Echoing My Previous Post On The CONCACAF Champions League

Chivas USA is down 1-0 to Tauro FC of Panama. The game, not surprisingly, is taking place in a mostly empty baseball stadium on a pitch that is, at best acceptable, and at worst, horrendous.

Incidents like this are all the more likely to hasten Sacha Klejstan’s exit from Chivas and MLS.

As Much As I…

Am enjoying watching New England get spanked by Joe Public in Trinidad — the Revs are losing 2-1 with about 5 minutes left — I’m still decidedly undecided about the value of the CONCACAF Champions League. As Jack Bell points out in today’s NY Times, it’s important for MLS to raise it’s international profile, but I don’t know that playing midweek games against sides like Joe Public before sparse crowds is the way to do it. And no offense to the squad from Trinidad and Tobago, I’ve actually asked my girlfriend’s family to get a Joe Public jersey for me, but MLS and the T&T League are very different.

Call me a snob or exclusionary or whatever, but Superliga was the template for forging a true CONCACAF champ. Rather than create another tourney, CONCACAF should’ve had some sort of play-in tourney amongst the Joe Publics, Real Estelis, Tauro FCs, Puerto Rico Islanders, and, for that matter, Montreals, Vancouvers, and Toronto FCs of the region. Those squads should’ve been playing for the right to get into a 16-team field that would consist of 2 sides each from MLS, La Liga de Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras. Throw a 3rd team from each of those aforementioned countries into the play-in and then CONCACAF — finally! — would have a club tourney that the rest of the soccer world wouldn’t look down on.

More importantly, from my perspective at least, they would have a tournament that actually made for compelling viewing. Instead, if what happened in tonight’s Joe Public 2-1 win over New England is at all indicative of the opening of the tourney, what we have is a couple weeks of matches that barely have the intensity of a coed pub league kickaround.

So, as much as I enjoyed watching the Revs go down tonight, I can’t help but wish that their defeat happened in a match they took seriously and actually seemed like it mattered.