With J Hutcherson -- For those of you who believe in the direct connect between Major League Soccer performance and National Team opportunity, the Jeff Cunningham call-up isn't even a conversation. 17 goals in 28 games, one of the finalists for Most Valuable Player, and he belongs back in the picture.
For those of you who are fans of the clubs that let him go or passed on him in recent years, you're probably wondering what Dallas saw. Not to be too clever, but the same thing those other clubs either overlooked or undervalued.
Cunningham plays his game, and that normally ends up frustrating coaches. He's not an every game scoring threat, yet he's as lethal as anybody MLS has seen when his game is on. It's as unpredictable as his multi-goal performances, tough to build around, and easy to criticize. More than enough MLS personnel have taken advantage of that opportunity.
Giving all due respect to coaching discretion, there's been an odd history of marginalizing game changing forwards for club and country. It's as if teams convince themselves that they have to move those players along. As that thinking seems to go, regardless of how many goals they score, you're risking the eventual tail off.
Meanwhile, these players pack up their games, setup in a new squad and continue to score. For whatever reason, that's normally treated as a fluke, or the more polite late career revival, than an indication of what they could've been contributing all along.
Cunningham scored 62 goals for Columbus over seven seasons. That earned him a season in Colorado before spending three with expansion teams. Real Salt Lake traded the guy early in the '07 season, the season after he won the scoring title. He slumped badly in Toronto, but in retrospect that's hardly a statement of relative quality.
Taking what three years of results have shown us, you have to wonder what Cunningham's career goal total would be had he been allowed to stay in a stable environment. I'm going to assume we could probably pencil in double digits for the better part of two seasons with Toronto. Certainly enough that he would already have the career lead in MLS goals scored. He's second, by the way, trailing Jaime Moreno by ten.
At the Hall of Fame induction in 2005, I won an auction item that got me the pick of any jersey from a group of Rapids players. With all due respect to that team (3rd in the West - semifinals that season), there was no question which one I was taking. There's just something about a striker who was using his career goals total at the start of the season as his uniform number.
No, I'm not going to make a connection between that Hall of Fame moment and Cunningham's chances at induction. The way the Hall vote is currently conducted leaves out players who set a standard club and country, much less the contributions of those who were exceptional at MLS level. That's the Hall's problem.
For me, it's not even a question that the pioneers of MLS goal scoring deserve to be in the Hall of Fame as soon as they're eligible. It's apparently the minority opinion, but I'm not going to downplay 121 goals scored in a League featuring eventual Hall of Famers.
I'm also not going to pretend that Cunningham has been anything but a success in Major League Soccer. There's no knock against him that's going to stick.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
