Pick A Winner!
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
You’re following the Cup, right? No, not that one. This one. The oldest soccer competition in America has reached the quarterfinal stage after DC United and Seattle advanced out of third round matches last night (highlights of the Sounders/Timbers match are here).
In this third round, MLS teams went 5-1-2 against lower-level competition (the two games that went to penalties officially go down as draws) and advanced in six of the eight matchups (oddly enough, the two lower-division sides that went through were third-division teams - USSF2 clubs were 0-for-6). This runs MLS’ all-time record in the Open Cup against lower-level competition to 110-42-19 (.699), and they’ve advanced 122 times in 171 matchups (71% of the time). Here’s the chart by level:
| Level | GP | W | L | T | Pct. | Adv. | Oust. | Pct. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Division II* | 115 | 71 | 30 | 14 | .678 | 81 | 34 | .704 |
| Division III^ | 35 | 23 | 10 | 2 | .686 | 24 | 11 | .686 |
| PDL | 17 | 13 | 2 | 2 | .824 | 14 | 3 | .824 |
| USASA | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | .875 | 3 | 1 | .750 |
| TOTAL | 171 | 110 | 42 | 19 | .699 | 122 | 49 | .713 |
*Includes the A-League, USISL Select League, USL First Division and USSF Division 2
^Includes the D3 Pro League, PSL and USL Second Division
But that’s only part of what I wanted to talk about today. I enjoyed watching the telecast of Seattle/Portland (it’s not often you get to see a US Open Cup match on TV before the final) despite a play-by-play guy with some…interesting takes on the English language. Anyway, they kept hyping it as “The Great American Soccer Rivalry.” Here’s what I did with that one. This is the kind of crap that made the Dallas Cowboys “America’s Team.” You just assert something is true, and if nobody calls you on it, eventually you get bolder and bolder and it becomes semi-fact.
Last night’s matchup was supposedly the 61st between the Sounders and Timbers going back to 1975. I just showed you the highlights of one. What other great Sounders/Timbers matchup do you remember off the top of your head?
You know why you don’t? Because 36 of the games happened in the USL and four others in the Open Cup (I must be missing one somewhere, unless they’re counting the Community Shield from earlier this year, because I only show 60 meetings). And of the 20 that happened in the original NASL, the most recent was in 1982. They only met in four playoff games in the USL, only one in the NASL, and now they’ve met four times in the US Open Cup. And only twice (1975 and 2007) did one team finish first in their division and the other second.
To be a truly great sports rivalry, you have to have most of the following: longevity, bad blood, memorable games, memorable personalities, controversy, playoff races or series, great or terrible moments (even better if we have photos or video of them), and the makings of compelling theater for people who don’t live in or around one of the two competing cities. You don’t have to have proximity (think USC/Notre Dame), but it doesn’t hurt.
I think Seattle/Portland falls short on most of those. There’s no doubt there’s proximity and bad blood (there seems to be some sort of general enmity between the two populaces, which always perplexes me). You can say they’ve got longevity, I guess, if you count the two (or three) incarnations of the Sounders, the two incarnations of the Timbers and the nine years between games. I’m sure Seattleites and Portlanders can come up with some memorable moments and maybe some controversy. Portlanders have a villain in Roger Levesque, but the only really villainous thing he ever did was score goals against them. But where are the memorable games (besides last night, which ended after 1am ET)? The playoff races? The personalities? The moments? And who outside of the Pacific Time Zone really cares?
Folks in the Pacific Northwest seem to keep pumping this meme that Seattle/Portland is going to be the MLS rivalry starting next year, as if past has been prologue and we’ve all just been waiting for you to get up here so we could have a real league. It’s not The Great American Soccer Rivalry. It’s the Pretentiousness Cup. And it’s always going to be a draw.
Other interesting stuff today:
- Bill Simmons has a fantastic “20 Questions” column about the World Cup. For a relatively new soccer fan, he nails exactly why the US is out and why soccer is (finally) in in America.
- And, proving there is balance in nature, there’s this douchebag from Las Vegas who may or may not even believe what he’s writing. Many newspaper columnists don’t care what their opinion is, only what they can get out there quickly without much effort and facts, common sense and context be damned. (And, inevitably, the meatheads who are in three fantasy football leagues feel compelled to chime in in the comments of any Soccer Sucks newspaper column.)
- Excellent stuff from my man Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion on the shady guys behind Australia’s bid for a future World Cup.
- Get ready for more Martin Tyler on ABC and ESPN in four years in Brazil. Whatever. I recognize his status, but there’s understated and then there’s boring. Tyler’s boring. Ian Darke, meanwhile, has been the find of the Cup. If you’re going to push my man JP Dellacamera to the side again (and please don’t), at least have Darke do the US games. Dump Derrek Rae and Efan Ekoku. They’ve been terrible. And a daily dose of John Harkes has exposed his lack of ability more than a game of the week could ever do.
- I’ve got a bunch of soccer - and other sports - stuff I’m selling on eBay and there will be more to come (I’m trying to do five things a day). If you collect stuff, you should check it out.
