I'm opening this with the following statement:

This is an editorial piece containing my opinions about the Brian Ching situation. I do not have factual evidence to support my points, I'm simply making educated assumptions based on the information we've actually seen. That said, I'm sure I'll get some reactions from people who don't make it past the headline before jumping to a conclusion.

American McCarver is a moderately terrible sports blog run by tech journalists and bloggers. And yet this post just seems to have so much zeitgeist in it:

The point — you were totally expecting a plural there, weren't you? — came an hour and a quarter into the game, when someone apparently kicked the ball into a net or something.

INT – ARSENE WENGER'S OFFICE. ARSENAL TRAINING GROUND. THE PHONE RINGS. WE HEAR A VOICE ON THE OTHER END.

"Hello Arsene."

"Who is this?"

"It's Jose."

"Jose Feliciano, the Puerto Rican singer and virtuoso guitarist?"

"No, silly. It's Jose Mourinho, World's greatest football manager and ridiculously attractive man.

Dan thinks Colorado made a phenomenally bad decision based mostly on past performance while admitting this:

Steve Sampson and Thomas Rongen have won doubles in MLS.

I rest my case. Jeff Carlisle goes on to paint a picture of the dysfunctional working relationship between Smith and his superiors:

Smith went public with his displeasure in an October interview with The Denver Post but later tried to make peace with Bravo, realizing that he didn't want to leave the team he had spent three years putting together.

To preface, I'm not wholly satisfied with the catharsis I've employed since Saturday. Seems my best efforts to cleanse the memories of what transpired have failed and I'm extremely fucking bitter. I'm usually glass-half-full, but I'd be lying if I said there was anything worth drinking at the moment.

I've been thinking over and over about the last game, with the goalkeeper going off, and it's bugging me mercilessly. When I think about it intellectually, I know the referee did the right thing in letting it happen - it's why I didn't press into it when we talked about it post-game (although we did talk about it).

STARTERS
Japan won the Women's World Cup! Huge congrats to them. Hooray saki!
dN
Argentina and Brazil the powers of South America are both OUT of the Copa America in the Quarterfinal stage (beaten by Uruguay and Paraguay.) While Peru and Venezuela the whipping boys of South America are through to the Semifinals (beating Colombia and Chile.

Helenio Herrera and "catenaccio" usually go hand-in-hand: two words so interlinked that, were there a calcio thesaurus, each would be a synonym for the other. An amazingly successful coach based on an amazingly defensive system, Herrera has written his name in the lore of both Inter and Italy. Besides the bolt-approach to football, however, Herrera was known for one other attribute: he was, in essence, an asshole.

In January at the NSCAA convention, I ran a session called "Finishing Exercises for Elite Players." I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine how a soccer mind as brilliant as my own could have run out a team which produced so many embarrassing moments in front of goal.

I mean, I know the answer.

A Crawley Town fan was arrested after a music video designed for the club's FA Cup tie with Manchester United was spotted on YouTube featuring some unfavorable references to the 1958 Munich plane crash.

At first it's something like Where's Waldo: FA Cup Song Edition, largely because it's impossible to distinguish airplane movements from your average terrible music video dancing (scientific fact).

Shout out to the man Mike Chabala for lending his face to the NOH8 campaign because being an asshole isn't cool.* I've always thought soccer was a little different than other sports in America because it seems less-saturated with that bullying, jock mentality that often permeates football, basketball, wrestling, UFC, slap-boxing, cock-fighting, etc.

Lineups are . . . well, not in just yet.

But Sairax is away this afternoon due to a family emergency, and I've got a client meeting and some negotiations that will probably stretch all afternoon, so no one will be around to post the lineups when they do come in.

One of us will hopefully be able to provide a match recap at some point, but if and when it does happen, it will happen quite late, so I wouldn't wait around for it to pop up (and yes, I know, I sound like a proper asshole, assuming you all have nothing better to do than constantly refreshing this site to see what inane bullcrap Sairax and I will have to say about men kicking a little ball thousands of miles away but indulge me in the fantasy that this is in any way important) this afternoon or evening.