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Footyball

Filed under: Imported

The MLS playoffs begin tonight. Basically the season up until now has been meaningless. That's because a completely asinine 8 out of 10 teams make the playoffs. Consequentially you have a team such as New England, with a pathetic record of 8-13-9, playing in the post season. 

U.S. coach Bruce Arena had the chutzpah to criticize the playoff system earlier this year. Unfortunately, he was subsequently browbeaten into apologizing. I have no idea why MLS has adopted such a lame-ass format. My guess is that they hope to goose attendance by keeping all teams in the playoff hunt right up until the end. (Average attendance per game this season was 15,559, up 4 percent from 2003.) The result: lots of pointless matches throughout the regular season.

Oh well.

The playoffs should be interesting. Since I no longer have any of the fancy cable stations that actually broadcast soccer (although I must add that, pathetically, I've watched quite a few games on my computer) I'm going to show up at Bruce's house tomorrow and demand that he let me watch some footyball.

My fearless prediction: D.C. United will win it all.

(Okay, one other thing to whine about: Why on earth has MLS scheduled New England's home playoff match at the exact same time as the opening game of the World Series? I know it was probably set prior to the Red Sox clinching, but couldn't they have envisioned such a scenario occurring and scheduled the game for tonight? Or do they want 12 people in the stands?)

Posted by Paul Demko at October 22, 2004 6:00 PM

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