(NOTE: After establishing the essential insanity of trying to cover everything on any given day, I'm now testing the insanity of trying to cover as much of what I missed as is reasonable on a weekly basis. Bear with me as I massage the organizational concepts into shape.)
With the preseason rolling along nicely (thanks very much) there are plenty of results from around Major League Soccer (MLS) that deserve (some, minimal quantity of) attention.
MLS-on-MLS Action
(By way of tribute to the departed Rick Santorum, I was going to dub this sub-title "dog-on-dog action," but didn't want to throw anyone and thus went with the obvious.)
Fairly early in the week, the Chicago Fire topped Chivas USA; the city of Angels struck back later in the week when the Los Angeles Galaxy beat the Fire, taking the aggregate score in the LA versus Chicago series to 3 goals apiece. For the record, I'm pulling for Chicago. Albright scored a beauty for LA, while Chris Rolfe appeared pretty active for Chicago in both matches.
The Houston Dynamo is another team having a busy week - likely in preparation for their CONCACAF Champions Cup semifinal against Pachuca. They lost to the Galaxy yesterday (who's also busy, yes?) and managed only a draw against Red Bull New York (RBNY) earlier in the week. Ugly as those results read for the Mexico-bound Dynamo, the game-day roster for the RBNY game makes it clear they're still getting players up to match speed. Then again, so was New York.
One final note: I'm thinking the Galaxy will be hard to beat this year - i.e. they're going to be strong on defense. And it's more than that Houston game pointing me that way.
Elsewhere....
MLS-on-World Action
FC Dallas
FC Dallas is currently warming up in Brazil around the club and facilities of Club Atletico Paranaense (which may fortunately be abbreviated as CAP). A March 3rd report notes that Dallas managed to beat the CAP B-team, with Carlos Ruiz scoring the lone goal of the game. Things went somewhat worse against the first-team. By the way, Soccer365's report on that second game tells you more than you could possibly want to know about what went down - good stuff.
Real Salt Lake
With the latter training in Spain, it's hard to say who got luckier on location between FC Dallas and Real Salt Lake (RSL). Whatever one's thoughts on that, RSL has been busy, busy over there: beginning with a bit of last week's news, the drew Rayo Vallecano 2-2, and have lost twice since then to Real Madrid Castilla (3-1) and San Sebastian (2-0). Hopefully, the weather is nice.
MLS-on-minnows
I'll treat these as addenda, as they properly ought to be treated. DC United gave up a suprising number of goals against Florida International University, in a 5-3 thriller. Elsewhere, Toronto FC pounded the stuffing out of the University of Connecticut. Nice work, by the way, the MLSnet.com interns for running a photo of Alecko Eskandarian in a DC uniform for the Toronto piece. At least he scored for the right team...
Whew. All for now. And I think it's plenty.
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