Earlier today, fans walked the long drive up to Red Bull Arena. There was no parking near the arena so they walked, most about a quarter mile, to the gates. Some had been coming to games the entire year, more to just a game here and there, and what seemed to be the majority were the fans for the afternoon. But once inside, holding the red towels that they had been given at the gates, they became part of the swirl and roar that was the Eastern Conference Playoffs.

Teal Bunbury opened the scoring for the Revolution in the 17th minute with the assist going to Jermaine Jones, but it was early, and no-one in the arena seemed particularly concerned. The Red Bulls were playing well, and when Bradley Wright-Phillips headed the ball in ten minutes later, after a Peguy Luyindula shot, the crowd seemed pleased with itself that it hadn’t panicked earlier.

It had taken the Red Bulls the first few minutes to get started, but once they did, they were strong on the attack, and the backfield held together well. So well in fact that Mike Petke said at the post game press conference that he didn’t see the need to make any changes, even though the teams were drawn 1-1 at that point. Upstairs from the locker rooms, fans crowded into lines for food on the comparatively warm afternoon, so that the sold out arena looked like almost any other match once the second half began. The New England Revolution had brought fans of their own. Packed thick into the away end, they waved their banners and flags, chanted down to the other end of the arena at the Red Bulls supporters section, but even if the rest of the arena was made up of casuals, they were out-roared until Jermaine Jones put the Revolution ahead in the 85th minute.

If there has been a thread to the games in New York this year, not just the Red Bulls, but any of the games, it is that there is a lull that happens, usually between the 75th and 77th minute. Fans get a little antsy, and usually it is then when someone starts a wave that sweeps around the arena some three to five times. It is usually enough.

But at the game this afternoon, there was no wave, although the fans were quieter around this strange period of time, they were too wrapped up in the game to start anything that would take their attention away from the pitch. Once Jones scored though, it was almost as if it were too much, as if the intent focus that they had pointed at the game, the trance or spell even, was broken, and fans slowly stood and left the arena.

There had only been four yellow cards handed out in the first half, but as the game became more aggressive, the second half saw the referee hand out an additional six, one to striker Bradley Wright-Phillips, a yellow for encroachment that will make him ineligible for the second game in the series. A hard card to swallow. Mike Petke didn’t have his traditional smile on his face when he said he wished he had been given a yellow card. That not getting one made him feel left out. It was a case, he said, of a referee who had lost control of the game. And the statistics bear that out. Cards were handed out in the 54th minute, 60th, 63rd, 67th, 77th and 83rd.

The Red Bulls had also missed on four good chances. He refused to name the players or when, but it was obvious to the fans who were walking down the long drive, walking back to their cars parked blocks away. They knew when and who. And they were naming names.

Photo credit: Rob Tringali.

Most people around the world get soccer. It comes at them packaged in so many ways for their consumption: on television, online, in print. They get it. It is available all the time. In fact, it is even more than available. It is there to indulge in, to feast on, even to glut on. There are, however, very few people who ‘get’ soccer. It is all in the level of apprehension, of comprehension, of rooted understanding. Manager Arsene Wenger truly gets soccer. As far as players go, Thierry Henry truly gets soccer. As far as writers go, David Goldblatt truly gets soccer.

We met at the corner of 12th Street and 1st Ave by accident, both on our way to Nevada Smiths, me hoping to have a chance to talk to him about his most recent book The Game of Our Lives, he on his way to an unfamiliar venue in an unfamiliar city. It gave us a chance to begin a conversation before the bar got packed.

David Goldblatt gets soccer in a way that looks deeper, looks beyond the play on the field and sees the society and lore that soccer engenders. This latest book was a challenge from his editor who told him, “You can tell the world about their game, but not Britain?” He took up the gauntlet. A Bristol Rovers fan, he sees the shirt hanging on the wall of Nevada Smiths and is excited. “Bristol Rovers! Brilliant!” He is a fan. When he talks about the state of the game in the United Kingdom, he is equally passionate. What David Goldblatt does with his book and in our conversation is to dispel the myths and present the facts. And they are as compelling as they are bleak.

A Labour Party supporter, and one time research assistant for the Party, he broke with them during the Iraq War, but there is a socialism, a social activism that pervades his book. For him, soccer is about the communal. “In a world of me, me, me and I, I, I, it is,” he points out, “a shared experience.” He says that 90% of fans go with someone else: friends or family. What keeps him going back, what keeps the game alive, is this live audience. “It is about ‘us’. Sure, there is individual brilliance, but in the end it is a collective. It’s a precious thing.”

And for once, he says, London is not at the center of it all. London, he tells me, overall gets more than its share. As he says, it would be like combining the governmental funding of all the major East Coast cities in the US in terms of, for example, the arts into just one city. But soccer distributes that wealth. And its center, according to Mr. Goldblatt, is Manchester. Soccer, he says, is not religion, not an art, and yet shares common features with both. There is ritual. There is the live audience that without which the game would be nothing. No-one watches the recaps of the Church of England if they didn’t catch the service, but they do watch the highlights of the games they missed. It is more on par with a soap opera, a point that he makes in the book’s introduction. The fans are the Shakespearean chorus, leaping here and there like W.S.’s character Chorus in Henry V. And like that Chorus, “they shape the nature of the spectacle.”

He talks about soccer in the United States.. The United States found soccer during its own industrial age, teams like Bethlehem Steel, and created a game that is deeply rooted in the US, but overlooked. Or at least has been. The issues he discusses in his book — racism, the glass ceiling for women, the social difficulties that face the game in the UK — are less prominent here. It has re-arisen in a post-industrial age and carries little of the baggage that the sport has in Britain. But it has its challenges. In a country that sees itself as super-macho, soccer is seen as feminine.

Asked if he could find one point to change in the game played in his own country, he is quick to answer. “Number one priority, to sort out women’s toilets. Basic.” Ninety percent of the grounds are deficient in that most necessary facility. And it makes sense. It is a step forward, something that seems so small, but is just basic common sense, and leads to greater change in the whole dynamic.

David Goldblatt isn’t a man who just shows us the faults, he gives us the solutions. Talking with him, you get the feeling that this is a man who not only deeply knows his subject, but deeply feels it as well.

Yesterday afternoon, as the sky darkened an hour early, and as the cold November wind blew around the arena, the New York Red Bulls kept a clean sheet against a DC United team and had Thanksgiving coming a few weeks early for their fans. Coach Mike Petke had talked about the importance of away goals in a press conference on Friday, talked about having the team keep it somewhere in the back of their minds, but few would have imagined a 2-0 result.

The Red Bulls came into the match tired. They had played on Thursday night against Sporting Kansas City in a knockout game, and less than 72 hours later, took on Eastern Division leaders DC United. With only one change to the starters, Peguy Luyindula starting in midfield rather than Tim Cahill, it was twenty tired legs that took to the pitch to contest the first of a two game series that will conclude next Saturday down the I-95 corridor.

There were fewer fans and fewer excuses to miss the game as well. Granted that it was cold, that you couldn’t find a hot chocolate anywhere but at one stand in the arena in the second half, a stand that had no caps for the cups, it was a flawless night. With a goal in each half, the Red Bulls gave their fans an absorbing game, a game that kept them loud, that kept the supporters on their feet, while the DC United fans, who started the game in a packed visitors section, waving flags and roaring over their own beating drums, got quieter as the game progressed. And while the rivalry between the two teams may be hot, but it didn’t translate onto the concourse at the break or at the end of the game.

The story on the pitch was another matter. Both teams had very near chances in the first half, DC United controlling the play for the first fifteen minutes. Whether it was the fans, or whether it was the cool weather, the Red Bulls started moving the ball hotly, creating opportunities, and putting the United team on the back foot. Bradley Wright-Phillips started the scoring in the 39th minute when Thierry Henry sent the ball back behind himself and Luyindula had the composure to let it go by to the feet of Wright-Phillips. 1-0. DC United had no response.

In the second half, Luyindula took a long ball from Thierry Henry in the 73rd minute and sent it in for the team’s second goal of the game. “More, more, we want more,” chanted a fan nearby, the words not picked up by the fans around him, but agreed with wholeheartedly. It was a less aggressive game that against Sporting KC, but tempers did flare.

By the end of the game it seemed like the referee had an endless supply of yellow cards for the Red Bull team that he wanted to get rid of before the full 90 minutes expired. As the added three minutes dragged by, fans whistled down to the pitch, trying to prompt the referee into whistling the game done. The Red Bulls did it, perhaps to the surprise of all 18,054 fans who were in the arena, the DC fans included. Even the back four were together in a way rarely seen in the season, winning cheers instead of groans.

Even more surprising was the absence of questions about Thierry Henry’s status for next season in the press conference at the end of the game. Henry, who was voted man of the match, walked down the carpet to the locker room with Gerard Houllier, but nothing was brought up in the conference with Mike Petke.

The coach had this to say about the game in his opening remarks: “It’s a good result, and the most important thing is that we got the shutout. No away goals for them and we go back to D.C. 2-0 up. It’s far from over though. D.C. won the East this year for many reasons, one of them being that they get results. They’re organized and hard-working, so we know it’s going to be a fight next weekend.”

It isn’t over yet, but the win, and the clean sheet goes a long way toward keeping the dream alive. As Mike Petke said: “I just think it’s a pride thing, they understand now that it’s really crunch time, next weekend could be our last game if we don’t approach it the right way, and we don’t go in there and get the job done. I think, I know, that these guys don’t want to stop playing next weekend, especially after 10 months, from preseason on, 10 months of going at it. Perhaps they’re a little more tuned in, and have a little bit more of that motivation and edge.”

Mobile app users, watch the video here.

Last night the New York Red Bulls hosted Sporting Kansas City in the knockout round of the MLS playoffs. It was a chilly evening. Fans clustered in the parking lots before the game laughing and keeping warm, and you had the impression of a much larger crowd than the 15,518 who trickled into the seats. For a midweek game that was added to the schedule on Sunday, scheduled after the Red Bulls beat Kansas City in their last game of the regular season, a game starting at 8:00pm on a school night that kept most families at home, it wasn’t a bad crowd. And they were loud.

Over the supporters end, a banner was lowered celebrating Bradley Wright-Phillips’ 27 regular season goals that tied him for the MLS all-time regular season record. He was cheered onto the pitch and clapped back.

The fans were, as always, loud for captain Thierry Henry as well. If there has been a thread to the end of this season, it is the question as to whether Thierry Henry will be returning next season. Each time you see him, you wonder if it will be the last in a Red Bull shirt.

As Mike Petke said after the game when he was asked yet again if Henry would be returning: “I have to get it tattooed on my head. I have no clue what Thierry’s going to do. I’m not thinking about… No, I’m not thinking about that at all. I’ve said it enough already. Thierry, I think, could play for two more years, whether it be here, whether it be back in England, wherever he decides to play. His contract is up, but I don’t know what he’s going to do. Having said that, I guess if I looked deep down inside myself, in a quiet room in yoga class, and I meditate, and I say ‘wow, I guess this could be Thierry’s last game’ then yes, I’m very happy for him.”

At the half, with the game still scoreless, fans started talking about overtime, so evenly matched were the two teams. “We’re going to get our money’s worth tonight,” said one fan. But when Dominic Dwyer scored to put Kansas City ahead in the 53rd minute, the arena went quiet.

The starting back four of Jamison Olave, Ibrahim Sekagya, Richard Eckersley and Roy Miller put together a solid performance for the most part, keeping the Kansas team at bay. Fans were yelling down to the visiting players who were warming up on the sidelines “You’re going to choke like your team did last night,’ referring to the Kansas City loss in the World Series.

In the 77th minute, when Bradley Wright-Phillips connected with a cross that found him in front of the goal, talk of overtime was once again on everyone’s lips. Thierry Henry and Peguy Luyindula were credited with the assists. And while everyone settled deeper into their seats for what they thought would be a long night, the Red Bulls dug deeper into themselves, and scored in the added 4 minutes of extra time, when Ambroise Oyongo connected with Peguy Luyindula, and the ball was sent to Bradley Wright-Phillips for the win.

As Mike Petke said after the game: “There was a point late in the second half where I was questioning if this team was scared of the playoffs. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been saying I don’t believe in any curses, or jinxes or anything like that, but I thought maybe we were just scared of the playoffs. But they proved that wrong, and now they’re happy in the locker room, exhausted, and now it’s on to D.C.”

Mobile app users, watch the video here.

Photo credit: Rob Tringali

Last night after the Colombian national team’s 3-0 win over El Salvador, head coach Jose Pekerman spoke about the new chapter that his team is beginning to write on the field. Reaching the quarter finals at the World Cup in Brazil this past summer will be a hard story to follow.

Heading to the match, traffic smacked to a halt on the New Jersey Turnpike well before exit 15 W, then crawled through Harrison, a string of tail lights leading to the long metal curl of the arena. In the parking lots were wreaths of smoke as the smell of roasting meat filled the air. Ad hoc vendors sold shirts and snacks to the sellout crowd that packed the parking lots as fans wrapped in flags slowly made their way to the gates. No one seemed to be in any hurry to get inside. What was amazing was the amount of noise made by the thin number of fans who were inside when the teams took to the pitch for their warm-ups. As the crowd rose for the playing of the United States national anthem, Landon Donovan was being substituted off a few hours away in East Hartford, Connecticut. It was an unplanned but fitting coincidence.

Three nil. It is a deceptive final score in a game that was by no means one sided. El Salvador met Colombia head-on in the first half, and had them on their heels at times, playing a technical game that made Colombia’s diamond formation look like a poorly set stone in the metal ring of the arena.

El Salvador seems to suffer from an identity crisis. After watching them play here last year against Trinidad-Tobago in a match that was very physical and with a crowd that was overwhelmingly in their support, it was a much different feel last night. First of all the crowd was largely supporters of the Colombia side, including actor John Leguizamo, who posed for pictures with fans. And at the match end, he was holding a World Cup ball and a sharpie waiting for the team to exit the locker room. Second was the level of play that El Salvador brought to the field, play that was clean to the point that it was really the only issue of manager Albert Roca’s post game interview.

Colombia had a much stronger second half. Leading by 1-0 at the end of the first 45 minutes on a goal from Falcao, a goal that Jose Pekerman said was extremely important not just in terms of winning the match but of re-establishing the player on the national side, Colombia scored two quick goals to put the game out of reach of the El Salvador side.

Somewhere around the 75th minute the fans, knowing the victory was theirs, started a wave that roared around the arena once, then again and a third time, their attention turned more toward themselves rather than the game on the pitch, celebrating the fact that they were there.

As slow as the arena had been to fill, no one was in a hurry to leave. Well past an hour after the game had ended, fans still filled the parking lots kicking soccer balls, cooking on grills that had barely had a chance to cool from their pre-game use, celebrating their team, celebrating the game, celebrating soccer. Just celebrating.

Mobile app users, watch the video here.

If there are two lessons that Manchester City and the New York Yankees can take out of the game between Liverpool and Manchester City at Yankee Stadium Wednesday night, it is that there were a whole lot more Liverpool fans in New York, and that there is a lot of work yet to be done before the stadium can really be soccer-ready.

The two teams were playing at the new home of the MLS joint venture between Manchester City and the New York Yankees, New York City FC (NYCFC), but the first issue is insignificant when compared with the state of the field and the viewing experience.

Having a stadium predominately filled with Liverpool fans is not a problem, but the baseball dirt that showed through the makeshift field is actually a very big issue. Even from the second level of the stadium, you could see the outlines of the strips of grass that were laid down in preparation for the match. It looked slippery and thin, and the ball bobbled across the uneven surface, which is not a good combination for a soccer field.

The first baseline disappeared into the patchwork, crossing diagonally right in front of the goal, and then along the side of the field where the third baseline is. The covering over the dirt of the baselines creates something that is by no means an even surface. Players fell as they crossed from the thick, manicured grass to the uneven surface covering the baseball dirt. Plus from the stands, you could see where clods of grass had been torn up. Even Manchester City goalkeeper Joe Hart slipped on the change in surface in front of the goal — where the net that abuts directly onto the low first base wall, with one post practically resting on it.

The ball behaved differently on the surface as well, which will definitely give NYCFC the advantage over the course of a season. Even the lack of width on the strip at the third base line, which the Yankees hope will not have to be covered with grass, is only about three feet wide, and presented a challenge when players ran off while giving chase, finding themselves on dirt.

A jumbo screen hangs there above the field at the furthest corner from the press box, showing the game as it is played as well as replays of goals, but it will make the officials life a lot more difficult as well when their calls no longer need to be debated. The replay action of their calls, penalties, fouls, offsides, etc, can be seen not only by the fans, but by the players almost immediately. As a friend of mine from Germany once said, the controversy and conversation and the very mystery of not knowing is something that should be cherished. Especially in soccer.

At the interval, lines for Liverpool and Manchester City merchandise were already 15 minutes long and growing even longer, so by the time the second half began, those toward the end of the line missed a lot of the second half action to wait for a scarf, hat or T-shirt. It was poor judgment to only have three merchandise stands available when a Yankee Stadium record of 49,653 (for a soccer game) show up.

Any time there is a big game at Yankee Stadium, there is always a problem getting fans out and onto the trains, but the trip is fairly quick if you know how to negotiate the lines, have a card with money on it already, and know to take the side staircases, but it is going to be an issue for families trying to get home on school nights early and late in the NYCFC season if they don’t drive. If they do, a $35 parking fee awaits them at the closest garages.

And yet for all the problems, no-one in the stands really seemed to mind. It was a well played game between two strong teams, who were unfortunately hindered by a third opponent, the field itself.

There is a lot of work to be done before the NYCFC season begins, but this game provided valuable insight for the NYCFC owners, to show what needs to be done to improve Yankee Stadium’s soccer-viewing experience. However, was Wednesday night’s field the best that soccer fans can expect from a bad situation?

Immediately after the game, even before both teams had left the field, the grounds crew was out putting up lines and stakes around the perimeter of the freshly laid grass. Their work was just beginning, with a long night ahead to prepare the field for baseball once again.

Liverpool is in New York City, in preparation for its sold-out game at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday against Premier League rival Manchester City.

My son and I attended the Liverpool practice yesterday in Princeton. It was a quietly whispered open practice with just a few hundred fans there, and the team including Brendan Rodgers, made sure that everyone got their autographs or a word or two. It was a special afternoon to witness. People were literally weeping when Steven Gerrard autographed their shirt or posed with them for a photo. It was a different atmosphere than what my son experienced with any of the other Premier League teams that he has seen play here in New York. While we are Red Bulls fans as a legacy of being New Yorkers, he is a Liverpool fan — not just of the kindness and attention that the team showed to the fans on a whole, but to him personally.

The practice itself was delayed when the flight that the team was on arrived late, but the mild afternoon was made even brighter for the fans on the metal bleachers that enclosed three sides of the practice pitch. And the promise of seeing the team so close made the wait seem easier. They were on their way, and the security guards radios kept everyone apprised of their progress. A cheer erupted from the far end of the stands from the fans who could see the team walking up the hill toward them, and spread from there as coach and players walked on to the pitch and then jogged the perimeter. Unbelief was the key emotion, excited children turning to their parents and saying “I can’t believe that they are right here in front of us.” Friends, too, were turning to one another saying, “I can’t believe I am here seeing this.”

With the Premier League turning its attention on the United States with such focus last season, it was hard for new fans to decide who to support at first. Funny maps were drawn of the five boroughs of New York giving fans a clue for which team fit where they live. Old family connections were dusted off and teams were adopted through the thinnest of ties. The favorites, the known and internationally branded teams, grew new fans. My son and I took a trip through Pennsylvania and were amazed by the numbers of Manchester United hats and shirts we saw.

I sat on the side of Liverpool, the history and politics fitting me well, and my son sat with me as we watched the games. But he is not one for televised games. He needs the real thing, to see with his own eyes rather what the lens of a camera shows him, and his devotion never grew beyond being able to say when asked who his favorite Premier League team was. “Liverpool.” He had found an affinity for Huddersfield Town that still surprises me, wearing his Terriers hat and shirt around the house after being gifted them for Christmas, but as for games that we could easily watch, there was just that loose connection for Liverpool that was as much about me as about them.

What yesterday did was to make him a fan in a way that is deeply personal, and creating a bond that will be lifelong in its hold. On Wednesday night, Liverpool face Manchester City at Yankee Stadium. He unfortunately won’t be there with me. The demands of covering the game, the logistical impossibilities, and numerous other factors will put me there and keep him home. But he is alright with that, as alright as a boy who wants to do everything and be everywhere can be. He has their autographs there in a notebook, their smiles and kind words in his mind, and the team in his heart. He will never walk alone.

Saturday’s friendly between Arsenal and New York Red Bulls is a strange one in that both teams downplayed the New York Cup match in Thursday’s press conference.

A lot of planning has gone into this game that will be broadcast live on ESPN2, a game that has brought Gunners fans from across the United States and England. Tickets have been sold out months for the 25,189 seat arena, but some seats are still available via ticket exchanges.

During the press conference, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger was asked about the growth of soccer in the United States. The Frenchman said that “The next 20 years will be very exciting. I wish I was younger.”

He described pre-season tours as more of a commercial opportunity for the club than any type of real pre-season training. The “real training” begins next week when the team flies to Austria. “The best is to stay, not travel too much,” added Wenger, especially in a World Cup year when balancing the rest and fitness of a team is under further pressure from the playing time in Brazil.

New York Red Bulls coach Mike Petke described the match as a good springboard for the rest of the season. “It’s going to be a great night Saturday night to have a team like Arsenal come to play,” said Petke, but added that it’s a shame that Thierry Henry can’t play for both teams over the course of the 90 minutes.

Henry described his feelings of playing with Arsenal. “Wearing the shirt was a privilege for me. It was the most important thing.” But his feelings about Saturday’s game are honest. “It is a great opportunity for some of the youngsters to play against them. It is a friendly game, so different. We’re not going to get three points if we win.

“It is a nice thing, but at the end of the day you are judged against the results in the league.”

It is the game on Wednesday against Real Salt Lake that is more important in the eyes of Petke and Henry. Petke added that Henry will not be playing the full 90 minutes against Arsenal, but would most likely be taken out after 60-65 minutes. It is a game for the fans, he says, but one that he as a coach cannot afford to take too lightly even if there are no league points at stake. Petke doesn’t want to have his team repeat the heavy defeat that team rivals LA Galaxy suffered after losing 7-0 to Manchester United.

Asked if there should be a break in the schedule for these international friendlies, Petke said that the league doesn’t even break for the World Cup or most FIFA dates, so why would they interrupt the MLS schedule for this. Soccer in the United States may be experiencing a huge growth, but the realistic coach added, “How many will come back [from the sold-out crowd against Arsenal] for New England next week?”

Major League Soccer, after a break from its season for the World Cup, has returned. With the eyes of the world focused on soccer, where here in the US where fans are turning out to watch the games on television and online in record numbers, the MLS has an opportunity to grow its fanbase. And so, on Friday night when the World Cup took a break in the action, MLS returned to Red Bull Arena.

With its return, Tim Cahill was back in town after scoring two goals for Australia, one which is still perhaps the most beautiful of the matches so far. But Australia failed to advance, and he was here, back in Harrison NJ where the fans roared him on to the pitch when he was substituted on late in the second half. Still missing from the squad was defender Roy Miller who is with the Costa Rica squad in Brazil.

Facing them were Toronto FC, who came in with a squad also diminished by the games in Brazil, a team missing Michael Bradley who is still on international duty with the USMNT. If the matches in Brazil have made the public hungry for the game, then last night’s near capacity crowd of 20,176 fans was a respectable number that is not the largest this season at the arena, but by no means the smallest.

Defensively, the Red Bulls made changes. The line was anchored by Jamison Olave, but included the additions of home grown Matt Miazga, Chris Duvall (their Wake Forest draft pick) and new addition Ambroise Oyongo. Oyongo earned an assist in his first game with the Red Bulls when he took a ball sent by Thierry Henry and crossed it to Peguy Luyindula for the first goal of the game. As a defender, he showed over and over during the game that he was unafraid to put his body at risk to keep Toronto from scoring. It was all out play that got him noticed.

Miazga created action and drove the game forward, his long ball to Tim Cahill, that Cahill sent along to Bradley Wright-Phillips for the equalizer, marked him as another player who needed more time on the pitch. Chris Duvall was another welcome addition. His speed kept him involved both as a playmaker and a play stopper.

They left it late, but RBNY were able to tie the game 2-2.

If the MLS is to change soccer in the United States, to profit from the attention that is focused on the USMNT, then it needs to change how it is perceived in the eyes of the world. It needs to be a league that plays with class and sophistication. It should be a fast paced, well played game that draws them in. Defensively, with the changes that the Red Bulls made in this game against Toronto, the team took a step in that direction.

Last night, over 46,000 fans showed up at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, hoping to catch a glimpse of something special, something that they could take home with them like a gift that they could open and peek at during the games played by Portugal in Brazil. They wanted a gift that would unwrap further and further and become even more precious should the team progress.

Before the team rosters were passed out, no-one was certain what to expect. Who would be starting? Would players be left out, still nursing injuries? MetLife Stadium is a good place to watch a game, but the field can be a concern. Grass is laid over the artificial turf surface creating a pitch that can be difficult for a player coming off an injury to manage. Additionally, Ireland has a reputation as a physical team. “We accept British teams play like that,” said Portugal coach Paulo Bento the day before. “We will prepare to face a British team such as Ireland is.”

“We will prepare as a team.”

When the fans realized what the press had just found out from the rosters, when they saw Cristiano Ronaldo take to the pitch with the other nine starters, a roar went up. The gift, as it were, had been given. Both teams played an aggressive first half, but Portugal controlled the game. Ronaldo tested the Ireland goal less than a minute in that raised a cheer from the crowd. When Hugo Almeida headed in a ball sent to him by Silvestre Varela in the third minute, the fans went wild. It seemed then like the Portugal squad would roll over Ireland in a festival of scoring. But the game settled, and Ireland created chances of their own, held on against Portugal.  They held on even when, in the 20th minute, Richard Keogh scored an own goal on a Portugal cross. They didn’t crumble.

James McClean stood out for Ireland. He was everywhere at once, unafraid to challenge, tackle, win the ball back, and kept the Ireland team together even though Portugal scored again when Cristiano Ronaldo sent the ball to Almeida in the 37th minute and Portugal went up by three, taking that lead to the locker rooms for the half.

Ireland came out strong for the second half, and within ten minutes scored when McClean sent one across and into the far side of Rui Patricio’s goal. Minutes later he drew a yellow card near the center circle for a tackle on Ronaldo. Robbie Keane entered the game in the 63rd minute, taking the Captaincy from Jon Walters, and taking the hint from the exchange, both teams began to substitute in earnest. No-one was more effective coming on than Nani, who assisted with both of Portugal’s goals in the half, himself another gift in the increasingly heavy package that the fans had come here for. In the 77th minute he sent to ball to Vierinha.  Vierhina, heading the ball unsuccessfully sent his own rebound in.   In the 83rd minute Nani passed to Fabio Coentrao, who tapped it in. 5-1.

As we recently wrote, Ireland is a team looking toward the future. And that future, as Martin O’Neill said in the press conference, starts in September with the Euro 2016 campaign. He was soft spoken in his remarks, but to regard that as a reaction to the final score would be wrong. He liked what he saw in the second half, as the team ‘started to get together’. This game was something he felt that they had to play, had to take and learn from.

Paulo Bento, in his comments to the press, said that ‘physically, all players are fit to play.’ Adding that it is ‘good to have the whole squad available.’

Everyone got a gift last night. For Ireland, it was like a pair of socks or a science set, something useful and educational. For Portugal, it was the reality of having a full and healthy squad for their first match against Germany. For the fans, it was seeing a team play well, and the hope of that team going far in Brazil.

Watch the highlights from the Portugal-Ireland game here:

With two draws in their preparation friendlies, Greece is a team that is looking toward the World Cup with tempered optimism. A depleted Portugal squad held them 0-0 on May 31, and they found themselves in another scoreless draw against Nigeria on June 4. On Friday June 6 at Red Bull Arena in New York, they will need to produce a positive result against Bolivia in order to gain much needed momentum moving forward to Brazil.

As easy as it is to overemphasize results in these lead-in friendlies, it is also possible to underplay performances. Portugal was a test even without Cristiano Ronaldo, and Nigeria are the reigning African Champions. Both teams will also be competing in Brazil. Against Bolivia, a side that is not as talented as Greece’s previous two opponents, questions will have to be answered.

Manager Fernando Santos has said that he is not concerned about the results thus far in these international friendlies, but it is hard to imagine that he would be pleased with anything other than a win against this Bolivia team.

Greece was drawn into Group C along with Colombia, Japan and Ivory Coast. Their first match, on July 14 against Colombia, will truly set a tone and determine their chances of advancing through the group stage. It is a group without a powerhouse and a group that is fairly wide open. The energy, the fans and this team can take into the tournament will be written in Friday night’s game reports.

Greece:

Goalkeepers: Orestis Karnezis (Granada), Panagiotis Glykos (PAOK), Stefanos Kapino (Panathinaikos)

Defenders: Vassilis Torosidis (Roma), Loukas Vyntra (Levante), Sokratis Papastathopoulos (Borussia Dortmund), Kostas Manolas (Olympiakos), Vangelis Moras (Hellas Verona), José Holebas (Olympiakos), Georgios Tzavellas (PAOK), Giannis Maniatis (Olympiakos)

Midfielders: Alexandros Tziolis (Kayserispor), Kostas Katsouranis (PAOK), Giorgos Karagounis (Fulham), Andreas Samaris (Olympiakos), Panagiotis Tachtsidis (Torino), Panagiotis Kone (Bologna), Giannis Fetfatzidis (Genoa), Lazaros Christodoulopoulos (Bologna)

Forwards: Georgios Samaras (Celtic), Kostas Mitroglou (Fulham), Fanis Gekas (Konyaspor), Dimitris Salpingidis (PAOK)

Bolivia:

(Based on roster vs Spain)

Goalkeepers: Romel Quinonez, Daniel Vaca

Defenders: Ronald Eguino, Ronald Raldes, Luis Alberto Guiterrez, Diego Bejarano, Edward Zenteno

Midfielders: Danny Bejarano, Alejandro Melean, Alejandro Chumacero, Gualberto Mojica, Damir Miranda, Walter Veizaga, Rudy Cardozo, Marvin Bejarano, Jaime Arrascaita, Vincente Arze

Forwards: Juan Carlos Arce, Marcelo Martins Moreno, Alcides Pena

Tickets are available here through the Red Bull’s website by selecting Summer of Soccer.

This afternoon the USMNT held an open practice at Red Bull arena. It drew a crowd that probably equaled the one that was here on Memorial Day for the Serbia against Jamaica friendly. Outside the arena over an hour before the gates opened, the lines grew longer and longer, weeding through the tents that had been set up by the official snacks of the US Men’s National Team. Cookie wrappers littered the street. Fans walked around with Clint Dempsey masks and fans.

Last week when the Red Bulls faced Portland at the Arena, there were a lot of US team jerseys, most with the name Donovan across the back. Not today though. Among these fans, Dempsey is the face, quite literally, of the team.

Inside the arena, there was a scramble for seats in the sections that the Red Bulls had opened. Chants of ‘USA’ and ‘Dempsey’ echoed through the empty second level. On the pitch, the players warmed up and the people watching waited for any opportunity to cheer and applaud — when the team running across the field turned and ran towards them, when a ball was kicked into an empty goal from midfield, etc.

The players warmed up, drilled and then scrimmaged. At one point Dempsey was tripped up near the goal, and was slow to rise, limping for a few minutes. Graham Zusi was quick on the wing in front of us. Tim Howard in goal made a few good saves, but Dempsey was still able to get the ball past him.

As the practice wound down, Jurgen Klinsmann strolled over to the fans standing in the special US Soccer Supporters area on the field behind the goal, signing balls, hats, jerseys and anything the fans thrust out in front of him. Clint Dempsey joined him, barefoot, and signed as well, as Kyle Beckerman worked the non-VIP crowd. Then suddenly Dempsey was there, leaving behind the fans where Klinsmann was signing, and climbing over the video boards. These ‘regular’ fans packed closer. Shirts, hats and posters were thrust down over the concrete wall.

A seven year old boy standing next to me had a small journal signed. “I think the US team is going to do alright,” he said, smiling.

Editor’s note: The USMNT team plays Turkey on Sunday at 2pm ET at Red Bull Arena in New Jersey. The game will be televised live on ESPN2, WatchESPN, Univision, Univision and Univision Deportes. Tickets for the game have completely sold out, and a capacity crowd of more than 25,000 is expected.

It is 5:48 on Tuesday, still the early evening, of May 27th. The day that David Peace’s novel Red or Dead had been released in the United States. People are gathering in the match viewing room at the 11th St Bar, a Liverpool supporters hangout. The edges of the tables are chipped. There is a road marker that reads ‘Cratloe Road’ on the wall above the makeshift stage where David Peace is going to read, and hanging on another the wall is a framed and autographed Liverpool jersey, two Liverpool pennants, and a mirror that reminds us not to forget Hillsborough and the 96. This mirror, engraved with the letters H.J.C. and a torch, puts our face there, reminds us of who the 96 were. They were us.

The place and time are very specific. They have to be, because there is something about the conversation with David Peace needs to be set in a concrete way. Something has to be defined because talking with him is so fluid, so wide and free ranging that it makes transcription impossible. David Peace’s mind, and through it his conversation, throws out angles and arcs that are impossible to define. Conversation is a dandelion head that seeds out in a million directions. In his books, we are drawn in as he painstakingly reassembles a broken mirror until we become ‘us’, and as he unfolds the story, that ‘us’ unfolds as well. We remember who we are and what we could be, either through the grace of God, or with the Devils touch.

His early work, The Red Riding quartet, is described as an occult history of the time and place where he grew up, West Yorkshire. He likes the word occult for its double meaning, ‘occluded’ as well as dark, evil. The rhythm and repetition in these books, he says, ‘grew and grew.’ Now with Red or Dead, it is joined by list and minutiae as he creates the book that flows from a quote by Bill Shankly that ‘football is like a river that goes on and on.’ It is a book in two halves that was originally meant to be just the second half, to be about Shankly in retirement.

His book Damned United, also released in the United States earlier this year, is two narratives in one as well but in a different sense. It is the very intense thread of the 44 days that Brian Clough managed Leeds United and a second narrative that defines the man himself.

When David Peace writes a book, it is through immersion, through the films, music, and novels of a period. And that immersion, he says, can be hard. “It is hard to come out. It gets harder.” With Shankly, as he dove into the past and into the life of the man, he realized that the book he had set out to write needed to be this two books in one. Match reports, he says, became obsessions. “I didn’t write it for Liverpool supporters. They know the history. I wrote it for people outside the club and outside the city.”

He had his children in mind as he wrote this book, what he refers to as his ‘first time writing about a good man.’ Selfless is a word that comes up over and over as he describes Bill Shankly. But there is another ‘S’ word that rises in the book Red or Dead — socialism. It is a word that these days is whispered, as governments and individuals disassociate themselves from it. It is a belief that Shankly embraced and embodied.

Bill Shankly is an arch-typical working man who believes not only in what he does, but in why he does it, in the who, how and what of the game. What David Peace believes is that the ‘when’ is not important. He believes that managers like Bill Shankly and Brian Clough could lead as managers even in our era. The book “Damned United” is management as marriage, something that Mr. Peace sees as common to the greats in the game: Clough and Taylor, Shankly and Paisley, Ferguson and his many ‘wives’. The team then is a family.

The game itself is a bloodline. A Huddersfield Town supporter, Mr. Peace talks about an attachment to a club that moved down from his grandfather, to his father, through him and now even into his own son. Shankly, he says, was the greatest gift that Huddersfield gave soccer.

Conversation ranges across the people Shankly influenced, like Clough and Alex Ferguson, to the current state of the Premier League and the Championship, to life in Tokyo and the sport there.

Mr. Peace gets up to get ready to read from Red or Dead, and when he does, the words flow as he emphasizes a word here, a name there. In this book he lists, he repeats, he inventories. He lists in another sense. He creates the firm footing of a character, then subtly shifts that platform, through the details makes the us the character, takes us to the places that are within ourselves when we silence all the noise around us and listen to the voice inside. I, meaning we, you, us, find ourselves in the narrative of his books if we allow the rhythm to take over, if we allow ourselves that uninhibited moment where we truly look at ourselves in the mirror that he creates.

Red or Dead has just been released in the United States by Melville House, and is available via Amazon and all fine booksellers.

Editor’s note: Listen to our interview with David Peace from October, 2013 on the launch of the book in the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday night I went to the New York Red Bulls game with a friend who was seeing the Red Bull Arena for the first time. He is German, which both is and isn’t a statement that is important to the story. It is, because he follows his hometown team and tries to cram in as many matches when he goes back to his family’s home there as well as games of his Bundesliga division favorite, Borussia Dortmund. He jokes that in Germany, the name of the coach of the German National Team is more well known than the name of the Chancellor. The game there is that important.

It isn’t important because he has been here long enough to set down soccer roots in this country, but hasn’t. Since moving the the United States in 1995, he has gone to three MetroStars games back when they were playing at Giants Stadium, which is less games here in almost twenty years than he went to during his last visit to Germany. He is a soccer fan, but hasn’t gone to a game here in the US for a decade and a half.

On Wednesday, the Red Bulls surprised the 15,000+ fans with a game that was truly lovely, at least from the midfield forward. While the Houston Dynamo threatened for the first ten minutes of the second half, they went scoreless. The game, statistics of possession and shots aside, felt firmly in the control of the Red Bulls, as the final scoreline of 4-0 showed. It was a game well played by the home team.

As he watched, one thing that struck him was the replay, not just of the goals but of refereeing decisions. His feelings were that it took away the mystery of a bad call and the passion that goes with uncertainty. Just because we can do something, a statement that becomes as big as the expanding MLS itself, doesn’t always mean we should. It sometimes gnaws at the roots of passion.

What was as interesting to me was that before the game started, as we watched the Red Bulls warm up on the field, I started naming and describing them, their backgrounds, their playing points good and bad, and the more I did, the more I found myself sounding like a fan of my own hometown team. Pride came out. I wasn’t trying to sell him on the idea of MLS. I wasn’t even trying to make him into a fan of the Red Bulls, as we talked about arenas and teams, about passion and pride.

The league can continue to expand and grow, but should it. If you believe the Reuter’s poll about fans in the United States following the World Cup, then we are realistically looking at a small fan base, both real and potential. Think of the fan base as pate or caviar. You can have the finest in the world, but if you spread it too thin, it loses its flavor and effectively it is subsumed by the bland bread or cracker that it was spread on. If the league cannot tap into people who are already soccer fans, then it needs to look at improving its current product and marketing it instead of trying to spread itself around, and there are ways to do that.

I doubt that many people remember Peter the Puck from when they were kids, but as the NHL expanded, they produced an animated series to teach people about hockey. Soccer may already be a part of the fabric of youth culture in the United States, but information is never wasted. And why is it that parents take their kids to practice on Saturday morning but not to a game on Saturday night? What we need is a game that is played well, a game that is not elitist, and an educated fan base that doesn’t feel like they are being cheated out of their money by a second class product.

Statistics, demographics, and game technology are all well and fine, and while soccer is a game you watch with your eyes, you should feel it with your heart. You should be passionate. It should be a song that plays in your head. It should be something you savor, a taste that rolls around in your mouth until you release it as words when you talk about your team and a game. That much is certain.

The World Cup is a dream. In June, some 600 players from around the world will assemble at stadiums and training grounds throughout Brazil to contest that dream. For viewers in the United States, soccer fans will be able to turn that dream into a reality through a host of viewing options from ESPN and Univision on TV, via the Internet and on smart phones and tablets.

Last week, I sat down with the president of Univision Deportes to learn more about his network’s exciting plans for the World Cup this summer.

Juan Carlos Rodriguez, President of Univision Deportes, is no stranger to the World Cup. Beginning in 1986, when he was studying industrial engineering in Mexico, he took some time off from school to work with FIFA. He never went back. Instead he became the youngest-ever executive member of the World Cup. The competition is in his blood.

“The World Cup challenge is very simple,” says Rodriguez. He wants Univision to create a new standard for the World Cup by which future coverage will be measured and will allow all of us who won’t be in Brazil to feel like we are there.

Imagine experiencing the excitement of the Brazil World Cup in your own home and at your fingertips — with exceptional coverage and an experience that can be enjoyed by both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking soccer fans.

The political and economic climate of Brazil has changed since the nation was given the hosting honors, a situation the team at Univision is aware of, having covered last year’s Confederations Cup, and Rodriguez doesn’t shy away from discussing these issues.

He is surprised when a program called ‘Con Pelotas’ is mentioned. It is a personal initiative of Rodriguez that has provided 200,000 soccer balls to children around the world. The idea grew after he took time to travel and photograph Soweto following the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and saw what the kids were using as soccer balls: bundles of rags, trash, rolled up pieces of carpet. He describes the foundation’s goals: “With a soccer ball at your feet, you will never have arms in your hands.” It is a way of giving back, of seeing with the heart, and he speaks of it without pride, instead speaking about it in the tones of someone who feels it is an honor to be able give.

Some day he says he hopes to go to a World Cup as a fan. We can be glad that he didn’t choose this year to do it.

Rodriguez was joined by Scott Levine, Senior Vice President of Products at Univision and Chris Wagner, Executive Vice President of NeuLion. In addition to previewing Univision’s World Cup plans, they were in New York to talk about the new Univision app that will allow viewers around the world to feel like they are there. He describes the coverage on two intersecting axis, the ‘x’, or technical axis of television, digital and mobile, and the ‘y’ as editorial content concerning news, entertainment and sport.

NeuLion creates the platforms for sports coverage including the MLS and NHL, covering over 47,000 live events last year. Levine describes the app as being for ‘football fans’ regardless of their language, with content in both Spanish and English.

The app features statistics covering, for example, ball possession, live game updates and video clips, along with a Twitter feed to connect with other fans, and highlight reels available after each game. You can favorite teams, too. The first 56 games will be streamed without authentication, and while games there after will require it, the video clips and recaps will still be available.

The graphics are amazing. “They will be beautiful, colorful and noisy,” says Rodriguez. “Noisy like us.” If he makes the challenge sound simple, this convergence of excellent editorial content with an application that brings it alive, the challenges of getting that content is more difficult. The teams will be escorted from training grounds to airports to stadiums. For the Univision team, that will not be the case. “We have to pray that we make the plane, that the plane takes off, that it lands, that the car we rented is there,” laughs Rodriguez. There is the challenge of language as well. Portuguese is the language of Brazil, and while he says that Portuguese speakers catch Spanish quicker than the opposite, he expects that the thrill of the World Cup should create an atmosphere of friendship where communication will not be a major hurdle.

Download the Univision Deportes app today for iOS devices and Android devices.

The Kicking and Screening Film Festival opened in New York last night with a look at the issue of identity. Each night beginning Tuesday, the festival will explore an aspect of soccer culture through films that focus on a central theme. Today, the theme is Coaches, Thursday, Inspiration — and Friday, Brazil.

The first film on last night’s program was from the series produced by Fox and sponsored by Budweiser, a campaign known as Rise as One. The film, entitled Rise as One: One Nation explored the issues of identity in France during the lead up to the 1998 World Cup. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a presidential candidate, was running on a ‘purist’ platform that stood against the composition of the French National Team. Through Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe, Zinedine Zidane, a son of Algerian immigrants, and Youri Djorkaeff, a son of a Polish father and Armenian mother and both immigrants to France, the film looks at what it means to be French.

But the run time of 22 minutes makes it hard to delve deeply into the issues. Instead, it is a cursory glance at what identity means, at who we think ‘belongs’ and who we then discover does belong, at who in fact leads the hearts and minds of a nation in victory and changes a nation’s thought process. It was a “wave of love and friendliness like after the war ended,” says Djorkaeff on winning the final in France, and indeed the celebrations in the film’s footage were strikingly similar between those of their World Cup victory and the end of World War II.

What is not looked at is how the nation would have reacted to a loss, or to an early exit from the competition. To back a winner and, from the pedestal of the World Cup trophy, become more tolerant is one thing. To see a nation forced to look deeply into its identity and challenge itself to change without the impetus of world soccer domination is another. How different would France now be had they not won is perhaps purely speculation, but an interesting consideration.

Far more deeply explored is the concept of identity as shown in the second film of the evening, 1905’ers With Heart, Mind and Soul. Faith, they say, is a belief in things unseen. This film is a look at a group of fans who kept on believing in a club, even when it went out of existence. It is a look at a group of people who came together from diverse backgrounds and found themselves supporting a team for a variety of reasons, but together formed a core of believers that chased after the question of what it means to be a part of something that unites them as a whole. There is something about the small town of Gottingen, and a team in the lowest divisions of German football that drew laughs from the audience, and it could be easy to throw around words like ‘charming’ and ‘ rural’, to act the part of the jaded New Yorker, but it would be wrong. It is a film to be watched with both the heart and the mind. There is a thread here that is important to anyone calling themselves a fan. There is a sense of the deeply personal, of the creation of an identity that goes against the thread of hooliganism and confronts it with what they label ‘Fooligans’. To see a destructive trend and ignore it is a fan’s dilemma. “Do we take the kids,” we ask ourselves when we know we are going to be in a situation that might present us and them to something we are not certain they should see, or even worse that could be dangerous. The Fooligans combated the intolerance of racism, sexism, and even sexual politics with an intolerance of intolerance. They marked the grounds as theirs.

But beyond the reach of their decision to take a stand, they stood together through relegation, promotion, the loss of a team, the changing of grounds. They grew together as people who believed in what they stood in the terraces for – each other and their team.

This is the Sixth year of the Kicking and Screening Film Festival, now running at the Tribeca Cinema in Manhattan. Films begin at 7:30 each night, and tickets are available through www.Kickingandscreening.com.

For many years soccer, Brazil and Pele have been linked in the mind of many around the world. You could say that for certain generations, they were the three hearts of the sport. When Pele was born in the Brazilian town of Tres Coracoes (Three Hearts) in 1940, his parents named him Edson Arantes Do Nascimento in honor of inventor Thomas Edison. They forgot the letter ‘I’. He certainly puts that missing letter into his latest book Why Soccer Matters. In this pleasant book, he takes the reader on a very personal journey as he travels the years of the game from 1950 until the present. He has shone brightly on many stages, but on no other stage as brilliantly in the eyes of the world as in the World Cup.

The book is best read as a biography rather than as a deep look into the impact of why soccer truly matters. Even a cursory comparison tells you that it is not as deep a book than his original autobiography, Pele, which came out just eight years ago.

He addresses some controversies that have arisen during his years in the spotlight, but very few are surprising. For example, when Brazil bid for the World Cup in 1994, he says that he believed it should go to the United States, not only because of Brazil’s economic turmoil, but because the sport was still so uncertain in America. While his Cosmos years are covered, and his role in ‘introducing’ soccer to the United States is highlighted, no mention is made of Pele’s connection with the resurrection of the team on Long Island. He also puts the lightest of touches on the issue of whether or not Brazil can afford to host the 2014 World Cup.

His parents receive a glowing treatment, but if there is one person in the book that stood out beyond Pele himself, it was the captain of the Brazil team, Waldyr Pereira (aka ‘Didi’). There is a nice passage when he writes of the goal that put Sweden ahead in the 1956 final: “After that first Swedish goal, it was Didi – of course – who picked up the ball and walked very slowly with it back to midfield, speaking very calmly to each Brazilian player he passed along the way. “Very good, that’s over!” Didi said cheerily. “Time for us now!””

That paragraph in a way sums up the sweetness of the book that begins with Brazil’s loss to Uruguay in 1950, and ties up neatly with Brazil hosting the World Cup in 2014. Pele views that loss in 1950 as something that brought the whole country of Brazil together for the first time. He even quotes the journalists who compared it with Hiroshima or the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It seems an extreme parallel, but one that he clings to throughout the book as the primary motivator of Brazil’s unification as a nation. He even goes so far as to imagine what would happen if those two teams meet in this year’s final.

Why Soccer Matters To Me might have been a better title for this journey from child to star, from star to ambassador, and from ambassador to elder statesman. The chapters are short, easily digested, and the book is a quick, untaxing read. On the whole it is a nice introduction to Pele, and through his eyes, to the global phenomenon that is the World Cup.

Pele, Why Soccer Matters is available from Amazon and all fine booksellers.

New York Red Bulls Head Coach Mike Petke summed up the opposition on Friday when he said Chivas USA is a “young hard working team, organized, run hard and fast. Anticipate them coming in organized.”

The rain that had been falling on the way over from the parking lot had stopped, so before the game the grounds crew turned on the sprinklers. The arena was thinly attended and the wet fans stared at the profusion of water. While it seemed like pointless overkill, it was just the beginning of a match where the words would take on new depth.

At first the game seemed high speed, conducted with an energy almost impossible to sustain. Peguy Luyindula, in his second start of the season, charged at the Chivas keeper, forcing him to quickly take a long kick. Then minutes later, Thierry Henry did the same, and you thought that this was their game, that all the talk on Friday had fired them into a frenzy. You saw the strategy. If Chivas think fast, force them to think faster. If they are organized, disrupt their flow. Attack, attack, attack. But for every strategy, there is a counter. Offside, offside, offside. Had the Red Bulls scored early on, it would have been very difficult for Chivas to take back the momentum in the arena. They didn’t.

There is little doubt that these two players are very dangerous as a scoring tandem. Rosales is leading Chivas in assists with three and Torres is the team’s scoring leader, now with four goals. You knew that they were going to have to be neutralized for the Red Bulls to win. What you didn’t expect is that they would have such an easy answer to all that unwanted attention. To draw fouls and further, to appear to embellish. The game soon lost its energy and became became bogged down in the middle of the pitch, using the field’s width rather than its length. When Torres put Chivas in the lead from a penalty kick, the attitude in the arena turned bitter.

The teams left the pitch at the end of the first half with Chivas 1-0 up. In the second half Chivas sought to defend that advantage, and played to keep the score static. They defended strongly from the start, but a more organized Red Bull team created several chances that found gaps in the Chivas lines. At times Dan Kennedy, the Chivas keeper, was forced into making very good saves, and at times the threat dissipated with imprecise shots. Chivas wanted to slow to game down, while the Red Bulls team recaptured the energy from the beginning of the game, and the crowd came back to them with a roar that drowned out the clap of thunder from the storm that rained down on the pitch. But the team was getting nowhere.

By the second flash of lightning, the second shock of thunder that rumbled through the arena, people stood up and simply left.

It was not a goal that set in motion a come-from-behind victory that would make the perfect ending for a team in search of its first win this season. Coming in the dying seconds of the added time, there was nowhere to go for the Red Bull team. There was no time left. The fact that the celebration of the equalizer that Peguy Luyindula headed past the Chivas keeper put you in mind of a win rather than a draw shows that the expectations for the team right now are not as high as they should be. To not lose is not the same as winning.

While neither side can claim the three points for a win, this draw is more than a simple 1-1 scoreline. There is a respect that one team has for another that is translated to the fans. Chivas, with what had come across as heavy embellishing in the first half, and what looked even more like outright diving in the second, lost respect. Even Thierry Henry cupped his hands and gestured with international sign for diving.

The Red Bulls fought back and secured a point, but the match pointed out something that needs to be examined. With Armando suspended last match and Jamison Olave known for aggressiveness, they will bear added scrutiny and regardless of their play and be baited by other teams looking for an advantage. Instead of respected, they will be targeted.

“It was much better in the second half overall; organization, our desire, our ability to create chances and get forward,” said Head Coach Mike Petke after the game. “But at this point, four games in, there’s still a lot we need to clean up. A lot.”

The New York Red Bulls are practicing on a rainy Friday at their arena in Harrison, New Jersey. There is still a little yellow grass behind the goal down in front of the supporters end, and a yellow blur of turf on the penalty spot. The reporters and staff waiting at the side of the pitch may joke about it, but they admit that it is one of the best fields in MLS right now, and you can tell that head groundsman Dan Shemesh is proud. It is still growing, still thickening and anticipating its fullness. In a way, so is the team that is practicing over the pitch. At the beginning of the practice, the voices of the players had a playful ring in the empty arena. Now they have a very serious edge. At the end of the practice, they stop to talk.

“I worry about a million things. I am a walking contradiction.”

Chivas USA is a team looking for an investor this year, but that doesn’t appear to be one of the emotional intangibles that they are bringing to their game. There is, says coach Mike Petke, no sense that they are a team with their backs against the wall. Instead they are dangerous without needing any other motivation than to play a fast and organized game.

But more than looking ahead to this game, the questions today concern the last three, a loss in Vancouver and 1-1 draws against Colorado and Chicago. What everyone wants to know about is the seemingly slow start the Red Bulls have had this season.

“I want to get off to a slow start,” he says, laughing. “Same thing as last year.” But kidding aside, he doesn’t seem worried. “I would like more shots, more goals, but that will come.”

Sure, he worries. He even lists some of the things he worries about: his car starting in the morning, traffic on the way to the practice facility or the arena, whether the coffee he buys on the way in will be good. But as far as this team goes, he points to that contradiction. “At the end of the day leading up to the game, I’m confident. I have the utmost confidence in this team.”

“No alarm bells yet”

Luis Robles goes right to the point. “We’re three games in. The last two were good performances,” he says. “It is important to play well and pick up three points.” He also sees the team coming together. “We’re better, not perfect,” he says, but adds this reminder. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint. “

“We have to get back in shape as last year,” echoes Peguy Luyindula. “We have to get back to the basics.” And in that echo, you can discern something that the team must be hearing from their coach since it is brought up independently on the heels of Luis Robles’ comments.

Even Thierry Henry points to getting back to basics as the way to win. “We have to defend well against Chivas and attack well,” he says. Very simple things. Scoring, then preventing the other team from scoring. In the team’s last game against Chicago, a 1-1 draw, he saw his position change.

“They asked me to play the middle against Chicago. We’ll see what happens Sunday.”

Tim Cahill doesn’t doubt the seriousness of the game ahead, but puts it in perspective: “It’s a long season and we’re going to have to start picking up points sooner or later whether we want it or not. No alarm bells yet.”

They say that April showers bring May flowers, but what about these rainy days in March? Maybe on Sunday, we will see how much this team has grown, and how much how much further they have to go to truly flower.

With so much attention focused on European soccer teams coming to the United States this summer, it’s important to note that the International Champions Cup returns to the five boroughs of New York in July when Olympiakos takes the field against AC Milan, where Citi Field turns its baseball diamond into a pitch for what has become an annual tradition of soccer at the stadium.

Since 2011, when the Greek national team played Ecuador in front of a nearly sold-out crowd, the home of the New York Mets has hosted a match each year, including Ecuador v Chile in 2012, and last year’s matchup between Israel and Honduras.

It has been 27 years since the Greek league champions have played in the United States, and playing at Citi Field offers the team an opportunity to face rival AC Milan, and to reconnect with a community of supporters in New York.

“It is with great pleasure that the administration, technical leadership and we the players of Olympiacos, await the match against A.C. Milan,” said Olympiakos defender and team captain Avraam Papadopoulos. Olympiakos venture into New York is an effort to brand itself with a large contingent of diaspora Greeks. Astoria, Queens, boasts the largest Greek population living outside of Greece in the world. “We are delighted to be playing against a historic rival in front of thousands of fans, most of which will be Greek expatriates,” continued the Australian born Papadopoulos. “We promise to honor their turnout and offer a beautiful spectacle to all of those who really love football!”

AC Milan is also offered the opportunity to connect with fans. The team competed in the International Champions Cup last year, playing against Chelsea at MetLife Arena, but this game will be played in a borough that is home to one of the largest Italian-American communities in New York City.

Tickets are now available for the July 25th match, with a kick-off time of 8PM, and can be purchased through the International Champions Cup at www.internationalchampionscup.com

There was supposed to be a drum-roll. Instead there was an old fashioned New Year’s Eve style countdown as the doors were opened to unveil the identity that will carry Major League Soccer’s latest expansion team into the future. There is a new badge in town. It represents New York City FC, and designer Rafael Esquer says that he was as surprised by the choice as anyone else at the unveiling. By his smile and through his conversation, you can tell that he is obviously pleased with the decision. His approach, he says, was to look at the timeless, classic elements of New York City, to see it as a whole and yet to appreciate the individuality of the five boroughs, and come up with a design. Nothing specific in time and space, but universal — something that he believes would also have international appeal. This design, based on the New York City subway token, perfectly fits that criteria.

While his badge may be the reason for the evening, cameras and microphones crowded around NYCFC head coach Jason Kreis, who has flown in from Manchester for the event. He is there scouting the players on Manchester City’s youth team. The decisions he faces in assembling the team are whether he commits his international signings on “young, inexperienced players” or to wait and see what develops in other channels. He is in the strange position of being a head coach without a team. “I am not a patient man,” he says. He has been involved in the game professionally as a player and coach since his minor league days in 1993. “I’ve had my break. I’m ready to go.”

Even more interesting than a coach without players are the small clutch of men among the guests, a handful of fans already wearing blue and white scarves. They are a supporters club without a team and, until tonight, without a badge. Andres Loaiza talks about their identity as separate from the EPL club that shares ownership of this team with the New York Yankees. “It’s New York City, not Manchester City!” As such, they will be carving out their own niche in New York’s soccer culture, starting with things like membership cards, their own supporters bar and creating an identity that this badge unveiling will propel.

There is another current running among the guests, another forward look at what the team will mean. Dave Hahn, chairman of South Bronx United, a non-profit organization that harnesses the power of soccer to encourage academic achievement to promote health and wellness and develop leadership talents among inner-city kids, is “excited. Very excited.”

Claudio Reyna, NYCFC’s sporting director, has already been involved with their program, but he is looking further ahead to what it will mean to these kids to have a club that they can identify with. It’s not about what these kids can afford, but giving everyone a chance to play, a sentiment echoed in the words of Steve Shilling, President of the MSSL Player Progression System, an organization that, similar to South Bronx United, teaches kids about more than soccer, gives them something beyond the field while looking for players to move into clubs like NYCFC. “We want to let kids play regardless of if they have money,” he says.

There are a lot of hopes pinned on this badge. In a little less than a year, the team will take to the pitch. If this unveiling speaks for anything, it is that the team already has supporters, and even before a player is signed, is itself a supporter of dreams.

There are three books about Manchester United that are worth reading, and that combined may bring this season into a little better perspective. Two of them were published within the last year, but it’s best to begin chronologically with the third, and perhaps best, of the three.

A Will to Win – Alex Ferguson

With all of last year’s focus on the book My Autobiography by Sir Alex Ferguson having died down, it is a good time to look back at a season and a book that deserve a little more attention. In A Will to Win, Alex Ferguson’s diaries the 1997-1998 season, begin in June while he is on vacation but he’s unable to stop his mind from pacing the sideline, and continuing almost daily through Eric Cantona’s retirement just after Manchester United won the Premier League championship and then less diligently into January of 1998. It is hard to disagree with any of the judgments he makes, unless you really dislike the movie Evita. “Madonna was tremendous,” he writes after screening the film.

It is a fair look at a season that saw the team focusing on the European Cup and depart before the finals, lose out on the FA Cup and the Coca-Cola Cup as well but maintain a strength and determination that brought them out at the top of the League. It was written at a time when the class of ’92 were appearing regularly in the first team and finding themselves in the mix for the big matches, particularly David Beckham, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes.

There are a few whetted knives in the writing – his views on media responsibility and the circulation of rumors, racism and the game, and managerial disputes. Overall, though, it is remarkably even. You get a real sense of the obligations of a manager: the amount of time he spends traveling, at functions, fretting about the team and a starting eleven.

He weights his criticism with humor throughout:

“So much for the kid-glove treatment. Despite all the talk about proper defending, we fail to stop the goals and go 2-1 down to Chelsea.

“So much for my inspired talk…the first half against Sheffield Wednesday was abysmal.

“The first half is just what I didn’t want, and exactly the way I knew Juventus would play.”

There are some truly funny things in the book. For example when his wife meets him at the door after a loss to Sunderland chanting “Fergie, Fergie give him the sack.” And you may be surprised at how often he uses the phrase ‘happy bunnies.’

It is a book that gives you a real feeling for the man, more so than My Autobiography. He ends after a 2-0 win against Tottenham in January 1998 by writing: “Once in front we became too comfortable and didn’t get back into top gear. It can happen that way at home. I think away games see our players more on their toes. There is no lack of desire, though, and when it comes to the crunch for the big games ahead, Manchester United will be more than ready!” Instead of crunch, the season became a crash.

“Modern football,” he writes “is an impatient business.” This book rewards the time it takes to read it.

A Will to Win: The Manager’s Diary is available from Amazon and all fine booksellers.

The Impossible Treble – Steve Bartram, Paul Davies and Ben Hibbs

Released in December, this book by David Bartram et al celebrates a magical year for Manchester United — the 1998/99 season that saw them win the Champions League, the FA Cup and the Premier League title. As Alex Ferguson says within its pages: “I believe anyone watching Manchester United this season will remember it for the rest of their lives. It may prove impossible to repeat.”

Calling a book The Impossible Treble may be a little like entitling a mystery “The Butler Did It”; you know the outcome even before you open the cover. The Impossible Treble however dispenses with suspense altogether and takes a different approach, laying out a monthly overview then going back and covering the games themselves within the chapter when it could have operated effectively as a single blast. Still it is interesting to look at a team and a season that saw Manchester United gut out wins and rise so high. As Dwight Yorke says in January of that year, “The whole concept of not giving up and coming back from the dead was phenomenal.”

That ‘backs against the wall’ play that becomes so concerning in the 2012/13 season is compared here to a steeplechase rider holding something back for the final dash. ‘I picture about 60 games for us, so we must pace ourselves and it’s a matter of trying to keep all the players fit.’ says Ferguson that February. In addition to this focus on the players, that same month a replacement was needed for assistant manager Brian Kidd, and the three names on Manchester United’s list were Steve Bruce, Steve McClaren and David Moyes.

As the season progressed, the players were aware that what they were moving toward was historic.

Gary Neville: “…everything felt really good. I think the whole team felt like that. Each player felt it individually and everybody came together at the perfect time.”

Dwight Yorke: “We had our backs up against the wall and came back from the dead all season. That was our mentality; never give in until that whistle is blown.”

Phil Neville: “By that point we were chalking games off, like a countdown, but we also knew that along the way there was going to be a hiccup, because that’s what happens when you get to March, April, May. It’s not that draw or defeat that you suffer, it’s how you react to that.”

There are few connections to be drawn between that team and the one that Manchester United has fielded this season, but it is worth looking back on a team that rose from the ashes of a season that saw them miss out on all the trophies then snap back into greatness the next.

It is a quote from Sir Alex Ferguson in the final of the three books that links them, when in February 2013 he compares his current team with this team that won the Treble. “The squad I had then is not nearly as strong as the squad I have got today,” he says in Champions 2012/13.

The Impossible Treble is available from Amazon and all fine booksellers.

Champions 2012/13 – How We Got the Title Back – MUFC and Steve Bartram

It is impossible to read, Champions 2012/13 – How We Got the Title Back without looking for clues to what is happening with the team this year. Littered throughout is a sense that this is a team that is not functioning at a highest level, that they are gutting out wins rather than putting in dominating performances, even though Alex Ferguson compares them with that Treble winning team, favoring this one.

“If you look back over different periods, you see we recover. When Arsenal won the title from us in 1998, we went and won the Treble the next year,” says the manager in August of 2012. “ We accepted the challenge and did something about it.”

It is a far more suspenseful book, the authors dispensing with the recap and then going back to the events of the month, and in that suspense you feel things build in a way that can be looked back on as troubling.

The players realized that they were starting games slowly, on the back foot, and it was an uncomfortable feeling. “It’s a bad habit” said Patrice Evra in October. “The positive thing we can say is we have had a good reaction, but, in football, it’s better to act not react – that’s what my old coach taught me. In November he continues the thought: “It’s not that we underestimate anyone – it’s just that we don’t expect a Manchester United team to be behind. But it has happened a few times this season.” “We’re very frustrated,” adds Darren Fletcher that same month “It shouldn’t take going a goal behind for us to start playing. The only positive thing we can take from it is that every time we do it we seem to respond. But we can’t keep making a habit of it. We want to go on a run of winning games now and not conceding first.”

It makes you wonder, if you are given to wondering about the collapse of Manchester United rather than just lamenting or celebrating it, with what foresight the manager decided around Christmas time of that year to pack it in, but holds his announcement until May. In February, David Gill decides to move on from the team he helped to build.

In March: A jaded United side squandered a two goal lead and could consider themselves fortunate enough to be pencilling a quarter-final replay after weathering a second-half siege from Chelsea at Old Trafford.

In May: United failed to score in a Premier League game at Old Trafford for the first time since 2009, as Chelsea edged a dour affair to boost their hopes of qualifying for the Champions League.

It seems to be with a great deal of foreshadowing that Alex Ferguson colors part of his speech after his last game as manager at Old Trafford. “I’d also like to remind you that when we’ve had bad times here, the club stood by me, and all my staff stood by me, the players stood by me, and your job now is to stand by our new manager,” he tells everyone there in the stands, in the offices and on the pitch. Michael Carrick though seems to think that the team is moving ahead when he says that there is ‘nothing too much to change.” But it feels like a team with symptoms of the season they are now enduring, a team that didn’t live up to its potential in a year that, granted, saw them win back the Premier League title, but whose performances were categorized as ‘not great’ and ‘mediocre’ by the people closest to the action.

Perhaps Patrice Evra says it best when he says: “We have fought a lot with Chelsea, with Liverpool, with Arsenal, but I always say that the most difficult opponent for Manchester United is Manchester United. “

Taken together, the three books show the rises and falls of Manchester United through the years under manager Alex Ferguson. From winning the Premier League title, to the crash the following year, then on to the Treble, you see things as a cycle. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. The question is, will David Moyes be holding the lamp?

For more Manchester United news, analysis and opinion, visit the Manchester United team page.

There were fireworks at Red Bull Arena Saturday but they were, for the most part, limited to the pre-game celebration of the Supporters Shield and the five minutes of added time at the very end of the game.

The New York Red Bulls began the game attacking toward their supporters’ end and gave the appearance of controlling the game even though the statistics tell a different story. Twelve attempts on goal and five on target in the first 45 minutes for the Colorado Rapids as opposed to four attempts, all off target, for the Red Bulls.

“Their average age is, what, 26…27…25? In this league you have to match the work rate with the intensity,” said RBNY head coach Mike Petke, speaking about the Colorado team post-game.

The Rapids brought their youth, intensity and work rate to bear against an older Red Bull squad. Twenty-three year old Dillon Powers was a strong part of those Colorado attacks. Even though he has been dealing with knee tendonitis issues and was questionable for the game, he led the Rapids decisively from the midfield. Deshorn Brown, 23, had five shots, with just one on target, while nineteen year old Dillon Serna, a homegrown player for the Rapids who debuted in their final game last season, took three shots, threatening with two in the half.

The Red Bulls defense was much more organized than when they opened the season last week against Vancouver. Jamison Olave and Richard Eckersley both were strong in initiating attacks from Colorado’s long clearances, but with play consistently running down the shadowed side of the pitch, the team soon became predictable. Neither side seemed poised to score in the first 45 minutes, although Colorado produced the most tense moments when the ball was not cleared from the front of the Red Bull goal, and pin-balled around the box.

The first half ended 0-0. The edge was with the Colorado Rapids.

“An all in, fiery, hard working coach,” Petke said, comparing the Rapids new coach Pablo Mastroeni to the team.

The Red Bulls looked to the sunny side of the pitch at the opening of the second forty-five, and it was there that they won back the ball in the Colorado half. When the ball found the feet of Lloyd Sam, he sent it across the goal for a diving Thierry Henry to head in. 1-0 Red Bulls in the 57th minute.

It was two of the three substitutes that the Colorado team made in the half that evened the scoreline in the 72nd minute, when Marvin Chavez drew a questionable foul from Jamison Olave. Olave, who traded words and shoves with Deshorn Brown earlier in the game, seemed targeted both for his reputation and that confrontation. The penalty kick was converted into a draw against the home team, and neither the Red Bulls introduction of Eric Alexander for the booked Lloyd Sam and Peguy Luyindula for Bradley Wright-Phillips, nor their sustained attack in the added five minutes, could change the 1-1 final score.

There were a few things that plain speaking manager Mike Petke talked about after the game. It may not be the result he had hoped for, but he says that he was feeling better about what he saw in the defense… holding the line, stepping up together. A line beginning to gel. Forget about the refereeing as well. He doesn’t see an excuse there. Instead, he pointed to three other issues; “Lack of creativity. Lack of imagination. Not finishing.”

The Teams:

New York Red Bulls: Luis Robles, Richard Eckersley, Jamison Olave, Armando, Roy Miller, Lloyd Sam (Eric Alexander 81’), Tim Cahill, Dax McCarty, Bobby Convey (Jonny Steele 67’), Bradley Wright-Phillips (Peguy Luyindula 86’), Thierry Henry

Colorado Rapids: John Berner, Chris Klute (Marc Burch 52’), Shane O’Neill, Marvell Wynne, Drew Moor, Dillon Serna, Nick LaBrocca, Dillon Powers (Vicente Sanchez 65’), Jose Mari, Gabriel Torres, Deshorn Brown (Marvin Chavez 61’)

Disciplinary Summary:

COL: Deshorn Brown (caution) 61’
NY: Lloyd Sam (caution) 79’
COL: Vicente Sanchez (caution) 80’
NY: Armando (caution) 85’

“Knowledge of positions is a good thing.”

Attaquant polyvalent. It is the french description of the position on the pitch that Peguy Luyindula occupies. In English, it translates as versatile forward. He is a player who feels like the off-season lasts too long, that the end of the season just means waiting for the next one to begin. “I’m eager to go back to the game” is his description of how he feels now that the regular season is just a few days away. It is a game that has been with him most of his life, although not in the playing role that he occupies on the New York Red Bulls team. “The history is weird,” he says.

Sports are one of the few fields where people place confidence in a positional family lineage, and so it was with Mr. Luyindula. “I started out young as a defender. My father was a defender. They saw that I was quick. After the first year, I was a right winger.” It wasn’t until he was around 16-17 years old at the academy when he was moved to the position of forward due to of a lack of strikers on the team. The positional change paid off for his first club, Chamois Niortais, where he scored 8 goals in 26 games. The team that year finished 5th, its best position in nearly a decade.

From there it was onwards and upwards for the Kinshasa born Frenchman: RC Strasbourg, Olympique Lyonnais, Olympique de Marseille, AJ Auxerre, Levante and Paris Saint-Germain. At each club, his knowledge of not just his own position, but of having played in other spots, made a difference to him.

He compares it to a factory worker who specializes in just one aspect of producing a product. You become locked in a single mindset, unable to see the big picture. “If from beginning to end you are a striker, you are just that.”

“You cannot be sad over perception.”

On the field, watching him interact with the team, you sense a powerful bond. And yet in the stands, Peguy Luyindula is divisive in a way that is unusual for the New York Red Bulls. Some players seem to float above criticism while others spend their time in New York vilified by the fans, grudgingly praised when they do something spectacular. In New York, everyone is scrutinized but not everyone gets their name chanted, some days good and others bad, and sometimes both within the space of 90 minutes, like Peguy Luyindula.

The fans have criticized the lack of fireworks. He responds by saying “You are effective when you have to be.” It is not a shoddy answer, not a shrugged off response. Watching him work in practice last season, threading in and out of the agility poles to take a ball sent to him and put it in a sharpshooter net, you know that he is not the type of player who steps up only when he has to. Rather he has the intelligence to be there when he needs to, to optimize his abilities for the good of the team. He rejects out of hand the excuse that the fans might be to blame, that they lack an understanding of his role within the team.

“When you are a fan, you are speaking with your heart, not your head. You see things, take things with the heart.”

“At the end of the day you are playing for the team. It is the only thing you do.”

Can you play with your heart? “You try to split it – half heart, half brains. If you play too much with your heart, you put your teammates away.” It is, he says, selfish football.

Polyvalent. It means versatile. But there is another definition, a medical one. It is an anti-venom, a balance and counter-action, sometimes even an agent to create an immunity. With his intelligence and his ability to optimize his effectiveness, he counteracts the opponent’s attack and creates chances for his team to equalize, to go ahead. Watch him. You will see.

So you don’t miss games this 2014 season, view the MLS TV schedule. You can also watch games via MLS Live. And be sure to stay updated on the MLS news throughout the season via the MLSsoccer.com site.

“You have to be pragmatic and ask the Chelsea supporters if they are happy with the Cup or if they would prefer to play a Brazilian Samba game and go home without the Cup” – Jose Mourinho on winning the League Cup, 2007

Last year, Chelsea made two trips to the United States. On their first trip over, just after the season, they played one game in St. Louis and a second at Yankee Stadium. On the Chelsea side, that game was notable for the lack of a couple key players, the club’s give-aways of pins and flags to the fans, and a great game from Juan Mata, who was brought on in the second half. Their opponents, Manchester City, had just announced their partnership with the Yankees to bring a MLS team to New York and appropriately, I suppose, won 5-3. At the end of the game, Chelsea manager Rafa Benitez left the field with a wave, his last game with the Blues.

The second visit was notable for a few reasons as well. John Terry was back in the side, and although Frank Lampard had traveled with the team, he didn’t play, but was there.. But the biggest change was that once again Jose Mourinho was leading the team from the side. It was Chelsea over AC Milan that afternoon 2-1. The Special One was back, albeit to a mixed response from the crowd.

The film The Blue Revolution looks at his first stint with Chelsea following the team, manager, management and fans through interviews and highlights. A fan piece, it spends much of its time with a London bar owner, a Chelsea season ticket holder, a Londoner living in New York and a Texan who once studied abroad in London and came back to the States with Chelsea fever.

Three seasons are a lot to put into a film that is just barely over 1 ½ hours long.

However the extras are as interesting as the film itself, perhaps even more interesting with the benefit of hindsight. In broadened interviews, Mourinho picks at a car door lock and ash tray as he rides with the interviewer in a minivan while he talks about the team. He describes their preparation as thorough in learning about the other team, but what is as important is not changing their own game, that ‘staying themselves’ is the way to winning. Other teams have to adapt to Chelsea.

Frank Lampard: “Things happen and then the manager kind of, you know, he reacts to (those) things. At Chelsea now, Mourinho happens and then everyone else reacts. You know what I mean?”

John Terry: “All the players, we love him at Chelsea He’s been a revelation ever since he arrived here. Not only just as a man, he’s a great man, but as a coach he’s the best I’ve ever worked with. On the pitch he’s spot on. He’s very passionate. He says things that are on his mind.”

Sir Richard Attenborough: “I found him always a man of great charm, a wonderful persona. He’s a star, he’s a star player. If he was playing rather than managing he would dominate the field. I think our future is very tied up with him.”

Peter Kenyon: “We want to become the London team. There’s 13 different teams in London, top quality football teams. We’ve decided that we want to become London’s team. He wants Chelsea to make a difference. The press is pure speculation, because actually nobody knows him….he’s passionate about Chelsea. He’s passionate. If we win we want to win stylishly. If we lose we want to lose with dignity and graciousness. He’s in it for the long term, and I think he’s the best possible thing to happen to Chelsea football.”

The difference in these quotes is that Peter Kenyon is talking about owner Roman Abramovich. The lines are already subtly being drawn, and even the fans can feel that things are going too far before the UEFA Champions League match against Barcelona in March, 2006. During the film, a traveling fan who is in Europe for the game talks about the tension, the feeling in the air that is not pleasant, but poisonous, dangerous.

Mourinho says something in the film that is telling. It is that his family wants to go to Disney without him. Is it his fame, or is it the controversy that he has been stirring up that makes them want to go alone? There is something lonely, utterly isolated within the place that a manager goes. Henry Winter of the Daily Telegraph talks about the siege mentality that every manager builds up, but Mourinho pushed the bounds so far that Peter Kenyon speaks about the feeling that was aimed at the team before the Barcelona match:”Sometimes I don’t think we’ve helped ourselves and we got to take to responsibility for that.”

The team, he felt, had come to represent everything bad in Britain.

“The magnificence of Jose Mourinho as a manager will not be seen by me as a journalist, will not be seen by the fans, it will only be seen by the players behind the locked gates of the training ground,” says Henry Winter. Jose Mourinho pushed the team to the heights, but also alienated a lot people on the way up, including the fans, as his opening quote reflects.

It is a much darker film to watch now than when it was made as a fan piece, and that is not a bad thing. In fact it makes it even more appealing both to Chelsea fans who want to look at the background to understand what is happening with the club as well as to people who are not Chelsea fans. What did Edmund Burke say about history? “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

Blue Revolution: The Inside Story of Chelsea Football Club is available on DVD from World Soccer Shop.

“The fears, the tensions, the dramas, the personality clashes, the tedium of training, the problems of motivation, injuries, loss of form, the highs and lows, new people coming through, old stars beginning to fade, that sort of stuff goes on, and will go on forever.”

More than anything else, this quote by Hunter Davies in the introduction to The Glory Game explains why it is still being read and why it is rightfully considered a classic of the sport. On the one hand, so much has changed around the sport over the last 40 years since the book was written. On the other hand, so many of the fundamental things have not. Last Saturday, watching Tottenham face Everton, the Spurs scored in the 65th minute from a set piece that had me flipping through to the last pages of this book. One of the appendices diagrams the scoring set pieces that the team used during the 1971-1972 season. It wasn’t there, but I looked.

Hunter Davies, author of the only authorized biography of The Beatles, wrote in his introduction to the 2011 edition of The Glory Game about a concern he had when the book first appeared in 1973. He hoped that it would appeal to an audience larger than Tottenham Hotspur fans. Through the unprecedented access Mr. Davies was granted by Tottenham, he was able to examine the club from all sides, to give a complete look at the inner workings of a top division team, and write a story that transcends the lines of fandom, and the hands of time.

The book moves across one season through chapters on the players, manager, staff, directors, and even fans. Almost anyone connected with the team who would talk to him, and even a few who were reluctant to, are profiled. In the chapter ‘Bill Goes to Bristol ‘, Davies takes a trip with manager Bill Nicholson to watch a reserves match. For all of the difficulties in getting the manager to open up, the conversation that they share in this chapter reveals Nicholson as a man whose life is as measured and considered as the answers he gives. “I get no pleasure out of being a manager,” he tells Davies. “It’s a job.”

Excerpts:

First day: We passed a school and all the kids in the playground stopped to cheer and wave. One or two shouted ‘Arsenal, Arsenal’.

Reserves and Nerves: All the Spurs’ players who work their way up internally, starting with the club as youngsters, say that they have this worry that Spurs, because of their resources and reputation, will buy somebody better, or perhaps just more famous, and they’ll be out of the team.

Nantes: “All they have to do is play it simple. That’s the answer, but they won’t do it. When you get into difficulties, when the opposing team are doing well and not letting you do anything, all you do is play it very simple and things go your way.”

Pat Jennings: His arrival in football was sudden and meteoric. In just eighteen months, from never having played in any sort of football team before, he was in the English First Division.

Something unexpectedly nice about the book is that there are no photographs. At the time it was written, most readers, especially Spurs fans, would have known what the players looked like. Now you realize them on a different and deeper level, as humans rather than an image. Through Hunter Davies’ descriptions, for example of Martin Chivers popping the plate with his front teeth out before games, you draw the characters in your own mind.

The chapters are short, typically a dozen pages each, stories that build on each other in layers rather than by momentum. It is not a diary of a year and the domestic season isn’t examined in great depth. Instead, the matches on which trophies hinge are described in the greatest detail, games that through their intensity spotlight the best and worst of the team’s development: Super Leeds (FA Cup), Nantes (UEFA), The Battle of Bucharest (UEFA), and Milan ( Anglo-Italian League Winners’ Cup) .

This book’s many layers, like those of a sweet onion, will add flavor to your appreciation of the game. The Glory Game is the seminal work on the inner life of a club, as relevant today as it was when it was published over 40 years ago.

The Glory Game is available at all fine booksellers, including Amazon.

Football does not ask for faith: it compels examination.

So writes Arthur Hopcraft in the introduction to The Football Man, reissued late in 2013 as part of the Aurum Press Sports Classics series. When I started reading the book, I kept a blank piece of paper as a bookmark to take notes, a simple page number and one word of a sentence that stood out. I filled up one slip of paper, then another, and then beginning on the third piece, I realized that I was becoming like a medieval monk transcribing a holy manuscript, so I stopped and just read. It has been added to a short shelf of books that have become indispensable.

Written in the late 1960’s, the book begins with the star of the day, George Best, and time travels through the past and into the future. Each section of The Football Man is dedicated to a particular aspect of the game, beginning with the players, and moving on to the manager, the director, the referee, the fan, the amateur, and finishing with football and the press, football and foreigners, and the future. Each section is shorter than the one before, and each firmly establishes its subject with keen insight through interviews and profiles. But he doesn’t let fact hide his storytelling abilities.

On Players:

Duncan Edwards: “The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more.”

Tony Kay: “He knew most of the tricks of the trade, but not the most important trick of all, which is to appear not to.”

Bobby Charlton: “Charlton makes his own rules for dealing with a football. He is a player to admire, but not for younger ones to copy.”

On Managers:

Alan Brown: “Managers make their own decisions about where their responsibility is ultimately owed. With some it is to success; with Brown it is to himself.”

Sir Alf Ramsey: “He does not watch football with his heart in his mouth, taut with anxiety for goals. He watches individual players, dispassionate for their success or failure, noting their advantages and their weaknesses, his mind endlessly taking in and rejecting new faces in the constant search for ‘the blend’.”

Surprisingly it is the chapter about referees that might be the most compelling just because is feels like it springs from the news: Cristiano Ronaldo’s red card at Bilbao last week, and the reported suspension of the referee involved. As you finish this chapter, you have, if not sympathy for, then certainly an understanding of the strengths of a good referee and the weaknesses of a poor one. “The good referee is not the man who plays safe with either a blind eye or a public display of moral outrage, but the one who can unobtrusively remove the teeth from the offence.”

He ends the book with a look at the future of the game, calling the proposed club competition that is the Champions League unrealistic, and at the time he was writing it was. But he hits the other points dead on. The issues he addresses, soccer in the United States, club spending, violence and professional refereeing are still poignant.

The players and managers he writes about may not strike a chord in the readers’ personal memories, but the game he writes about will strike an emotional one. Of entering any soccer ground, he writes: “The moment evokes my past in an instantaneous emotional rapport which is more certain, more secret, than memory.”

This book, The Football Man, opens the gates to that secret part of us that cherishes this sport, and the key bearer’s name is Arthur Hopcraft.

The Football Man is available from all fine booksellers including Amazon.

This morning as the Staten Island ferry docked at its slip in Manhattan, it left behind it a wake of open water through the ice floe that has been building up in the harbor. It is an apt metaphor for looking at Guillem Balague’s book Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning. What could have come across as slick and cold, a recounting of victories and statistics, it’s instead openly infused with warmth and life. Balague, a writer for various magazines and newspapers and a television commentator for Sky Sports, offers us a look of what is below the surface of the man and his team.

The book begins with the 2009 UEFA Champions League Final and continues through to the 2011 Champions League Final. After reading it, I wanted to see it from the time the lines of players walked past the four scarlet coated soldiers guarding the trophy through to its presentation. Watching the game reinforced and complemented the book, deepening its impact rather than undermining it. Balague’s descriptions of the game are broken down under six headings :

1. the preparations
2. the tactical talk
3. first half
4. half-time
5. second half
6. the final word: the lifting of the cup, the managers.

“Their attack,” he writes of the Final’s second half, “involved constant positional permutations between the front five, with the full backs often involved as well. A never-ending display of ball and player circulation.” It is a detailed look at a match that shows Guardiola at his best. The tactical talk, pieced together from the memories of the players who were there in the locker room, is just one example of the attention to detail that Guardiola brought to his preparations for the game, and provides just one example of the details that Balague brings to his book.

What Guardiola managed to achieve in his handful of years with the club is looked at in terms of a question that the author asks toward the end of the book: was it an evolution or a revolution?

“Changing an answer is evolution; replacing the question is revolution,” Balague writes. The book lets the reader decide.

The legacy of Barcelona under Guardiola’s care rises above debate. What the author does so well is to bring the achievements to life, filling out the statistics through the words of the players and manager, giving flesh to what exists in the mind as one of perhaps the greatest and most accomplished teams in recent memory. The paperback, released in late 2013, is fully updated through Guardiola’s decision to take the position at Bayern Munich, a team that as of today has gone 42 games without a loss. What is it about Pep Guardiola that enables him to take a position and make it work so well from the start? What is there below the surface? Many of the answers are here in this book.

Balague was given privileged access to Guardiola and the players at Barcelona, and has written a book that offers an insight into the club and its most successful manager to date. It is a compelling read.

Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning is available at all fine booksellers, as well as through Amazon.

The 2013/14 season is a period of intense transition for Manchester United, as former Everton manager David Moyes has become the first new manager of the team in more than 25 years.

Despite the recent adversity the team has suffered after defeats to Tottenham, Swansea and Sunderland, this is not the first time that the team has struggled or has faced transition in its history since 1878 as a recent book by author Søren Frank points out.

His book, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, looks back across the entire history of Manchester United, from its very beginnings as Newton Heath LYR FC in 1878 through to the Red Devils of the 2012/13 season. It will be how the team adapts to the challenges it now faces that will decide more than Cup wins or Championships could. Will it reconnect to the past and the continuity of ideals that have supported the team throughout the years, the Manchester United ‘brand’, or run to the future in a different direction?

In his introduction, Mr. Frank set out what he sees as the four pillars of the Manchester United brand:

1. a free-flowing style of attacking football,

2. a philosophy that is a combination of rivalry and excellence exemplified through youth development,

3. the institution’s pop cultural associations, and

4. its self marketing as a transnational brand.

In the last chapter, he forms the questions now facing the team’s future. It is a book that he states is written with a pen in each hand, one hand writing as a fan, the other as an intellectual, combining throughout the three tracks of cultural history, aesthetic appreciation, and factual information. It is an ambitious goal, and even if it is in fact just a goal rather than a reality, the book is admirable in its scope and depth. Chapters are organized around the specific date of a Manchester United milestone, the history spreading out from it like that stone thrown into a pond. There is a good deal of back passing, changing time and perspective in these bites of history that come dangerously close to scoring against the book, but it is pulled off like Sir Alex Ferguson’s glance at his watch in the last 15 minutes of a match, so that the story moves ahead through years good and bad to the present.

If there is a problem with the book, it is something that seems trivial, but is actually important to being able to grasp the story fully; the typeface. The book is printed in a font that is a challenge, which is unusual in books from this press. One sentence that is spaced well is followed by another where all the words are run together. It is hard on the eye, and having to go back and reread paragraphs breaks the continuity of the prose, and the narrative suffers.

This aside, the author nicely introduces himself chronologically into the text in the chapter December 1978, with the first Manchester United game that he watched on television as a boy in Denmark. It is a personal look at where his own obsession with the team began, and through it he taps into the pillar of Manchester United’s transnational appeal.

The book also shines in its look at the Munich air disaster, what it meant to the team then and how that shattering event has shaped and been shaped by the club since 1958. Another chapter describing the financial dealings and control by the Edwards family gives a look into the club from another angle that brings a fullness to the team’s history. A further chapter examines how the commercial efforts of the club has created a schism between the traditional working class roots of the team and what is perceived as soulless corporate merchandising. It makes me think about the increasing number fans I see wearing Manchester United sweatshirts, hats and jerseys. This a book they should read to understand the team they support. Through it I, as an impartial observer as I wrote in a review of Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography, have a better understanding of the team, its history and the fascination it holds.

It was an awesome task that Søren Frank set for himself. The reality of what he has done it to write a solid look at Manchester United through the years by focusing on the different aspects that has made the team a Manchester institution so firmly established in the city that it could never be at home anywhere else. He has also shown how, through time, that team transcended a physical place on a map and became an international representation of excellence through a mixture of youth and experience. He has illuminated the red thread, made it shine, and given us a reason for our feelings, pro or con, about a team that is as much a symbol as a reality.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Cultural Analysis of Manchester United is available at all book retailers, including Amazon. The book is also available in a Kindle edition.