With J Hutcherson -- Yet another night for the glory of the CONCACAF Champions League, with DC needing an away result against Firpo and Toronto looking for the comeback in Puerto Rico. Without overdoing the specifics, DC needs anything other than a loss or a 0-0 draw to keep from exiting in regulation courtesy of the away goals rule. Toronto lost 1-0 at home, making their various scenarios a goal more difficult. They're also facing a Puerto Rico team that went deep last time around.
As much as was made of Montreal in the 2008-09 Champions League, it's Puerto Rico setting the standard. Semifinals will do that for you. So will not botching your qualifying tournament to make sure you're back the next year.
It also includes teams from the Puerto Rico Soccer League, a circuit playing the standard Clausura/Apertura schedule with five of the nine teams affiliated with bigger foreign clubs. Should the PRSL work, things become even more of a problem for Puerto Rico's USL-1 club. It's one thing to be the only fully professional club in your country. Quite another to be pushing a different league, a different style, and a different schedule against a league full of hometown heroes.
For the Islanders, their time is most definitely now. Make the big statement by knocking off Major League Soccer opposition to get into the group stage, holding up home field in the process. Considering the difficulties MLS has had doing similar, it's a solid reason why there's value even in the preliminary stage of this tournament.
Moving on, Kansas City becomes the first club in 2009 to decide their coach isn't working. Curt Onalfo is gone in favor of technical director turned interim coach Peter Vermes. Along with that move come the basic questions that have hampered the fire to rebuild model in recent years. Sigi Schmid exiting LA, Bruce Arena no longer with New York, and Steve Morrow pushed out in Dallas. All were supposed to spark something better than they had, and all ended up in the same stall or worse that led to that decision.
Credit at least some of them for not being equally quick with the drop for the replacement. At least there's that, the relative prize for the person trying to not only change thins up, but do it against comparisons to the other guy. That's even tougher when that other guy is proving his worth somewhere else.
Turning this around, if 6-0 was good enough to cost a coach his job, what does it mean for FC Dallas? The quick answer is that a lot of goals one week mean very little next time around. The FC get a short week turnaround against the best team in the Western Conference at home on Thursday.
Should this be as much of a big game as anything involving Dallas in quite awhile? It might not be the fairest thing to the coaches or the players, but that's a quick yes. Throw up six goals unanswered against anybody in this League, and that's what it earns you. A quick reshuffle of expectations for a team that's still sporting a negative goal differential at the wrong end of the table.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
