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MLS Keeps 'Showing Up'
I don't wish ill will on anyone in MLS, though I may disagree with the tactics of a coach, the attitude of a player, or the sanity of a marketing campaign. If that means I'm someone who sees the glass more than half-full, well so be it.
Its importance to the game in this country and its slow but steady improvement, as well its limitations and flaws, might seem obvious, and much easier covering MLS would be if the former routinely trumped the latter, but such is not the case. Yet stridently bashing MLS for every inconsistency or that glitch impairs one's ability to evaluate the big picture, and the big picture is this: in what is about to be Year 14, MLS is still around. What a competitor!
Woody Allen once said, "Eighty percent of life is showing up" - you'll see other percentages referred to but he's quoted to that effect --- and a corollary can be added that nearly, if not all, of the remaining 20 percent is sticking around, through good and bad, ups and downs. Baseball may lack the crash and bash of football, or the slams and jams of basketball, or the grit and spit of hockey, but it's been there forever. In most countries, soccer sustains the populace as baseball does here, and it does so by survival as much as spectacle.
Plummeting downward right now are many aspects of life and if MLS can weather this greed-driven storm of gloom and doom, perhaps nothing can kill it off except that same greed applied to reckless overspending on players and other rampant madness, a la NASL.
Rather than trumpet the ticket frenzy in Seattle (again), though, I prefer at this juncture to point out a few of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller tales to watch and savor as they unfold in this year of MLS, game by game, week by week.
(continue)
I don't wish ill will on anyone in MLS, though I may disagree with the tactics of a coach, the attitude of a player, or the sanity of a marketing campaign. If that means I'm someone who sees the glass more than half-full, well so be it.
Its importance to the game in this country and its slow but steady improvement, as well its limitations and flaws, might seem obvious, and much easier covering MLS would be if the former routinely trumped the latter, but such is not the case. Yet stridently bashing MLS for every inconsistency or that glitch impairs one's ability to evaluate the big picture, and the big picture is this: in what is about to be Year 14, MLS is still around. What a competitor!
Woody Allen once said, "Eighty percent of life is showing up" - you'll see other percentages referred to but he's quoted to that effect --- and a corollary can be added that nearly, if not all, of the remaining 20 percent is sticking around, through good and bad, ups and downs. Baseball may lack the crash and bash of football, or the slams and jams of basketball, or the grit and spit of hockey, but it's been there forever. In most countries, soccer sustains the populace as baseball does here, and it does so by survival as much as spectacle.
Plummeting downward right now are many aspects of life and if MLS can weather this greed-driven storm of gloom and doom, perhaps nothing can kill it off except that same greed applied to reckless overspending on players and other rampant madness, a la NASL.
Rather than trumpet the ticket frenzy in Seattle (again), though, I prefer at this juncture to point out a few of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller tales to watch and savor as they unfold in this year of MLS, game by game, week by week.
(continue)
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