D.C. United Might Trade Its No. 1 Pick
Major League Soccer holds its eighth annual draft in Kansas City today, but whether D.C. United will exercise its right to the No. 1 overall pick or trade it away was the subject of considerable conjecture Thursday.
University of Virginia forward Alecko Eskandarian is the consensus No. 1 choice, and has been praised by D.C. United Coach Ray Hudson.
“Eski is the jewel of the draft,” Hudson told the New York Times earlier this month. “He’s not just a very good player, he’s got something extra, that little touch of magic. He has those things that you just can’t coach. He’s tough in the air and he can kill you with that left foot of his.”
Those comments were made before D.C. United had secured U.S. national team player Earnie Stewart, however, and the team’s needs have changed.
Eskandarian is the son of former New York Cosmos and Iran World Cup player Andranik Eskandarian and has made no secret of wanting to play at Giants Stadium, his father’s old stomping ground.
Whether Hudson will trade the first pick to the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, possibly as part of a three-way trade, or use it to acquire someone other than Eskandarian was open for debate.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that D.C. United soon would announce the signing of Bulgarian defender Galin Ivanov, and there was also talk of the club’s trading its No. 5 pick to the Chicago Fire for Bulgarian playmaker Hristo Stoitchkov, which, if nothing else, would give Ivanov someone to talk to.
Both moves would further diminish Hudson’s need to make a rash trade with today’s top pick.
The draft’s first-round order: 1. D.C. United; 2. New York/New Jersey; 3. Chicago; 4. Dallas; 5. D.C. United; 6. San Jose; 7. Columbus; 8. Galaxy; 9. New England; 10. Galaxy.
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MLS on TV
The league announced that its national television schedule for 2003 would include three games on ABC and 26 on ESPN2.
The April 5 season-opener in Columbus, Ohio, between the defending champion Galaxy and the Columbus Crew, winner of the 2002 U.S. Open Cup, will be televised by ABC, along with the Aug. 2 All-Star game and the Nov. 23 MLS Cup, the league’s championship game. The latter two matches are at the Galaxy’s new stadium in Carson.
Twenty-six of the 29 nationally televised games will be live and 21 will be shown on Saturday afternoons, among them the Galaxy-Colorado Rapids game at 1 p.m. on June 7. That will be the inaugural game at the Home Depot National Training Center.
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El Salvador- Guatemala
The national teams of El Salvador and Guatemala, preparing for the UNCAF Copa de Naciones, Central America’s qualifying tournament for the 2003 CONCACAF Gold Cup, will play each other tonight in Santa Ana in the first of back-to-back games in Southern California.
The 8 p.m. match at Santa Ana Stadium will be followed less than 20 hours later by a rematch at 4 p.m. on Saturday at the Coliseum.
Promoter Hugo Bandi said that coaches Juan Ramon Paredes of El Salvador and Julio Cesar Cortes of Guatemala had each brought more than two dozen players to California and that the two games would give them the chance to test their teams’ depth.
Guatemala’s squad includes two MLS players, forward Carlos Ruiz of the Galaxy and midfielder Fredy Garcia of the Crew.
The round-robin Copa de Naciones tournament will be played in Panama, Feb. 9-23.
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Quick Passes
Armenia fired Oscar Lopez as its national team coach after the Argentine demanded that his salary be raised from $120,000 to $300,000 a year.... Bayern Munich acquired Argentine defender Martin Demichelis from River Plate for $4.5 million.
