Quick Hits From 116th Street

I called out early for the wrong match. Not that I should really come down on myself too harshly; the opportunity to watch a match of any kind has been so difficult lately that I viewed the second half of Colorado vs. D.C. with the kind of glee usually reserved for Champions League knockout clashes. But dammit, these were the Champions League knockout clashes, and I could only find time to catch the second half of one; why did it have to be Chelsea vs. Liverpool?

Since I missed the master class of showmanship from Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo on Tuesday, perhaps I deserve the fate of having to watch Boudewijn Zenden (for the 11,000th time in his career), take a long pass, stutter awkwardly with the ball, then pass back to John Arne Riise for a full 45 minutes plus stoppage. It's Friday, and thinking about that game even now makes me sleepy.

I've been thinking that maybe I should get into the Red Bulls. I've been withdrawing my full MLS support for the day a Philly team arrives in the league, but since global warming has delayed the freezing over of hell even further, perhaps I should back Bruce's boys. After all, I've been living in New York for nearly three years, with my only attachment to New York teams being benign amusement (Yankees), mocking amusement (Knicks), general dislike (Rangers), outright hatred (Giants, Mets, Devils), pity (Jets) and thorough indifference (Nets, Islanders). Furthermore, I appreciate the fact that the drink itself provides a nice pick-me-up at 3 PM on a lagging work day, plus I love Claudio Reyna. The downside to this whole "becoming a Red Bulls fan" thing is that I'd have to start hating D.C. United, a team I kind of like, and I'd have to start becoming outraged at things like Youri Djorkaeff hanging out at the World Cup, rather than finding such incidents hilarious. I'm just not sure Red Bull is the team for me, we'll see how this all plays out (I sound like Simmons now. Sigh...).

With so much American money pouring into the Premiership at the moment, my guess is that there will be changes on the horizon. If this trend continues, could we eventually see a more "Americanized" version of English soccer? Could the Premier League break away from the FA, do away with promotion/ relegation and adopt a playoff system? This is pretty extreme stuff to speculate about, of course, and there's nothing out there that even suggests such a thing to be occurring. That being said, there are a lot of American dollars pumping into England right now, and if there's anything in the world more meddling than an American sports owner, I don't know what it is. At the very least, I would expect the G14 to get significantly weaker in the upcoming years.

And now, for those of you who haven't seen it (all two of you), and as a way of saying "I'm sorry I haven't posted to my blog in two months," I give you this: