it as a knee or specifically an ACL type thing. He'll get the dreaded "scan" and until then we just have to keep our fingers crossed. It could be a sprain. It could be a tear. I'm not a doctor, or importantly, I'm not down there.
Considering most people tend to think the worst, if it's something serious the U.S. is now possibly, stress possibly, facing a World Cup without Charlie Davies, Oguchi Onyewu and now Dempsey. Anyone want to hope a flight to Merseyside right now and wrap Landon Donovan in a mylar bag and ship him off to the facility that's storing Ted Williams' frozen head?
As of writing this Sunday afternoon, Doc Hodgson is claiming its a PCL injury. If that's the case, he is likely done-zo for South Africa. It's a terrible blow for the U.S., but not as bad as the Davies/Onyewu setbacks. We've seen Dempsey go from useless to starman all in the same match, so in a sense the U.S. has already played without him for stretches in the past.
And as I've long maintained that a lineup featuring Dempsey and Donovan isn't entirely balanced. The U.S. does have rising talent Stuart Holden in the mix, who could conceivably step into the right midfield role. Or, another possibility is Donovan shifts to the right, like he did at Everton Saturday, and perhaps Bob Bradley exhumes the corpse of DaMarcus Beasley from the Scottish highlands? Or, gulp, Freddy Adu, worms his way into the mix.
Tactically, the U.S. might be able to replace 99 percent of Dempsey's output. The other one-percent, like the volley vs. Stoke, well that's what so upsetting about this development.
If anything, this tempers the U.S. enthusiasm ahead of the Cup just a little bit, which isn't such a terrible thing. Let's not forget, this team plays considerably better when it's playing the "Nobody Believes in Us" card as opposed to as a favorite. It also put a much bigger onus on Donovan to perform, and more importantly, carry the offense on his shoulders.
For all the gains made by the U.S. national team in 2009, depth remains a major issue -- something I'll address Friday ahead of the friendly with Honduras on Saturday night.
Right now, we just have to hope that the "scan" on Dempsey's knee turns up to be nothing major -- a long shot, I know. Keep telling yourself that since he walked off the field he can't be that injured. If Doc Hodgson is right, well, don't hold your breath.
Me? I'll just wonder why it took until the 2008 NFL season for all the mean things I've written about Tom Brady for Bernard Pollard to snap his knee in half.
A day late:
A couple days ago I was trying to drive my brother insane by singing Eddie Murphy's 1980s hit, "Party All the Time." The result of this -- the Rick James-produced track ended up getting stuck in my head.
So scanning through some awful late-night television, I stumbled across the utter pile of dog crap that is, "Meet Dave."
Here's your premise, "A crew of miniature aliens operate a spaceship that has a human form. While trying to save their planet, the aliens encounter a new problem, as their ship becomes smitten with an Earth woman."
God bless you Hollywood. And bless you HBO for deciding to air this classic. (It's worse than it sounds, even with the usually trustworthy Elizabeth Banks playing said "Earth woman.")
Amazingly, a thought occured to me while watching "Meet Dave" long enough to get enough fuel to mock it through the Internets -- the current plight of Liverpool is a lot like the career of Eddie Murphy, well, without the midnight transsexual prostitute stuff.
Look at it this way, both were powers in the 1980s, coincidentally while wearing Red. (Think the iconic Eddie Murphy Delirious outfit.) In the 80s Liverpool were still winning league titles and European titles, while Murphy was banging out hit-after-hit at the box office in between pickup basketball games with Prince. Liverpool even had the 'Anfield Rap'.
Maybe both peaked in 1984, Murphy by putting bananas in tailpipes in "Beverly Hills Cop" and Liverpool by winning the 1984 European Cup. You would have bet serious money that Murphy could have been the biggest comedic actor of all time and Liverpool would keep winning title-after-title.
Five years later, both changed. In 1989 Murphy starred in the flop-tacular "Harlem Nights", while Liverpool won its last league title (1989-90) as well as the tragic Hillsborough Disaster.
As we know, it turned out, Axel Foley and Kenny Dalglish didn't walk back through the door. ('Beverly Hills Cop 3' doesn't count.)
Sure since then both Murphy and Liverpool have had their moments. Murphy with the voice of the Donkey in 'Shrek', while Liverpool have won a UEFA Cup and the 2005 Champions League. Yet both remain mere shadows of the forces they were in the 1980s.
Put it this way, would either Eddie Murphy or Liverpool rate in the book of an 8-year-old kid?
Where the sketchy comparison ends (assuming you even made it this far after I glossed over Liverpool's previous eight decades of success), is that Eddie Murphy is amazingly only 48 years old. He conceivably doesn't need to make another movie the rest of his life. He can continue to churn out crummy family comedies or dreck like "The Advenutres of Pluto Nash" (a utter disaster) and nobody beyond the critics in Hollywood would care all that much.
Liverpool, meanwhile, is a club that means so much of millions of fans that it must endure, or figure a way out of its malaise. However so long as the Three Stooges -- Rafa, Hicks & Gillett are pulling the strings, they'll never get back to the heights, instead teasing fans with glimmers, like Murphy putting in, what I'm told, was a solid performance in 'Dream Girls'.
And if you never thought I'd say anything nice about Liverpool, at least Rafa and Hicks & Gillett had nothing to do with "Norbit."
SALVO!
Sometimes the scoreboard says it all, Chelsea 7, Sunderland 2.
It's fairly simple to read into that one -- in any language, no less.
Without its African stars, Chelsea essentially extended its two middle fingers to the rest of the Premier League -- "We're still here, dammit."
Chelsea, for the first 25-odd minutes, looked lively and threatening. (Throw out the rest of the match when its 3-0, because Sunderland check out.)
It was a couple individual players, too, taking it upon themselves, namely Flourent Malouda and Ashley Cole, with a set of fine individually worked goals. Cole in particular stood out, collecting a chip on the touchline from John Terry, faking out the keeper and chipping over him from a sheer angle with his right foot.
Chelsea, at its best over the last half-decade, has won a lot of games before they even started at Stamford Bridge. This was a return to that swagger, which should scare the rest of the league.
That said, the way this season is going, there are no guarantees this swagger continues to Jan. 27 for the Blues next league match against Birmingham City.
More of the same Manchester United:
Sir Alex Ferguson wouldn't have been able to blame the refs for this one. United, at Old Trafford, could have been down either 1-0 or 2-0 had Steven Fletcher or David Nugent been able to finish for Burnley. But alas, both shots went wide and United eventually got goals from Dimitar Berbatov and Wayne Rooney and order was restored.
Naturally, you can't count out United but this team doesn't look to have the juice to keep pace with Chelsea, regardless of what the past and the table say.
Right now some fans seem more concerned with trying to drive the Glazers out, any wya.
A nice chunk of Toffee:
During Everton's fairly comprehensive 2-0 home win over Manchester City, I tweeted something along the lines of Landon Donovan bringing the club some energy, on par with Brendan Fraser's unfrozen caveman character from the early 1990s "gem", "Encino Man." Yeah, a stretch, at best. Believe me, it was better than my original idea that Donovan was playing the Whoopie Goldberg role from "Sister Act" and sassin' up a previously boring dull set of nuns, or the Everton squad as it were.
Doesn't matter which mediocre 90s comedy you want to use, Donovan has definitely injected a lot of life into Everton, as now the Toffees are finally in the top half of the table. In his second Premier League outing, Donovan didn't set the world afire, but he did bring positive play to the Everton midfield.
To use a comparison I've used before, Donovan took a Vince Offer Slap Chop and turned a boring Everton tuna into an exciting, lively tuna salad. He did make a bad decision, trying to lob a cross to teammate, instead of going for goal, but why split hairs?
Credit David Moyes for lining up a midfield quartet of "Little Billy", Steven "The Avatar" Pienaar, Maroune Fellaini and Donovan. Maybe it was a little unconventional or too offense-oriented, but it worked as Manchester City looked 100 percent lost.
Perhaps my anointment of City was a little, say, premature. Saturday's performance lends credence to the idea that City was a product of a soft schedule. Couple that was a anonymous game Carlos Tevez, who might have gotten hurt or at least tweaked something in his leg and City went from world-beaters to ordinary overnight. That's how it works, right?
And what of Robinho? On as a first-half sub for Roque Santa Cruz in the first half and then pulled shortly into the second? How to you say "toxic asset" in Portuguese?
It's clear the tricky Brazilian is surplus parts at Eastlands. He's not exactly a pure forward, nor a winger either. So where to play him? Roberto Mancini probably wants to sell him off, since Robinho seems to court controversy no matter where he goes.
Perhaps a club in Europe would want to snare him on the cheap, Spain maybe? But is he worth the trouble? Maybe the best move is Robinho goes back to Brazil for the rest of the season, trying to work his way into the Brazil World Cup mix and then sees where his stock rates after that.
But back to Everton. With more performances like this between now and March, David Moyes is going to have a tough time saying goodbye to Donovan when he flies back to Los Angeles. Sounds like both sides are thinking about extending the romance.
Ironically enough, Everton's win did a great favor to Liverpool, which remained just four points behind Spurs and Man City for fourth place.
Sad and sadder:
One of the better traits of exporting the Premier League is from a television perspective not too much time is wasted on crowd shots of mongo fans in the stands.
Saturday we caught two shots that would've been quite at home during an NFL broadcast, you know, since the NFL needs to fill a telecast that features 11 minutes of action. (Man, the Saturday night NFL playoff games, peeeeeee-ewwwwww.)
Around the same time we got a glimpse of a young Chelsea fan with a pathetically endearing homemade sign reading, "Plz Plz Frank Lampard give me your shirt." (No, he didn't have room for the small print: I assure you, I'm not crazy.)
A little later at Old Trafford we caught a shot of a father holding his infant son, who was wearing industrial grade metal ear muffs. Good parenting.
Guess it doesn't matter the country, mongos are mongos.
Sky is falling?
The take out of England is that the Premier League is on the verge of a major crisis. Me, like I've said, my brain can't count as high as some of the debts incurred by the clubs. David Conn does a pretty good job sounding the alarm in the Guardian. So read it.
Here's all I can contribute on the subject. It's well-known that: Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea (to a small degree), Portsmouth (to a major degree) and West Ham all have major fiance problems in terms of debt. These are just the clubs that are wide out in the open about it. That's a quarter of the league, with teams at both ends of the table.
To me, the debt situation almost seems like a fantasy. I can't get my head around how these clubs are so far in the red. I'm no CNBC talking head, but it does seem eerily similar to the financial meltdown with the global banking system, no?
Hopefully the powers that run the Premier League don't wait for a club (Portsmouth) to go belly up in the midst of a season before taking action.
Nobody wants NFL-style parity/revenue sharing, but some financial oversight might not be such a terrible idea, no?
Other stuff:
Tottenham is still Tottenham. A scoreless draw at home to Hull City? Fail. ... Blackburn Rovers looked like a League One team Monday vs. Manchester City, then pull out a 2-0 win at home vs. Fulham on Sunday. Go figure. ... Aston Villa is now just two points ahead of Liverpool. Looks like all of owner Randy Lerner's mojo went back across to the Atlantic to help the Cleveland Browns finish the season a little less pathetically. ... Jonathan Spector got his first start since 2009 for West Ham in the 0-0 draw with Aston Villa. As an American, we'll take the good news. ... Arsenal did a nice-and-tidy job vs. Bolton in Owen Coyle's first game. If you were lucky enough to be at the Reebook you can tell your kids you saw Fran Merida score a goal for Arsenal. ... Liverpool/Stoke City a proven cure for insomnia. Trust me from experience this weekend. ... Anyone stumble across Fox Soccer HD yet? ... Portsmouth can't catch a break. Fans help shovel the field clear of snow, then the Saturday match at Fratton Park is deemed unplayable.
Fantasy team o' the week:
* Give this an asterisk, for now, since we have three leftover matches to complete the week, but Shawn Donohue's West 29th St Chelsea put up 82 points with Lampard, Rooney and Cole leading the way. Also, we have a tie at the top on 1,255 points with Cantona Dojo and Beckham Priapism. This is like the EPL in fantasy form!
This week:
* Arsenal v. Bolton -- (Wednesday, FSC, 2:45 p.m.) Owen Coyle isn't playing. ... Arsenal 3, Bolton 0.
* Liverpool v. Tottenham -- (Wednesday, Setanta, delayed?) Part of me wants Liverpool to win this one to give Reds fans a false sense of hope. ... Liverpool 2, Spurs 1
* Manchester United v. Hull City -- (Saturday, 10 a.m., ???) The Red Devils aren't "good", but still good enough to dispatch Hull at home. ... United 2, Hull 0
Last week: 5-4
Season: 110-98
A lot of the stuff I cover is high school sports. Lately coaches have felt leery of talking to me, because they're afraid if I write anything positive their teams begin to lose. The term "mush" is used and we all laugh.
My standard response is that if I had that kind of power, I'd be sitting on a stool at a Sports Book in Las Vegas.
After this weekend's slate of Premier League games, maybe I'm not so sure. I write an ejaculatulatory post about Carlos Tevez' current form and lo and behold, he's limping around Goodison Park on Saturday in a 2-0 loss to Everton.
Lately I've been banging the drum and driving the Clint Dempsey bandwagon all at the same time, and Sunday he limps off the field at Ewood Park.
Weird, right?
More on Tevez and City below, but let's start fretting about Clint Dempsey, who had continued his amazing form, rattling the crossbar with an audacious bicycle kick earlier in the match.
After losing the "feed" of the game for a bit, I finally got it back and within a minute I heard the name Dempsey, only to see his walking off the field with an injury. Right now even the injury itself is vague. Most reports have it as a knee or specifically an ACL type thing. He'll get the dreaded "scan" and until then we just have to keep our fingers crossed. It could be a sprain. It could be a tear. I'm not a doctor, or importantly, I'm not down there.
Considering most people tend to think the worst, if it's something serious the U.S. is now possibly, stress possibly, facing a World Cup without Charlie Davies, Oguchi Onyewu and now Dempsey. Anyone want to hope a flight to Merseyside right now and wrap Landon Donovan in a mylar bag and ship him off to the facility that's storing Ted Williams' frozen head?
As of writing this Sunday afternoon, Doc Hodgson is claiming its a PCL injury. If that's the case, he is likely done-zo for South Africa. It's a terrible blow for the U.S., but not as bad as the Davies/Onyewu setbacks. We've seen Dempsey go from useless to starman all in the same match, so in a sense the U.S. has already played without him for stretches in the past.
And as I've long maintained that a lineup featuring Dempsey and Donovan isn't entirely balanced. The U.S. does have rising talent Stuart Holden in the mix, who could conceivably step into the right midfield role. Or, another possibility is Donovan shifts to the right, like he did at Everton Saturday, and perhaps Bob Bradley exhumes the corpse of DaMarcus Beasley from the Scottish highlands? Or, gulp, Freddy Adu, worms his way into the mix.
Tactically, the U.S. might be able to replace 99 percent of Dempsey's output. The other one-percent, like the volley vs. Stoke, well that's what so upsetting about this development.
If anything, this tempers the U.S. enthusiasm ahead of the Cup just a little bit, which isn't such a terrible thing. Let's not forget, this team plays considerably better when it's playing the "Nobody Believes in Us" card as opposed to as a favorite. It also put a much bigger onus on Donovan to perform, and more importantly, carry the offense on his shoulders.
For all the gains made by the U.S. national team in 2009, depth remains a major issue -- something I'll address Friday ahead of the friendly with Honduras on Saturday night.
Right now, we just have to hope that the "scan" on Dempsey's knee turns up to be nothing major -- a long shot, I know. Keep telling yourself that since he walked off the field he can't be that injured. If Doc Hodgson is right, well, don't hold your breath.
Me? I'll just wonder why it took until the 2008 NFL season for all the mean things I've written about Tom Brady for Bernard Pollard to snap his knee in half.
A day late:
A couple days ago I was trying to drive my brother insane by singing Eddie Murphy's 1980s hit, "Party All the Time." The result of this -- the Rick James-produced track ended up getting stuck in my head.
So scanning through some awful late-night television, I stumbled across the utter pile of dog crap that is, "Meet Dave."
Here's your premise, "A crew of miniature aliens operate a spaceship that has a human form. While trying to save their planet, the aliens encounter a new problem, as their ship becomes smitten with an Earth woman."
God bless you Hollywood. And bless you HBO for deciding to air this classic. (It's worse than it sounds, even with the usually trustworthy Elizabeth Banks playing said "Earth woman.")
Amazingly, a thought occured to me while watching "Meet Dave" long enough to get enough fuel to mock it through the Internets -- the current plight of Liverpool is a lot like the career of Eddie Murphy, well, without the midnight transsexual prostitute stuff.
Look at it this way, both were powers in the 1980s, coincidentally while wearing Red. (Think the iconic Eddie Murphy Delirious outfit.) In the 80s Liverpool were still winning league titles and European titles, while Murphy was banging out hit-after-hit at the box office in between pickup basketball games with Prince. Liverpool even had the 'Anfield Rap'.
Maybe both peaked in 1984, Murphy by putting bananas in tailpipes in "Beverly Hills Cop" and Liverpool by winning the 1984 European Cup. You would have bet serious money that Murphy could have been the biggest comedic actor of all time and Liverpool would keep winning title-after-title.
Five years later, both changed. In 1989 Murphy starred in the flop-tacular "Harlem Nights", while Liverpool won its last league title (1989-90) as well as the tragic Hillsborough Disaster.
As we know, it turned out, Axel Foley and Kenny Dalglish didn't walk back through the door. ('Beverly Hills Cop 3' doesn't count.)
Sure since then both Murphy and Liverpool have had their moments. Murphy with the voice of the Donkey in 'Shrek', while Liverpool have won a UEFA Cup and the 2005 Champions League. Yet both remain mere shadows of the forces they were in the 1980s.
Put it this way, would either Eddie Murphy or Liverpool rate in the book of an 8-year-old kid?
Where the sketchy comparison ends (assuming you even made it this far after I glossed over Liverpool's previous eight decades of success), is that Eddie Murphy is amazingly only 48 years old. He conceivably doesn't need to make another movie the rest of his life. He can continue to churn out crummy family comedies or dreck like "The Advenutres of Pluto Nash" (a utter disaster) and nobody beyond the critics in Hollywood would care all that much.
Liverpool, meanwhile, is a club that means so much of millions of fans that it must endure, or figure a way out of its malaise. However so long as the Three Stooges -- Rafa, Hicks & Gillett are pulling the strings, they'll never get back to the heights, instead teasing fans with glimmers, like Murphy putting in, what I'm told, was a solid performance in 'Dream Girls'.
And if you never thought I'd say anything nice about Liverpool, at least Rafa and Hicks & Gillett had nothing to do with "Norbit."
SALVO!
Sometimes the scoreboard says it all, Chelsea 7, Sunderland 2.
It's fairly simple to read into that one -- in any language, no less.
Without its African stars, Chelsea essentially extended its two middle fingers to the rest of the Premier League -- "We're still here, dammit."
Chelsea, for the first 25-odd minutes, looked lively and threatening. (Throw out the rest of the match when its 3-0, because Sunderland check out.)
It was a couple individual players, too, taking it upon themselves, namely Flourent Malouda and Ashley Cole, with a set of fine individually worked goals. Cole in particular stood out, collecting a chip on the touchline from John Terry, faking out the keeper and chipping over him from a sheer angle with his right foot.
Chelsea, at its best over the last half-decade, has won a lot of games before they even started at Stamford Bridge. This was a return to that swagger, which should scare the rest of the league.
That said, the way this season is going, there are no guarantees this swagger continues to Jan. 27 for the Blues next league match against Birmingham City.
More of the same Manchester United:
Sir Alex Ferguson wouldn't have been able to blame the refs for this one. United, at Old Trafford, could have been down either 1-0 or 2-0 had Steven Fletcher or David Nugent been able to finish for Burnley. But alas, both shots went wide and United eventually got goals from Dimitar Berbatov and Wayne Rooney and order was restored.
Naturally, you can't count out United but this team doesn't look to have the juice to keep pace with Chelsea, regardless of what the past and the table say.
Right now some fans seem more concerned with trying to drive the Glazers out, any wya.
A nice chunk of Toffee:
During Everton's fairly comprehensive 2-0 home win over Manchester City, I tweeted something along the lines of Landon Donovan bringing the club some energy, on par with Brendan Fraser's unfrozen caveman character from the early 1990s "gem", "Encino Man." Yeah, a stretch, at best. Believe me, it was better than my original idea that Donovan was playing the Whoopie Goldberg role from "Sister Act" and sassin' up a previously boring dull set of nuns, or the Everton squad as it were.
Doesn't matter which mediocre 90s comedy you want to use, Donovan has definitely injected a lot of life into Everton, as now the Toffees are finally in the top half of the table. In his second Premier League outing, Donovan didn't set the world afire, but he did bring positive play to the Everton midfield.
To use a comparison I've used before, Donovan took a Vince Offer Slap Chop and turned a boring Everton tuna into an exciting, lively tuna salad. He did make a bad decision, trying to lob a cross to teammate, instead of going for goal, but why split hairs?
Credit David Moyes for lining up a midfield quartet of "Little Billy", Steven "The Avatar" Pienaar, Maroune Fellaini and Donovan. Maybe it was a little unconventional or too offense-oriented, but it worked as Manchester City looked 100 percent lost.
Perhaps my anointment of City was a little, say, premature. Saturday's performance lends credence to the idea that City was a product of a soft schedule. Couple that was a anonymous game Carlos Tevez, who might have gotten hurt or at least tweaked something in his leg and City went from world-beaters to ordinary overnight. That's how it works, right?
And what of Robinho? On as a first-half sub for Roque Santa Cruz in the first half and then pulled shortly into the second? How to you say "toxic asset" in Portuguese?
It's clear the tricky Brazilian is surplus parts at Eastlands. He's not exactly a pure forward, nor a winger either. So where to play him? Roberto Mancini probably wants to sell him off, since Robinho seems to court controversy no matter where he goes.
Perhaps a club in Europe would want to snare him on the cheap, Spain maybe? But is he worth the trouble? Maybe the best move is Robinho goes back to Brazil for the rest of the season, trying to work his way into the Brazil World Cup mix and then sees where his stock rates after that.
But back to Everton. With more performances like this between now and March, David Moyes is going to have a tough time saying goodbye to Donovan when he flies back to Los Angeles. Sounds like both sides are thinking about extending the romance.
Ironically enough, Everton's win did a great favor to Liverpool, which remained just four points behind Spurs and Man City for fourth place.
Sad and sadder:
One of the better traits of exporting the Premier League is from a television perspective not too much time is wasted on crowd shots of mongo fans in the stands.
Saturday we caught two shots that would've been quite at home during an NFL broadcast, you know, since the NFL needs to fill a telecast that features 11 minutes of action. (Man, the Saturday night NFL playoff games, peeeeeee-ewwwwww.)
Around the same time we got a glimpse of a young Chelsea fan with a pathetically endearing homemade sign reading, "Plz Plz Frank Lampard give me your shirt." (No, he didn't have room for the small print: I assure you, I'm not crazy.)
A little later at Old Trafford we caught a shot of a father holding his infant son, who was wearing industrial grade metal ear muffs. Good parenting.
Guess it doesn't matter the country, mongos are mongos.
Sky is falling?
The take out of England is that the Premier League is on the verge of a major crisis. Me, like I've said, my brain can't count as high as some of the debts incurred by the clubs. David Conn does a pretty good job sounding the alarm in the Guardian. So read it.
Here's all I can contribute on the subject. It's well-known that: Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea (to a small degree), Portsmouth (to a major degree) and West Ham all have major fiance problems in terms of debt. These are just the clubs that are wide out in the open about it. That's a quarter of the league, with teams at both ends of the table.
To me, the debt situation almost seems like a fantasy. I can't get my head around how these clubs are so far in the red. I'm no CNBC talking head, but it does seem eerily similar to the financial meltdown with the global banking system, no?
Hopefully the powers that run the Premier League don't wait for a club (Portsmouth) to go belly up in the midst of a season before taking action.
Nobody wants NFL-style parity/revenue sharing, but some financial oversight might not be such a terrible idea, no?
Other stuff:
Tottenham is still Tottenham. A scoreless draw at home to Hull City? Fail. ... Blackburn Rovers looked like a League One team Monday vs. Manchester City, then pull out a 2-0 win at home vs. Fulham on Sunday. Go figure. ... Aston Villa is now just two points ahead of Liverpool. Looks like all of owner Randy Lerner's mojo went back across to the Atlantic to help the Cleveland Browns finish the season a little less pathetically. ... Jonathan Spector got his first start since 2009 for West Ham in the 0-0 draw with Aston Villa. As an American, we'll take the good news. ... Arsenal did a nice-and-tidy job vs. Bolton in Owen Coyle's first game. If you were lucky enough to be at the Reebook you can tell your kids you saw Fran Merida score a goal for Arsenal. ... Liverpool/Stoke City a proven cure for insomnia. Trust me from experience this weekend. ... Anyone stumble across Fox Soccer HD yet? ... Portsmouth can't catch a break. Fans help shovel the field clear of snow, then the Saturday match at Fratton Park is deemed unplayable.
Fantasy team o' the week:
* Give this an asterisk, for now, since we have three leftover matches to complete the week, but Shawn Donohue's West 29th St Chelsea put up 82 points with Lampard, Rooney and Cole leading the way. Also, we have a tie at the top on 1,255 points with Cantona Dojo and Beckham Priapism. This is like the EPL in fantasy form!
This week:
* Arsenal v. Bolton -- (Wednesday, FSC, 2:45 p.m.) Owen Coyle isn't playing. ... Arsenal 3, Bolton 0.
* Liverpool v. Tottenham -- (Wednesday, Setanta, delayed?) Part of me wants Liverpool to win this one to give Reds fans a false sense of hope. ... Liverpool 2, Spurs 1
* Manchester United v. Hull City -- (Saturday, 10 a.m., ???) The Red Devils aren't "good", but still good enough to dispatch Hull at home. ... United 2, Hull 0
Last week: 5-4
Season: 110-98
Labels: clint dempsey, English Premier League, Monday recaps, Premier League, Soccer
With respect to Dempsey's injury, here is something I read on another site:
mcl--medial collateral. cruciates are anterior and posterior. posterior is rarely injured alone. the pcl is small, and secondary to the other three, and only gets torn in the context of severe trauma that also rips at least one, but usually two, of the others. if the report is accurate, that it is a cruciate injury, almost certainly it is an acl.
I believe that Chelsea's debt has been wiped out. I think the club paid down the bulk of it, then Roman cancelled the rest by taking more shares in the club. I think that this was done because some people expect Platini's "fair play" proposal to go through, where teams in debt aren't allowed to compete in European competitions. This is similar to why they signed Turnbull and Sturridge - in case the proposed 6 + 5 rule (or whatever it is called) goes into effect. This long-term thinking makes me think that they know something most of us don't about the transfer embargo. One would think that if they expect the embargo to last, they would sign a couple of players (especially younger ones) and loan them out.
As for FSCHD - I don't know where it is available, but I've seen a couple of games (the Blackburn-Sunderland game springs to mind) that looked like they were filmed in HD if not broadcast. Anyway, here is there Channel Finder, at the least you can request it with your cable provider:
http://foxsoccer.channelfinder.net/start.asp
I am surprised your downplaying Dempsey's injury this much. This is a BIG deal for this squad. He can play outwide and as a striker, so he adds depth, he was the only guy to score at the last WC, and he has been playing at a high a level in one of the top leagues in the world, then any other position player for America has leading into a WC year.
Honestly, does anybody else on this squad get on the end of free kicks and crosses as well as he can? Does this team accomplish anything in South Africa last summer without him?
Yes, Holden can play, and this probably paves the way for DMB to come back again, but this leaves us with two strikers, Altidore and Donovan, one doesnt play right now, and the other is used as a midfielder.
The three guys who are happiest about this injury are Connor Casey, Brian Ching, and now probably Josh Wolff (laugh, but think about it, where else is Bradley going to go, especially if Wolff gets off to a fast start in MLS if there is a season). All 3 guys now have a great shot of going to South Africa.
If I am Bradley, I get on the phone to McBride and beg and plead for him to make one last go at it. Rather have the corpse of McBride then the other three guys.
So is there anyway Bradley goes with a 4-3-2-1 formation with Altidore on top, Donovan and Holden/DMB as attacking midfielders, and clog the middle with Bradley JR, Clark, and maybe a healthy Edu?
You really hate Spurs, don't you? Despite their position in the table, you constantly cite City as a title contender, and while it must be considered two points dropped against Hull, Myhill turned in the goalkeeping performance of the past five years. Spurs put 22 shots on goal and couldn't score, unlike the Stoke and Wolves defeats where they were taken out of the match offensively, against Hull they just came up against a keeper who played the match of his life.
And yet they're still in fourth.
I am with Anon - this is worse than we think (or maybe than we *want* to think). The same kind of words were written after Onyewu's leg crumbled - and they seemed very optimistic to me. But I am a pessimist, so who knows.
Maybe ONE out of the US's three big injured guys (Davies, Gooch, Dempsey) comes back to play a role in the World Cup. If so, I would bet on Deuce, just because his role might work as a sub in the last 20 minutes of a game and Gooch, as a defender, needs to be able to go the full 90 or Elder can't play him. I still feel like we don't grasp the full scope of Davies injuries - which is probably a sign that he is not going to play at all in the summer.
Cardillo, how is your Tevez-love now after two goals in the Cup derby? Tevez has been playing great (he's on my fantasy team) but I still don't think United made a mistake letting him go. The player Carlito is now, is not someone he could have become on United with Rooney 'blocking' his path. That was a fun match to watch and I'm looking forward to the return leg.