Man, Look At How Stupid This MLS Game Is
That's it. That's the whole thing. I'm going to make fun of MLS for a while.
You may have thought, once you watched San Jose play Vancouver, or Atlanta play Cincinnati, or San Jose play Real Salt Lake, or LAFC play Seattle, that you’d seen the best and dumbest soccer that MLS had on offer. And you would be wrong, because look at this.
That is two players who have played for the United States of America in the last six years, both of whom have their brains remotely shut off during this challenge and for a few seconds turn into foosball men when you and your little brother do that thing where you combine forces to hold the ball up in the air before returning to spinning those things like helicopter rotors, because this is for funsies and you don’t care about foosball rules. It is one of the purest distillations of how drunk this MLS is Back tournament has become, and it’s not even the only dumb or weird thing that happened in this game. Consider… everything else. Like Cincinnati’s multiple missed chances, highlighted by Jurgen Locadia’s all-timer.
Or Steve Clark! As a reminder, Steve Clark did this not even a year ago.
I know people will talk about his assist to Diego Valeri in the first minute of MLS Cup 2015, but let this be a reminder that Steve Clark can ball. That’s a textbook “get big” save, followed by an immaculately-timed slide tackle from behind that was not a foul, which is it’s own massive feat for a goalkeeper, followed by another save at full stretch. It is still one of the most impressive 30 seconds I’ve ever seen from any goalkeeper, anywhere. Anyways, that same person did this last night.
You just… you just could’ve picked it up. This was almost immediately followed by an FC Cincinnati shot directly to Clark, which slipped through his hands, bounced off the post behind him, and back into his hands. Yeah.
Clark made up for it, making a penalty save (albeit one of the easiest ones you’ll ever see) in the ensuing shoot-out after Kendall Waston put on an impressive branding display with his penalty (tall, violent, right down the center). But still.
This all occurred in a game, mind you, where FC Cincinnati achieved its final form and put out a block so low that it wouldn’t be able to ride the teacup spinny thingy at an amusement park, *while they were still down a goal in a knockout format, in which the result did not even count towards their regular season totals.* I don’t know if that’s… progress, for Cincy and Jaap Stam? Like, they for sure weren’t getting four goals scored on them. Absolutely not. And they did manage to get the game to penalties, I suppose. But they also ran headlong into conventional wisdom, that playing for penalties isn’t a sustainable strategy because penalties are a coin-flip. That might not be a problem if you run into a team that’s just better than you on the day. The problem is when every single team you might face is better than you on the day. Except for Atlanta United.
A lot of the time I have a deep thought to accompany these types of pieces. I like to surprise people with some wit or something hidden amongst the vast fields of stupidity I like to dance through while I sing the Sound of Music soundtrack. But I don’t have any of that for you today. Just pure, unbridled stupidity, that I think we should all enjoy. Because if you can’t enjoy the dumb stuff, why are you even here?
As a Reminder, It Could Have Been Worse
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On a Completely Unrelated Note to That Last Plug…
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