September 2, 2008

Under Pressure

cue Queen and David Bowie, with Vanilla Ice somewhere in the background still trying to prove Ice Ice Baby had a different bass line...

New England and Chivas USA are down to the wire tonight to qualify for the CONCACAF Champions League group stage. They were unable to get results on the road, and are now left to prove their strength at home. Can they do it?

It really doesn't look all that likely. New England has passed Chivas in the number of players on the injured list, with most of their attacking options on the shelf. With Twellman and Ralston out, who does the scoring? Even Adam Cristman, who's been better than I had expected, is doubtful. Khano Smith can't do it all on his own, can he?

As for the Goats, they'll be missing Shavar Thomas who's with the Jamaican national team for their qualifier against Mexico this weekend. The Galavision announcers would be thrilled about that development, or laughing nonstop about how's representing his country. Ante Razov played 70 minutes on Saturday against Toronto, will he have anything for tonight? At least Attiba Harris scored on Saturday, maybe he'll have some confidence going into tonight's match. It's needed.

I'd love to hear the taunting coming from Francisco Marcos and the USL if they have as many teams in the group stage as MLS. We'll see what happens tonight...

3 comments:

bj said...

Your precious MLS teams got smoked tonight, and don't play the injury card because how do we know the two obscure teams that they played didn't also have injuries. Let's face it. MLS is not ready for this type of competition. Joe Public? Give me a break. T@T is a very small island country. Thirty miles by sixty miles. Smaller than Cobb county,GA. To be fair, the MLS can't match the speed of these teams. They have a lot of work to do.

Longshoe said...

The injuries had a hand in it, you can't deny it. That said, the MLS teams have to be at a higher quality to overcome the injuries.

New England was at least in good shape after the away leg, down 2-1. All they needed was a goal at home, and they're sitting pretty. It's absolutely inexcusable to get blasted 4-0 in a must-win cup game. Very disappointed in the coaching staff and their job in getting their team ready to play.

Chivas really screwed the pooch in the away leg, going down 2-0. They had chances to at least draw that game, and blew them all night. I think they had too big of a mountain to climb in the home leg, and weren't able to do it.

You're dead on when it comes to the speed, particularly in the New England series. The Joe Public wingers were running circles around the Revs, Tierney looked horrible in the away leg and was at fault on both goals. He didn't look much better in the small amount of the game I was able to see tonight.

No excuses, New England and Chivas USA weren't good enough to overcome champions from Trinidad and Panama. That's sad.

bj said...

Montreal of the USL advances by beating Real Esteli 1-0 on aggregate.