With rosters across Major League Soccer getting stretched like taffy at the state fair, a versatile performer can greatly enhance his value in the big picture in steadily expanding MLS.
It’s one thing if an athlete can play in a position beyond his preferred spot and not be a total disaster at the alternate location. But a fellow who can actually fill a hole and manage to be effective as a stop-gap, that fellow has greatly elevated his stock in the eyes of a manager who is straining to make due during times of smaller rosters and swollen schedules.
A quick look around the league during Round 17 says it all. In fact, in one particular instance, five words say it all: Steve Ralston at left back. Read more
by Steve Davis
Failure or progress?
By Philip Hersh
The game is a touchstone for women soccer players, just as the moon walk — the giant step for mankind, not Michael Jackson’s dance move — was for the world 40 years ago, as Ray Meyer taking DePaul to the Final Four was to Chicagoans 30 years ago, as Greg LeMond’s back-from-near-death victory on the last stage of the Tour de France was for U.S. cycling fans 20 years ago.
The game took place 10 years ago last Friday. It redefined the lives of many young athletes and became one of those moments in which the memory of where they saw it became indelible.
Lindsay Tarpley was 15 years old when she watched the final of the 1999 Women’s World Cup with her parents and two brothers — neither a soccer player — in the family room of their home in Kalamazoo, Mich. Read more
By Michael Lewis
Some American fans think New Jersey’s Giuseppe Rossi is soccer’s answer to Benedict Arnold.
Fans are upset that Rossi decided to go with his heritage instead of the country of his birth to play with the green, white and red of Italy rather than the red, white and blue of the USA.
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By Robyn Dixon
Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — When Emma Jordi’s mother suggested a Sunday afternoon at South Africa’s Confederations Cup watching the national soccer team play Iraq, the pretty blond 14-year-old had an excuse. Homework.
“I have to write a speech for English,” she said warily, more accustomed to riding her beautiful chestnut gelding, Spring Close Prince Dante, than spending rowdy afternoons at the soccer stadium, the air rent by the blasts of plastic trumpets called vuvuzelas that fans blow.
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