One Small Step for MLS, One Giant Shame for Chelsea

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MLS All-Stars 1, Chelsea 0. Of course it’s a good result for MLS, and not just because it looks good on paper. The MLS was the better team, and played the better soccer.

The problem, as always with assessing these exhibition game results, is to weigh just how prepared and committed the opposition was.

For Chelsea this was a preseason friendly. So the players — you could argue — were not fully fit, and the team, with the addition of new signings over the summer, has yet to gel. And the game itself, of course, means very little to Chelsea.

Yes, you can argue all of that, but it doesn’t cut much ice around here. The MLS All-Stars had never played as a team before, and they were lacking several of the league’s big names, in particular Landon Donovan, Eddie Pope, and Pablo Mastroeni.

But the factor that looms largest in assessing Chelsea’s performance, is money.Most of the players on the Chelsea team earn as much in a week as the average MLS player takes home in a year. Chelsea may not be the best team in the world, but they are certainly the most costly. Just look at its two summer signings: to acquire the Ukrainian goalscorer Andriy Shevchenko, Chelsea paid AC Milan $57 million, a record transfer fee for a British club. Germany’s Michael Ballack, signed from Bayern Munich, is reported by the London Daily Mail to be on a salary of $240,000 a week.

Those colossal figures ought to mean a huge gap in caliber between Chelsea and the MLS team.They ought to mean that Chelsea could stroll through this one. Instead, they labored. Ballack and Shevchenko were both on the field, but that was about it. Neither did anything memorable. Another of Chelsea’s putative stars, Frank Lampard (actually an Englishman, this one!), merely continued the feeble form he had shown when playing for England in this summer’s World Cup.

The only Chelsea players who came close to justifying their wage checks were John Terry, Michael Essien, and Didier Drogba — not because they looked like super soccer players, but because they worked hard.

It was a poor Chelsea performance: one without bite, and one without any discernible style. So, comes the inevitable question: to what extent was Chelsea’s weak showing the result of superior play by the MLS?

I would give MLS and their coach Peter Nowak a lot of credit on that score. Right from the start, MLS was in attacking mode, willing to take risks, to send defenders forward, to shun the lateral move for a penetrating pass.

In an exhibition game, of course, that is how it should be — but, alas, negativity has bitten deep into soccer, and it’s not often that we see a team attack with brio.

Chelsea were kept off balance by excellent ball control and attacking moves from Dwayne De Rosario, Christian Gomez, and Jaime Moreno. When Chelsea broke forward, they found defenders Jimmy Conrad, Bobby Boswell, and Facundo Erpen in formidable form.

A halftime score of 0–0 flattered Chelsea. After that came an avalanche of substitutions (eight for Chelsea, seven for the MLS), but the tenor of the game did not change: if anything, the MLS was more dominant, and it got its reward with a cracking goal from De Rosario.

Chelsea coach Jose Mourinho offered no excuses for the defeat. Or maybe he did. “The team in better condition won the game,” he said, “They were faster than us, sharper than us, able to play a high tempo game against a team that was tired and slow.”

And why would Chelsea be tired and slow? Because they’d spent a week training in Los Angeles, and apparently this had worn them all out. Considering that most of his players only played 45 minutes in this game, this seems an almost facetious excuse.

Well, the guy had to say something. His millionaires did not look good. Whereas virtually all of the MLS players did look good. There was quite definitely no link here between salaries and performance.

True, the game meant little to Chelsea. But for the MLS players there were a couple of factors that made it a serious occasion. There was — let’s not kid ourselves — a financial spur here.A good showing against Chelsea … heck, that could even lead to a contract with Chelsea, and goodbye to MLS’s stingy salary caps. De Rosario, the game’s MVP, would be justified in entertaining such notions.

There was also a desire by the players to squelch the idea that American soccer is a joke and their league a rinky-dink production. Mission accomplished, I’d say.Thirteen of the 18 players used by Nowak were born and developed in America. Thanks to Nowak’s attacking tactics, they were able to play a free-flowing game that allowed their talents full expression, and they produced some pretty impressive soccer.

The notion that the rest of the world looks down on American soccer — and in particular, the American-born player — has been around for as long as I can recall. Back in the 1970s Bobby Smith, one of the first American players to hold down a starting spot on the predominantly foreign New York Cosmos, used to protest loud and long, “Hey man, we can play with these guys!”

It is strange that this sense of inferiority persists, for American players have proved themselves with top clubs in Europe, and with solid World Cup performances.

But persist it does, albeit in an interesting new variation. This time the American players are intent on impressing … the American fans. More specifically, the Euro-snobs, the ones who will watch foreign games on television, especially English Premier League games, but who regard MLS games as too inferior to bother with.

Jimmy Conrad explained: “More than anything, it’s about winning over the American fan who’s a World Cup fan. I think games like this show that the perceived gap between MLS — or American soccer — and European soccer is closing. We have players who can compete.”

pgardner@nysun.com


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