This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

 SPICELESS EDITION

The Spice Girls made the cover of Rolling Stone. Does anyone remember when Rolling Stone was a good magazine?

Temper expectations. Isn’t that how I’ve been putting it, in regards to the success of American soccer? Well, apparently the same goes for Victoria Beckham’s reality series, which has been shortened from series to special. I can only imagine the resources devoted to Pairs Hilton have left Ms. Beckham with little more than a handycam over her shoulder, or maybe they found Posh to be one spice short of a ratings grabber (could that be soccer’s fault?). So it’s slow this week, but we’ve got the Gold Cup (game schedules here).

The first real game of the year for Bradley’s US MNT is tomorrow, and all my focus is on good thoughts. Good thoughts. We gave back the canal, but we’re gonna try to hold on to this cup for awhile. A few nips and tucks after the jump…

This week was all about the attempted defection of half the Haitian U17 national team and the successful defection of two Cubans from the their mens national team… unless you were the big boy media. In which case, you didn’t pay any attention because, hey, we found some tainted toothpaste and maybe if we talk about it enough, it might trigger a Chinese-US Cold War. Good Grief, network and cable news have become seething characters in the oxbow lake long left behind.

Luis Bueno of any-number-of-websites fame mentioned that he held an interview with Cuban defector turned MLS-er Maykel Galindo that will turn into something on Saturday in the Press Enterprise. I feel kind of down on this, because while it will be a great interview, it’s not going get the real feature treatment I wanted this story to get. Oh well.

In other disappointments, we finally got a look at Grant Wahl’s SI Latino piece on his tour of Mexican football. Again, here I am with lot’s of good stuff to learn, but it’s not the usual Wahl feature fare. Maybe he was burned out from college basketball, as he alludes to, but the shortened diary format of this piece kind of bummed me out. It’s more a photo essay with words than a true article. But you have to love the way Wahl throws himself in there with the fans and the moment.