Weekend Wrap-Up

Well, it was an all-around fun weekend these past few days for the football fan. There was some great football and some fun moments. I’ll wrap things up this week with a few quick hits that can get you caught up on anything you missed.

1). There was a PHENOMONAL weekend of football in Spain this past weekend. We saw controversy, heroics, and a ton of action. All three of the top three clubs drew, which means next week will finally (and sadly, as I wish this fun could go on forever) settle everything. I could summarize al the action for you, but the great Phil Ball does it better in one of his best columns of the year.

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=437945&root=europe&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos1&cc=5901

2). Staying in Spain, this weekend also demonstrated why I have a love/hate relationship with GolTV. On one hand, they showed all three big games in Spain this weekend. (The Real game, the Barca game, and the Sevilla game.) They showed the Real game live, and the latter two on tape. All this is good.

However, they made the ridiculous decision to try this triple split screen at times, which did nothing but make all three games unwatchable unless you had a mega-big screen. Further, because of the split screen nonsense, I missed one of the van Nistleroy goals. Bah. On top of all this, they used the same announcer for the Barca game that they did for the Real game, and he called the game as if it was live even though all the viewers well knew that he had just watched the damn game while calling Real. That’s bad enough, but to top it off the announcer was the unfathomably bad Ray Hudson. All of that is bad.

3). One more weird note from Spain. Now that Beckham is playing great (Capello says he’s as good as he was when he played at Manchester United), we are getting the inevitable slew of stories about how Real is trying to get him to renege on his contract with the Galaxy and stay there. A typical story can be found here:

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=437906&cc=5901

All along, I had hoped Beckham stayed in Spain. He is a world-class player and deserves to play in a world-class league. I could have waited a few years to see him in the MLS. But Real screwed up by not signing him (they have admitted it was a huge mistake) and now there’s nothing they can do about it. So they might as well stop bitching and get on with finding a replacement. I can’t believe they let Ribery go to Munich…

4). Finally, the U.S. is cruising through the Gold Cup, although interestingly enough Mexico is having some problems. I will be at the third U.S. group match in Foxboro, Massachusetts on Tuesday and also at the quarterfinal on Saturday. I will file a report when I get a moment.