For some reason I knew you would say that! Typical English gentleman! That's ok Mike. All I have to do is show her your pic and she will tell me the whole soap!
Mike, I have a question for you. We all know that NASL had their fair share of Brits and Irishman in every town. What I want to know is why was it that Vancouver , Seattle & Portland would only sign Brits? Was it because the Pacific Northwest has a similar climate to Great Britain or are there a lot of British immigrants up there? Just curious.
Don't know for sure but I would guess because the coaches were mostly British and stayed with what they knew best....their own kind.
Yeah that was true with most of the clubs in the league. However, unlike other clubs signing all kinds of different nationalities from all of the continents , the PNW teams seemed to sign only Brits.
Mike, I want you to know you are responsible for keeping me up the longest ever on a school night ... Dallas played the Rochester Lancers at Aquinas Stadium in a play-off game on 1st of September 1971. (By record, the longest regulation match in history). Do you remember that ? You're probably still tired from it ... It was one of the most fantastic nights ever ... I believe the little Brazilian Carlos Metidieri ended the whole thing with a goal. cheers
Blah blah blah...whatever. When's your damn book coming out? We've been waiting, what, three years now? C'mon already...
Remember it well it was the first of a three game series, went 176 minutes. We won the second game in Dallas 3-1 and back in Rochester game three went 146 minutes before we scored to advance. That game 3 was tougher than the longer first game as both teams had 2 players ejected early in the game so we played 9 vs 9 for over 90 minutes...
Need a literary agent. Tried the major NY houses (probably aimed too high) and got no interest. Any ideas ??
You may have to self-publish. It's really easy these days. You won't get an advance, but you can get it done.
Great note. FIFA is a necessary dictatorship that guarantees that you'll see the same game (and with no uni-kits in Cameroon) in Ukraine and Peru. Several issues continue to pop up on these forums that ought to be addressed. 1. The NASL could present on any given day a great contest to watch. But these were strictly paper teams. They were not linked to their own brick-and-mortar stadiums. The promoters could write a check to the league, sign some good players, play a couple of good games somewhere and then disband the team and leave town. Does anyone think the Rapids are going to walk away from that beautiful new stadium? The Rapids are not as much fun to watch as the Philadelphia Fury. That's OK with me. I'll wait. The priorities are in order and the better game is on the way. 2. ABC did not kill the NASL but helped speed its disbanding. ABC and now the fulltime sports networks wanted, and still want, control over the schedules and rules of teams. In American gridiron, for an example, defensive linemen have been restricted increasing because the networks want more passes completed and more scoring. In baseball, the strike zone was shrunk so more newspaper space could be taken up with reports of home-run records. The MLS management is correct to tell the networks where to stick proposed exceptions to world rules. We all have seen brilliantly played 0-0 games. (Let's keep it among ourselves that we also have seen some god-awful nil-nils.) I tell critics of a lack of scoring that high-scoring games are more often sloppy and badly-played than low-scoring games. 3. After 20 or so teams are ensconced in stadiums that probably can't be used for anything else, two problems with U.S. soccer can be more speedily addressed. The problems are at the U.S. Federation and the NCAA. Real Salt Lake this past year gave a clinic in moving away from listening to the dodderers at the U.S. Soccer Federation. An owner who didn't know about soccer was told by Federation insiders to hire one of these Federation insiders. He dutifully went with the advice but was smart enough to recognize the error faster than managements at other franchises have (The Fire was next to wise up. When will the Crew?). And in the matter of players, Real Salt Lake seems to have torn up the "super draft" list of suggested new players (the list that produced a new crop of duds all over the league this past season) and went out and brought in immediate help in the form of three players that I am eager to see next season -- the Argie centerback in particular. At least, no announcer can fill his air time by telling me their colleges. Look at the best players around the world. You won't find one who started his career as late as 21 or 22 years old. The NCAA game can provide filler for rosters in the USL and perhaps in the MLS, but the national team needs players that can deal with players who have played at the big-money level for several years beginning in their mid-teens. One example is Fred Adu. While others were wondering what MLS team would get him, I was sweating until he signed with an agent and took his first professional dollar, which meant he was barred from wasting years in the NCAA game. We need to be finding good kids at the local club and high school level or even below that, and doing whatever it takes to make them unacceptable for wasting in an NCAA program. (Note a big distinction here: An NCAA program does not mean a college education. We have illiterates working for NCAA entertainment companies operated by colleges. Kids can play real soccer, money soccer, and go to college too. They won't be pressured by coaches to take easy courses and save their energy for the college team.) Given pro teams locked into their own stadiums and players seriously playing in their mid-teens, the U.S. game can beat anything overseas.
Completely agree. Completely disagree. NFL rules changes designed to open up play were more for fans attending games than for TV networks. The major rules change schisms were in 1974 (goal posts to the end line, kickoffs moved back, overtime) and 1978 (illegal chuck, rules to open up the passing game), all nearly/more than 30 years ago. The NFL simply didn't have as many games on as many outlets then as it did now. Those rule changes were designed to make the game more attractive to everybody, and to create a more even balance between offense and defense. They weren't specifically designed to cater to the networks. No, the mound was lowered because Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA and Carl Yastrzemski won the batting title with a .301 average. Rules changes are made to try to bring the balance between offense and defense closer to equilibrium. Defense was taking over baseball and it was god-awful boring. You can fill just as many column inches describing pitchers' exploits as home run records. But fans like offense. Always have. Well, they are now. Kinda. But I am not sure that ABC/ESPN, which televises soccer games played under "world rules" all the time, is really trying to tell them to make the goals larger or bring back the shootout. MLS did those things on their own to align more with the world's game. I don't think they were doing them in spite of insistence from the TV networks that they open up the game. It isn't like CBS in 1967 making sure the referee called fouls and made players stay on the ground so they could cut to commercial. Maybe not yet. But I'd like where we're heading with those two things.
Eh...even with Osgood, Giles, and Ball, I thought Fury games were pretty painful to watch. It got a little better in 1979 with Robb and Rigby, and went back to tooth-pullingly painful in 1980. But I agree with your main points one-hundred percent. I just wanted to drop the names of ex-Fury players.
I had a few friends who played with those guys (Rich Reice, Jim Miller, Bill Straub and Tom Weidbolt). All of them, to a man, said Osgood was a greatguy and teammate... I was lucky enough to meet John Dempsey once and he was a heck of a guy, too.. Too bad they were all onloved in that mess. It should have been so cool...
Amen. The #1 priority for MLS and the USSF in terms of youth development has got to be to bypass the NCAA. Get the message out to potential players that the path to professionalism does not go through the college game, then make sure the professional youth programs are there to back that statement up. I'd like to see each MLS club with a youth squad. ------RM