Hooligan is back
Well, your Hooligan has taken a break, as real life has reared it's ugly head. Real life is in no way more important than football, but it's hard to get a job watching football all day (if anyone wants to give me this job, I'd be awesome at it).
Big week in soccer, as the Olympics are ongoing and the EPL started back up. We, unfortunately, haven't been able to watch as much as we'd like, due to work. And other stuff. We didn't even get to watch the EPL this weekend.
But we did, thanks to the Brother of Hooligan, get to watch the Italy Belgium game in HD this weekend. And it was good. In fact, it was brilliant. We're always happy to see comeuppance here at Hooligan Central, and "The Best Team in the World" got a pretty decent sized helping of it.
Belgium played 65 minutes a man down. Belgium had to pull it's goalie due to injury. Belgium doesn't have the big name players that Italy does. Belgium went down immediately after losing a player (on what, I feel, was a BS call. Yes, he blocked a scoring opportunity, but isn't that what defenders are SUPPOSED to do?). But Belgium won. A man down, against the winners of the World Cup, outgunned and outclassed, Belgium won.
And not only did they win, they ran the game. Italy had not given up a goal in the tourney. They gave up three. Italy didn't get a single goal against Belgium due to the course of play, only on PKs due to fouls in the box. And Italy's goalie got pissed and ejected from the game. It was brilliant!
And, of course, in EPL news Scolari helmed Chelsea to a 4-0 victory by outspending everyone else with Russian Mafia money. Arse won against Brom, which is pretty astonishing since my boys generally lose against pisspoor teams and only beat the good ones. Man U tied their first game, but with Ronaldo the Whiner out recovering from foot surgery and two of their main players out on injury in the course of the game, a tie is pretty good. When you have to pull your lead fullback to midfield, you know you've got some bench depth problems.
On the MLS front, the Galaxy is going through a major shakedown. Alexi Lalas, former MLS star and he of the crazy hair, has been fired as the GM, and the coach, Ruud Gullit, stepped down for "personal reasons" on the same day. Riight, has nothing to do with the fact that they haven't won a game in going on three months. Anyway, Cobi Jones, also a former MLS star and he of the crazy hair, was interim coach for exactly one game (a 2-2 tie, not a spectacular showing, but better than what they've been doing). I approved of that move. This may be Cobi's first year as an assistant coach, but he's played with the Galaxy since the inception of the MLS, only retiring last year. He knows the players, and they respect him It's chancy with his lack of experience, but I think the world of Cobi and was pretty sure he could make it work. Then, today, disaster.
There had been rumours about it for a week. And I was fighting mad over just the rumours. Confirmation came this morning. Bruce Arena, world class screwup, has been named the head coach of the LA Galaxy.
Here's the problem with that. Gullit was the third coach in, like, two years. And was starting to do ok, before this streak of, let's face it, pretty terrible play. Now to replace him they've brought in the guy that got sacked from the US national team for coaching us right out of the World Cup, and who got sacked after just 9 months with the New York Red Bulls for coaching them right out of the league. A perennial loser is not the person to turn your program around, guys. Sure, he might be the winningest coach in US national team history, but how many of those have we had? His record is, at best, marginal. Hell if he showed up to coach WEST BROM he'd get LAUGHED OUT OF THE STADIUM. Instead, he gets handed the plum job of coaching arguably the flagship team of the MLS.
That's enough for today. Next time, I'll talk more about C. Ronaldo and his prissy attempt to milk more money out of Man U., Rooney's bout with the dreaded Muntaba virus, and the Olympic final.