Sorry, Columbusians - those of us who live next to the Columbia river get to celebrate!
The officiating was crap - but at least it was consistently hurt/benefitted both teams crap. (The missed out-of-bounds before the Timbers second goal; the missed handball in the box that should have been the Timbers third goal.)
And other than Clark's mis-queue in the opening minute, he was a rock. I honestly thought that he should have gotten MVP because his insane goalkeeping was the only thing that kept it a one-goal match. The Timbers should have been up 4 or 5 to 1.
Yes, I was incredibly sad that many of my friends went to Columbus for the match, but being unemployed, I couldn't afford to go. I could hear them loud and proud on the TeeVee.
I'm a big MLS fan, and I hate to say this, but I felt like the football in this match was low-quality, and not just Columbus' two howlers. It was more like Luton Town vs Wycombe than the top tier league MLS wants to become. I lost count of the number of times players from both teams passed the ball out of bounds or dribbled out of bounds. Dunno, maybe it was nerves. At least I didn;t have to watch LA, either NY team, Ortlando or Seattle.
I have no time for Caleb Porter. But congrats all the same, Portland were the better team on the day. I'm still fuming about Columbus' performance - that was well below what we were capable of, it should have been a far tighter game. One stupid mistake destroyed the contest in the first minute. After the second goal Columbus partially settled down but some players were clearly rattled and not themselves for the rest of the match.
Columbus are a young team - their inexperience showed. I'm still too angry to be positive, even though I think Berhalter has done a great job with a club the league and pretty much everyone else loves to write off. We also have an owner who put his money where his mouth is. I hope Berhalter can get the squad to pick themselves up and come back stronger next season.
I was annoyed to hear Don Garber babbling on about how MLS is going to expand to 28 teams. Sorry, that's too many. We already no play every team home and away. With 28 teams it's going to be like MLB, we will spend most of our time playing within our own conference. Dumb.
How many hundreds of millions of pounds did LvG spend over the past two seasons? And why does the football look so dreadful after all that? And why after all the old players let go during that same time period, does the squad look like it still has so much dead weight in it?
Retirement beckons, Louie.
I know I'm biased because I support the 'pool, but the reality is Man Utd have no excuses. They have spent a
huge amount of money and the results are incredibly average. Trust me, I know what
that feels like. A lot of people had a grand old time laughing about Andy Carroll and Balotelli (among others), but Liverpool aren't the only club paying through the nose for players that don't live up to the hype. I wonder how much of that gets pinned on LVG, and how much on Woodward.
What Man Utd don't have, and will never have again, is Ferguson. Without him, Man Utd are just another super-rich club. And while it seems like the number of such clubs has expanded over the last 15 years (Chelsea, Man City, Monaco, PSG) the numbers of top top
top managers and players has not. Which means it's tougher to be top dog now than it ever has been.
Pep and Ancelotti seem to be the names bounced around most often as replacements for LVG, but with Man City also possibly looking to replace Pellegrini (and if Pep goes, Bayern will be in the market too) we could see a real managerial bidding war this summer. I suppose you have to throw Mou into that equation as well, Chelsea might pull the plug on him yet. I bet he'd go to Italy, but you never know.
Arsenal through to the next round. 3-0 now. They've shown United how it's done!
Tbh, i didn't think we would pull it off. But massive credit to the boys for getting the job done. Hopefully a favourable draw in the next round. Wolfsburg or Zenith perhaps.
I wish Arsenal the best, I really do, but we all know that this just means they are going to get absolutely
humped by one of the real contenders in the knockout stages...just too many injuries for them to keep multiple campaigns going at once. I like Giroud (a magnificent looking specimen with great hair), but even this performance against the hapless Greeks still doesn't convince me that he can get it done against the Bayerns and Barcelonas.
...or maybe the negativity of my Arsenal-supporting officemate is starting to rub off on me.
Still, they got a big result today and that should give the squad a morale boost. Who knows, they might surprise us again.
