Soccer The Word

Greg Ryan lost his job today as the U.S. women's national soccer coach, less than a month after his controversial decision to bench goalie Hope Solo and his team's subsequent meltdown against Brazil.

U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati made the announcement, and he said he will be part of a three-person committee (along with Mia Hamm and U.S. Soccer's secretary general, Dan Flynn) that will determine the next coach for Team USA, which needs to regroup for the Olympics next year.

Gulati said there was no specific incident that led to the decision not to bring Ryan back, but everyone knows the loss to Brazil was the final nail in Ryan's coffin. There was no hope that he could continue to coach Team USA after that.

Goalkeeper Hope Solo was told not to show up for the Women's World Cup third-place game after she criticized coach Greg Ryan's decision to bench her for the semifinal against Brazil.

But she hasn't been banished for good, and when Team USA begins a three-game series with Mexico in St. Louis on Saturday, Solo will be on the roster. It's not clear whether Ryan will pick Solo or the woman she was benched for, Briana Scurry, in St. Louis, but presumably both of them will get some playing time against Mexico, either in St. Louis Saturday or in one of the following games, in Portland and Albuquerque.

This is a magnanimous gesture from Ryan, but it's also the only move he could make if he wants to salvage his own reputation. As much as Solo was criticized for her comments about Ryan and Scurry, Ryan was criticized more for benching Solo in the first place. He won't be Team USA's coach for much longer, and at least he's not going out holding a grudge.

Back in July, Jason Chung, a fellow at The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard University Law School, got keyboards tapping everywhere with a post at The Situationist entitled, Negative Press: Is ESPN Killing the National Hockey League by Influencing Public Attitudes?

As a long-time fan of the NHL, it was an interesting read to say the least, and one that had my head nodding in agreement more often than not. From where I sit, there's little doubt in my mind that the relentless barrage of negative press the league endured throughout the playoffs and beyond was triggered in part by the programming decisions made in Bristol, Conn.

Now Chung is back, and his timing once again in fortuitous, as his latest post looks at ESPN's stake in promoting the success of Major League Soccer: Manufactured Hype: Can ESPN's Agenda-Setting Behaviour save Major League Soccer?

It's an interesting questions to ask, especially as a number of fans of the sport are beginning to question whether or not the sort of hype ESPN is delivering is actually hurting the league rather than helping it.

As my FanHouse colleague David Warner pointed out yesterday, D.C. United's own Bobby Boswell, former MLS defender of the year, has something of a bone to pick with ESPN, essentially accusing it of promoting Beckham at the expense of the sport itself.

Then again, there are other times when you have to wonder just what side ESPN is really on.

What's worse, as concern about the severity of Beckham's ankle injury linger, others are wondering out loud whether or not the hype is starting to backfire on Beckham and the league -- something which has to be considered particularly unfair given reports on just how badly hurt the England international really is.

As expected, there's YouTube footage of David Beckham warming up on the RFK Stadium sidelines from three different angles. I chose the one above because of the flashbulbs coming out of the crowd. That's almost halfway toward what you would see at a Super Bowl kickoff -- for a guy jogging on the sidelines.

Plenty of photos showed up on Flickr last night, too. Americans may still be warming up to soccer, but when it comes to celeb-watching, they wrote the book.

Previously at FanHouse:
Beckham Will Help Galaxy, But Not Tonight

I guess it's not exactly breaking news that Tony Kornheiser criticized a soccer player on Pardon the Interruption today. But Kornheiser came across as so scornful toward David Beckham on today's PTI that his comments are worth repeating:

"I have no patience for this guy. The guy is a fraud right now. He's a fraud. He's taking money under false pretenses. He's not playing. And who's being cheated? The people who bought the tickets. ... When he's ready to play, sell the tickets. .... He's a fraud. He's a fraud."

Is Kornheiser being unfair here? Probably. But it's interesting to note that even though ESPN is invested in seeing Beckham's arrival in the United States succeed, its on-air personalities seem to feel comfortable bashing soccer in general and Beckham in particular. ESPN is often accused of artificially propping up its own properties, but I've heard lots of Beckham bashing on the Worldwide Leader.

You would think that The Colbert Report would attempt to admonish Association football and favor good old-fashioned American football, but it appears Stephen Colbert has left that task to the likes of Bryan Burwell, Jay Mariotti, and others who are also too ignorant to appreciate Colbert's satire. Besides, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the dog's "man crumpets." Hey, Stephen Colbert said it, I believe it, and that settles that.

(Spotted on Culture of Soccer via The Offside.)

Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel is the best sports show on television, and it always concludes with Gumbel offering a closing thought. In the most recent installment, he says he thinks there's a hint of xenophobia in the way many sports columnists feel the need to badmouth soccer when writing about the arrival of David Beckham:

I'm not sure that it's xenophobia, but I do agree that it's odd that so many American writers come out of the woodwork so often to say they don't like soccer. Like Gumbel, I don't foresee Beckham making soccer more popular in America, but I welcome him and wish him well.

When Jozy Altidore got hacked from behind in the 50th minute yesterday and was forced off the field, the USA U20s brought a guy named "Akpan" whose main contribution was getting hacked to the turf (sense a theme?) in the right place for the Uruguayans to score an own goal. Though Austria isn't an intimidating opponent, it would be very, very nice to have Altidore around for the quarterfinals. He's going to try:

"I'm going to try, man," he said. "I don't know at this point, but I'm going to try to get ready for Saturday."

The injury in question is a calf thing, not a knee or an ankle, so that seems possible. If he can't go I will follow through on my oft-repeated (loudly, in public) threat to bomb frickin' Uruguay into the stone age if I have to MacGuyver an F-16 out of old Michigan tickets, a paperclip, and my MP3 player. Seriously... is there a more reprehensible team in world soccer? I say no.

The Debriefing is a column that runs every weekday at 9:00 a.m. here on FanHouse. It goes deep into one issue and then bounces around to a plethora of smaller ones ... and does it all in a way that will make you feel like the prettiest girl at the cotillion. Bookmark this page, and visit daily.



David Beckham cannot make you watch soccer. I suppose he could, if he were to break into your house, duct tape your wrists and ankles and hold a pistol to your temple as he put some MLS highlights into your DVD player. But I don't think that's going to happen.

Beckham will be good for the MLS, much like a delicious bundt cake is good for a church group's bake sale. It'll earn some short term cash, create some good word-of-mouth advertising around the neighborhood, and get some people talking. But the bundt cake is not sending the kids to the Vatican for two weeks in August. You can't build a future around it.

The ideal outcome for the Beckham-to-America experiment would be for him to raise the sport's profile permanently, create a greater sense of respect for American soccer, and to get people to stop chuckling when they hear the initials "MLS."

But that's a pretty tall order.

(Also at the bottom: An ESPYs photo gallery that you don't want to miss, Darko gets papered up, and I, I'm sorry to say, am Yesterday's Sad Sack.)

This one's been making the rounds in the last few days, and it deserved a spot here. This is Wayne Rooney abusing a digital camera for his shoe company. He looked proud of his little accomplishment. Then, after filming this ad, he went out and shagged a cougar. Hopefully off camera.

(H/T: Who Ate All the Pies)