CONCACAF Champs' Primers

The CONCACAF Champions Cup will constitute one of the bigger distractions in the days ahead - I've mentioned the other elsewhere and will elaborate on that before the day is done.

Turning to business, as all y'all know by now, we're at the semifinal stage of the CONCACAF Champions' Cup. For the record, a Wednesday night game will pit the Houston Dynamo against CF Pachuca, while the Thursday game features DC United taking on CD Chivas de Guadalajara. And, thank whatever God you praise, these games will be televised. (On a personal note, work obligations mean I'm going to see a lot more of Houston v. Pachuca, which is kind of a shame because I think DC v. Chivas will be a better game.)

This will be the (rough) extent of the previewing I'll be doing, but I want to point interested parties to the refined scribblings of Luis Bueno, who is working toward making himself a one-man source for the Champions' Cup semifinals. Between an "check-up" article on the Mexican Primera's 2007 Clausura he posted on LA Soccer News and a pair of Champs' Cup primers - one for Sports Illustrated (LINK) and the other, a more hard-numbers piece he produced for an outlet called The Press-Enterprise.

Returning to the one-man show meme above, I was about to chide Jeff Carlisle from ESPN for falling off between his coverage of the quarterfinals versus the looming semis, but thought to check that site before doing so. And, sure enough, he's got something up and it's pretty dang good. Looks like there's two on this beat and Carlisle deserves props for naming some players to watch.

I'll be making a modest contribution of my own to this fray: a heads-up preview article for Write On Sports, but I want that to be pretty bare-bones and that's by design. I'm going to make a conscious effort this year to scale back on my previews in order to save time and energy to report on the games themselves. After all, it's the games we're all watching, right? So expect a heads-up with a touch of framing, but nothing like the total coverage you'll get by reading all the stuff linked to above.

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