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| Step 1. Have the baby...or you can't ruin her 14th. |
As anyone who hit my Major League Soccer Week 1 Review, I
went global on that thing. That was a big part of why that post went up
Wednesday. Not the only part, but a big one.
The impulse to cover it all, while understandable, doesn’t
really make sense. Sure, half of this comes from a place of tearful exhaustion
(I…tried. Don’t you EVER tell me that I didn’t TRY, damn you!), but, on a practical
level, how many interesting things can you really say about, oh, the New York
Red Bulls’ 1-0 home win over the Colorado Rapids? I mean, I struggled to
squeeze 10 lines total out of that turd (don’t worry; won’t pin the image to
that line) between both teams, because, based on the condensed game, New York
smothered Colorado’s broadly mediocre attack, Rapids’ ‘keeper Tim Howard made
3-4 good saves (and one great one against New York’s Bradley Wright-Phillips),
and New York attained “glory” on an own-goal by Eric Miller. Rah-rah.
As such, I’m cutting that shit out and going with a Top 5
this year, a hard Top 5…wait…shit. I was going to stick all the results
somewhere in here, but now I realize that it’s late (midnight is 4 a.m. to the over 40 set), and I don’t wanna do it.
Next week, people, next week (Make a note, Judy; we need to tighten our
deadlines...). There’s a couple steps to that, however, and frequent visitors
surely know my love for long preambles, so here’s that. I’ll run each of the
five topics I choose against some form of local media – maybe the official
site, maybe just the relevant SB Nation blog, maybe something I find on my own,
or that someone suggests on her own – to confirm that I’m not missing something,
or that I’m not reading too much signal from a noise I picked up in a condensed replay.
And that’s part two: I’ll write a reviews/analysis/bad-joke collection
for any game the Portland Timbers play (See: this week’s 1-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy), plus two other games that I choose – and probably because,
sure, it’s a game that interests no one but the local fans, and only half of
them, but I take fewer risks with spoilers if I watch that one, so…that’s how
you wind up writing up the Chicago Fire’s 2-0 win over Real Salt Lake (not even MLS can spoil the weekend's first
game) and Sporting Kansas City’s intrigue-laden goal-less home draw versus FC Dallas (watch the babies, people; the babies).
And, finally, that takes us to Part 2 1/2: because those
three games (or two games, on a slow week) get that much attention, I figure I
should pull the Top 5 from the games I don’t watch all the way through. Sure, I
risk passing on more lightly observed thoughts, but that’s where the local
confirmation thing (e.g. running each point past local media) comes in...
…what? Why are you looking at my like the biological father
who just brought a Barbie doll to his daughter’s 14th birthday? Christ, man, I’m
doing the best I can out here…look, it’s my new girlfriend. She’s just really
demanding…
We’ll talk about that later. Here’s this week’s Top 5.
