The Chicago Fire have signed 25 year-old Uruguayan forward Federico Puppo. HTIOT first put this rumor up over a week ago and it's interesting to see it finalized. It seems the Chicago Fire technical staff should be fully familiar with Puppo.

"Federico Puppo is a player we've kept an eye for the past few seasons," said Fire head coach Frank Klopas.

The Hot Time In Old Town crew has been experimenting with new some sidebar boxes in order to improve our coverage and information on the Chicago Fire. One of these sidebars is the Chicago Fire Rumor Mill. If there's so much as a minor hint of Fire related player news, you'll see at least a fanshot thrown up along with some thoughts on how realistic it sounds and how credible the source appears.

It has been over 40 days and 40 nights since we last did an overview of the Chicago Fire roster going into 2012. In that time Mike Banner has been let go. Yamith Cuesta, Diego Chaves, and Josip Mikulic have drifted away in circumstances that are still being sorted out. Rafael Robayo, Federico Puppo, Austin Berry, and Kheli Dube have been brought in with contracts to their name.

Here it is, the last leg of the positional preview. I finally manage to get around to talking about the forwards. There are several issues with trying to evaluate the forwards. The last road pre season game, the one I expected to have the closest thing to the starting eleven that we were going to get, never happened.

Three weeks! It's only been three weeks!

The Dynamo are back at last with a trip to Chicago to face their Eastern Conference rivals the Fire.

BROADCAST INFORMATION: Galavision - 6 p.m. (Comcast: 50/HD 650; AT&T Uverse: 3003; DirecTV: 404; Dish: 273) SportsTalk 790 (ENG Radio) La Ranchera 850 (SPN Radio)
REFEREE: Geoff Gamble.

I recently read somewhere (I wish I could remember where so that I could link to it) that OPTA uses the amount of passes in a game to determine possession. This surprised me. Basing possession on passing has the potential to produce some skewed results. The most obvious argument against this is that a team that uses the short passing game is going to have a larger portion of possession regardless of the actual amount of time that they truly have possession.

Early this morning I wrote a "recap" of last night's debacle in Michigan on the way back to Chicago. Due to technological failure on my end, I wasn't able to post it right away. So join me after the jump to relive the emotional horror that was last night.

What the hell happened? I just witnessed the biggest f*****g disgrace in my tenure as a Fire fan.