MLS Needs to Quickly Take an Official Stance
It is Saturday night and Chivas USA is on the attack. Hector Cuadros has the ball out wide on the right and hits a cross into the penalty area that caroms off the arm of Real Salt Lake defender Marlon Rojas.
What does referee Terry Vaughn do?
He calls a penalty kick, of course, for a hand ball infraction by Rojas. Isn’t that what the rules say?
Cuadros scores from the spot, Chivas USA wins, 1-0, and Real Salt Lake goes home to Utah feeling cheated.
Fast forward to Sunday night. Landon Donovan has the ball out wide on the right and hits a cross into the penalty area that caroms off the upper arm or shoulder of Colorado midfielder Ritchie Kotschau.
What does referee Jair Marrufo do?
He waves play on, of course. There was no intentional hand ball infraction. It was ball to hand, not hand to ball. Isn’t that what the rules say?
Forgive fans at the Home Depot Center for being confused. It is not the rules of the game that are vague, it is their application by Major League Soccer officials, who all too often seem to be reading different books.
Inconsistent officiating plagues MLS. It also infuriates players, who seldom know from one game to the next what is going to be called a foul and what is going to be allowed.
Coaches are becoming increasingly angry also. The standard of play has risen year by year in MLS but the standard of officiating has failed to keep pace.
Steve Nicol, Thomas Rongen, Dominic Kinnear, Peter Nowak and Fernando Clavijo, now MLS coaches, are former international players who experienced the game at the highest level.
When such men protest bad calls by officials, it is not simply a matter of a coach doing or saying anything he can to help his team. It is a sign that something is wrong.
The league needs to address the quality of officiating. Not down the road but now. And if fixing it means paying MLS referees much more than the pittance they earn at the moment, then pay it.
And when they are paid more, hold the referees to a much higher standard.
The league, its players and its fans deserve no less.
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Something else dragging MLS down is the appalling situation in New Jersey, where the MetroStars are the closest the league has to a New York presence, discounting MLS’ East 42nd Street offices.
The MetroStars are an embarrassment.
Forget, for the moment, that they are the only MLS team never to have reached a championship game in either MLS or the U.S. Open Cup. Forget, too, that they have had seven coaches in 10 seasons.
Even forget that they are winless in four home games (0-2-2) in 2005 and floundering.
What should most concern the league: Last season, the MetroStars averaged 17,195 spectators a game. This season, they are averaging 8,646 and local writers already are writing the club’s obituary.
“It was billed as a soccer match,” New York Daily News columnist Filip Bondy wrote of Saturday’s 1-0 home loss to the San Jose Earthquakes, “but it felt more like yet another funeral for the sport that is dying inside Giants Stadium, one lousy week at a time.”
The New York Post was filled with similar misgivings and mentioned “the mausoleum-like atmosphere” at the Meadowlands.
Fans are deserting the team in droves. The MetroStars’ most recent two home games were televised, and what viewers at home saw was acres of empty red seats surrounding two bad matches played on the abominable synthetic surface.
Every bit of good will that MLS is building with its successes in Los Angeles is being undone by its failures in what will always be -- no matter what New Jersey says -- the New York market.
Earlier this year, MLS Commissioner Don Garber was adamant that something had to be done.
“This team will fail if it has to stay in the Meadowlands,” Garber said in March. “We simply cannot continue to play in the Meadowlands and be financially viable or have the environment that that team deserves in order to be the team that it should be in the New York metropolitan area.”
Convoluted sentence structure aside, Garber is correct.
“It is inconceivable that a professional sports league would not have a team in this area,” he continued. “But if we don’t find a solution, we have also been bold in making decisions that we needed to make to ensure the ongoing viability of the league.”
The time for such a decision is rapidly approaching.
The hearse has drawn up outside Giants Stadium and all that is left is to cart off the body.
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If fans will not come out to see the woeful MetroStars, they will come out to see David Beckham in his first U.S. match.
England plays Colombia in a friendly at Giants Stadium on May 31 and, as of Monday, 31,000 tickets had been sold.
Beckham, described in England’s Guardian newspaper Monday as “perhaps the only English footballer who could not walk down Fifth Avenue without being recognized,” will be joined in the game by Real Madrid teammate Michael Owen.
But neither player will be available for theU.S.-England match in Chicago three days earlier.
Also absent for the May 28 game at Soldier Field will be the Liverpool duo of Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher, who will be playing in the European Champions League final against AC Milan at Istanbul, Turkey, on May 25, and Chelsea’s John Terry and Frank Lampard, both of whom will have minor surgery after helping the London club win its first English title in half a century.
Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand has said that he would take part in the eight-day, two-game U.S. tour.
The U.S. team probably will be at full strength.
