They’re Not Close to Understanding Soccer
Real Madrid is now off to Beijing, Tokyo and Bangkok, to conquer new teams in new lands by two-goal margins without really trying as they continue to prepare for the real soccer that matters, the Spanish League regular season.
As glorified scrimmages go, Real’s 2-0 exhibition victory over the Galaxy at the Home Depot Center on Monday night got a lot of local people excited -- mainly those who work behind a mike for FSN West -- but in the grand scheme, the best that can be said about the 90-minute workout was that it was an educational experience.
What was learned:
Real Madrid Coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo at last learned the name of at least one Galaxy player. That would have to be Kevin Hartman, the Galaxy’s harried yet resolute goalkeeper, the team’s last line of credibility against Real. Or as Luxemburgo might have used it in a sentence, “We’d have defeated them by five or six goals, at least, if not for that Kevin Hartman.”
The Galaxy learned, a little too late, not to awaken a sleeping giant, as it did by hacking Real midfielder Zinedine Zidane with a yellow-card foul in the fifth minute. In the sixth minute, a riled Zidane tiptoed through a woozy Galaxy defense and dished to Michael Owen for a 1-0 lead, simple as that, enabling Real to take its foot off the gas and send in the subs in waves before scoring again, for appearance’s sake, in the 75th minute.
Real Madrid, with no trophies to show for the first two years of its David Beckham experiment, learned a sure-fire way to win a bevy of championships immediately: Join MLS.
Michael Eaves, the soccer neophyte who played host to FSN West 2’s coverage of the match, learned that just because Beckham is more popular than Zidane doesn’t make him a better player. There’s a reason Real hasn’t won anything yet with Beckham, a free-kick specialist and a bit of a luxury item at Real, unlike Zidane, an impact player who can overwhelm opposing defenses with his passing, shooting and on-the-ball virtuosity.
(Of course this all took a while. It was good that Eaves had a veteran soccer coach, Thomas Rongen, by his side to help explain all this to him.)
Everybody else learned that, from a media perspective, the quality of an exhibition performance in mid-July is truly in the eye of the beholder. Contrasting the dry-eyed newspaper accounts of the match to FSN West 2’s breathless coverage, it seemed the scribes and the talking heads had been watching two very different matches.
From the Daily News: “Real Madrid ... toyed with the home team, putting on a scintillating show in a 2-0 triumph that was nowhere near as close as the score might suggest.”
From the San Gabriel Valley Tribune: “At least it looks respectable on paper, because it could have been much worse.”
From the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Don’t be deceived by the final score. This was a soccer clinic, tempered only by the fact that this is the first week of preseason for Real Madrid and its members were catching a flight to China after the game.”
Then there were the announcers who worked the game for FSN West 2. With the exception of Rongen, they were deceived by the final score.
“The Galaxy have been in this game, have had their chances, have not looked overwhelmed at all,” game commentator Max Bretos said.
According to the final statistics, Real outshot the Galaxy, 15-9, and had nine shots on goal compared to two for the Galaxy. And only one Galaxy shot was a real threat -- a second-half free kick by Jovan Kirovski that forced Real keeper Iker Casillas to make a diving save. Other than that, Casillas pretty much had the night off.
“It was a great showing for the Galaxy,” color analyst Allen Hopkins said. “Two-nil to a club like Real Madrid is nothing to be disappointed about.”
Yet, that final score was this close to 5-nil: Beckham scraped the outside of the far post in the 13th minute, Hartman nearly jumped out of his skin to deflect a crushing blast by Roberto Carlos in the 31st minute, Hartman bravely stopped Figo on a breakaway, then smothered the second chance by Owen in the 67th minute.
And it could have been worse if Real had played Ronaldo, who sat out the game because of a hamstring injury. Or if Real hadn’t taken its foot off the accelerator after Owen’s early goal. Or if Luxemburgo hadn’t begun substituting en masse in the second half.
These subtleties went ignored by the FSN West 2 crew, which was too busy promoting the Galaxy’s pre-match agenda, which was, as Bretos worded it during the post-match show, “The [Galaxy] players did not look out of place.”
The FSN West 2 telecast was also marred by bad information, most of it packaged tidily in this pre-kickoff assessment by Eaves: “It doesn’t get much bigger than this, as the world’s most famous sports team takes on the best team in MLS history.”
Right away, there are three things wrong with this statement.
One, this was merely an early preseason tuneup for Real and a mid-summer exhibition for the Galaxy. Yes, it can get much, much bigger than this. If the match were so important, why did the Galaxy rest its best player, Landon Donovan? Answer: In fact, Donovan has bigger games with the U.S. national team and the Galaxy later this week.
Two, Manchester United might have something to say about that “world’s most famous sports team” thing.
Three, if championships are the ultimate measure of success (and they are), the Galaxy, with one MLS title, is only the third-most successful team in MLS history. D.C. United has won four league championships. San Jose has won two.
Eaves also called Real Madrid “the No. 1 team in the world.” You want the truth? Real finished second in the Spanish League last season, didn’t get out of the round of 16 in the European Champions League and finished the 2004-2005 season rated 10th in a prominent European soccer “power rankings” poll. Which poll? The one on foxsports.com.
