Mateo319: Another Dead Blogger

While it's been a great experience blogging here, I've decided it's time to move on and blog elsewhere. For a variety of reasons, I can't tell you where, but assuming I do a good enough job, you'll find me soon enough.

Thanks to my readers and commenters! It's been fun!

-Mateo

As Crew fans are wont to do, their supporters section is currently in the midst of yet another round of pointless infighting. The aim is apparently obliteration of the section for the next few years until the next round of naive high schoolers comes in to give it a shot.

To be fair, as is usually the case, this most recent round of Surviver: Nordecke Edition was kicked off by the Crew organization. Crew GM Mark McCullers is threatening to evict members of the North End for engaging in profane organized chants:

...

There they sit, languishing on 5 points. The defending champions, now laughing stock of the league, tied for last in the east with New York, the other finalists of MLS Cup.

So why aren't I sharpening my pitchfork or bitching about losing Sigi and Brad Evans? Because honestly, things aren't all that grim.

A game that I've been playing with this team is "let's look at the corresponding fixtures from last season." Not temporally, but spatially. And what do we find?

2008
Toronto FC W, 2-0
@ Toronto FC T, 0-0
@ Chivas USA L,...

A story that's been picking up traction in light of what happened at the Blue Jays game two days ago, along with Rogers Center having some dry games this year is the possibility of BMO having it's liquor license suspended for some games in 2009. On the It's Called Football podcast from the weekend (I'm not linking, if you read this blog, you should be able to find it), the TFC VP of Operations was asked about the possibility of dry games. His response was that he couldn't talk about it. After he had hung up the hosts said that a number of rumors seemed to indicated there would be a couple of...

In the last few days both Jack Bell and I noticed that Hungary is suddenly sitting on top of their World Cup qualifying group (actually, second on goal differential) by a good 7 points. Whereas I merely was pleasantly surprised, Jack wrote a very nice piece about the golden team and the "success" of today. The video is the best footage I've seen of the 1954 Hungary-England match in Budapest, which followed the famous Wembley tilt.

As for the prospects for actual World Cup qualification:

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Since I'm a big fan of beating horses well past their freshness date, I'm following up Saturday's post on Bill Archer v. the TFC bloggers with a little more context.


After I listened to the podcast, I thought more and more about Ben Knight's meltdown. It really did seem to come out of nowhere, and it had a bit of an edge on it. It got me wondering where his anger toward Bill came from.

The day before the now infamous game between TFC and the Crew, Ben posted "A Letter to Columbus"...

From Caboodle.hu comes comes the heartwarming tale of FIFA officials taken by one of the most notorious tourist scams in Hungary. Most regular travelers to Budapest know to avoid shady strip club-type places. Why? Because oftentimes at the end of the night a couple goons will "persuade" you to pay your "full tab" which is much higher than one might expect. Usually this happens around the tourist/sucker rich Vaci utca, but this incident happened further north near the Western Rail Station (Nyugati Pályudvar).

Apparently two un-named FIFA officials, one from Britain and the other...

From the aforementioned awesome Bleacher Report (which was linked on the Crew board today by patricksp):

And the Toronto bloggers think Bill is a liar?

So this site had Bill Archer on today, on a video podcast. Some thoughts:

1) Before Bill went on, a TFC executive admitted that they like "tension" in the stadium, and wanted to toe the line where it felt like "something was about to happen." Of course the TFC supporters nodded enthusiastically, but when you deliberately foster a fan culture that toes the line of stadium violence, you get what you deserve.

2) The Toronto guys appeared to be surprised Bill liked to talk about his own point of view. Really? You thought he would be different?

3) ...

Today I was using the Googles to look for this:



and instead came across this:



Which looks an awful lot like - no, is - one of Dan's blog posts, except it's on BleacherReport, not BigSoccer. After the confusion wore off, I thought I should investigate since I'm so fond of tromping on people for double posting blog entries in a feeble attempt to build traffic....