MLS Final Shaping Up as Major League Dud
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

According to the accepted wisdom, it was the English who invented soccer. A bunch of mid-nineteenth century bewhiskered gentlemen were the guilty ones. But there were Scots involved too, so already the origins of the sport look doubtful. Probe further and you find evidence of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Chinese playing some sort of proto-soccer well before the Victorians got into the act.
Me, I have other ideas. I believe the sport was invented by cats. I’ve watched kittens dribbling what they don’t know is really a soccer ball, and it’s all there – the action, the moves, the grace, even the leaping and falling over, the playfulness.
But there’s something else about soccer, something deep in its very soul, that is relentlessly feline. In a word: perversity. Cats and soccer are two realms where logic – the cool calculated, sensible thinking of man, the superior animal – has a hard time of it.Two realms with behavior patterns that constantly mock plans and predictions, that seem to delight in doing the very opposite of what is expected.
I doubt that there is any such thing as a cat behaviorist (it would seem a hopeless field), but should there be, then maybe MLS should consider consulting one. Maybe it could then fathom why its season, instead of climaxing in a blaze of sparkling soccer, has instead turned into a damp squib of mediocrity.
In particular, an explanation is urgently needed as to just how Sunday’s Eastern conference final in Foxborough between the New England Revs and the Chicago Fire turned out to be one of the worst games of the entire season. I’m being charitable – this one could be a candidate for the worst game in the history of soccer.
Revs fans will disagree, of course, because their team advanced with a 1-0 win to play the Los Angeles Galaxy in next week’s MLS Cup final. But for fans who just wanted to see good soccer and for the MLS – which is trying to sell soccer as an exciting, entertaining sport – this was an utter disaster.
It takes two teams to confect some thing as truly awful as this, but the worse offenders were the winning Revs.The scoring was all over after just four minutes, and fittingly, the game’s lone goal was laughably ugly. Revs midfielder Shalrie Joseph scuffed his shot, the ball rolled reluctantly towards the open Fire net, and Clint Dempsey slid clumsily in to escort it over the goal line … with his backside.
The crudeness of the goal set the pattern for the next 90 minutes.When, for fleeting mini-moments, something resembling soccer did surface, it was Chicago that produced it.
But that is not to absolve Chicago. This deplorable tangle produced 46 fouls, way above the regular season average of around 30 per game. Chicago’s contribution was 28 fouls, plus five yellow cards and one ejection. Somehow – and only referee Terry Vaughn, another performer having a bad day, can explain this one – the Revs escaped without any cautions at all.
What we got was an inchoate mess of strenuous physical effort, misplaced passes, brainless long balls, and wild tackling – a clumsy ballet performed to the rhythm of repeated blasts from Vaughn’s whistle.
Sadly, the ball seemed an almost superfluous item. I was reminded of a joke we told eons ago in England about the fan who, irritated by a delay in the action as a player ran off to retrieve the ball, shouted “Never mind the ball, get on with the game!”
The British version of soccer has always incorporated a huge dose of sheer battling physical effort. And there on the Revs bench we had Steve Nicol, the Scottish head coach, and Paul Mariner, his English assistant.While it would be exaggerating to suggest that the Revs were playing the sort of soccer that Nicol and Mariner want, it is undoubtedly true that the Revs performed as a Brit-coached team is always likely to play. Soccerwise, the Revs are more old England than New England.
Nicol has fashioned a team that, in the British tradition, is long on combativeness and heart, but short on style. The core of New England’s midfield – Joseph, Daniel Hernandez, and James Riley – are hard workers and, when need be, hard tacklers. Dempsey and Steve Ralston bring a dose of creativity, but neither could be accused of showing a high degree of artistry.
Nicol does have an artistic midfielder in the person of the Uruguayan Jose Cancela, but it is something of a mystery why Nicol ever signed him, as he seems a totally inappropriate player for a Brit-style team. Cancela spends most of his time on the bench.
The day before the infamous Revs vs. Fire clash, the L.A. Galaxy defeated the Colorado Rapids 2-0 in the Western Conference final. This game, which never quite sank to the dreadful depths of the Foxborough debacle, was hardly an electrifying occasion.But it did have its highlights in the form of two splendid goals from Landon Donovan. The first combined speed, timing, and deadly finishing as Donovan darted in front of his defender to plant an unstoppable shot in the net – all in less time than it takes to tell of it.The second started with doggedness as Donovan battled and stumbled his way past three defenders before recovering his poise to curve the ball beautifully around goalkeeper Joe Cannon.
Will Sunday’s final feature any such moments of pure soccer skill? Or will it be another war of attrition? I don’t need to study the entrails to answer that one: all indications are that it will be grim. Nicol has his team playing nofrills soccer – but they’re winning. Why change anything? Steve Sampson’s Galaxy has spent the entire season swaying between so-so and okay performances, though Donovan has come through whenever it’s mattered. I doubt the Galaxy can change that set up, even should Sampson want to.
There is also the ominous fact that we’ve had a Revs vs.Galaxy final before, and it wasn’t pretty. In 2002 the Nicolcoached Revs and the Galaxy (then coached by Sigi Schmid) gave us what was – by unanimous consent – the worst of all nine MLS finals: a sterile 0-0 bore that staggered into overtime before Carlos Ruiz ended the torture and won it for the Galaxy in the 113th minute.
Both the omens and the soccer logic point to another stinker. But I despair not. Because of the perversity of cats and the sport they so obviously invented, I’m expecting a barnburner.