Photo: Paul Rudderow
Philadelphia Union
The boys in blue played Toronto FC to a PSP, PhillyVoice, CSNPhilly, BrotherlyGame, Section215, and PattisonAve.
Bedoya and Curtin were upset about the PK awarded to Jozy Altidore. “‘Knowing him, he tends to go down easily in the box,” said Alejandro Bedoya, a U.S. Men’s National Team teammate of Altidore, who also labeled it a makeup call from a penalty kick given to the Union earlier in the half. “So we’ll just leave it at that.'” Jozy Altidore was unhappy about the comments. Not sure Ale should be making comments about PKs, given that he missed his opportunity.
The Union are currently tied for 6th in the Eastern Conference with Toronto FC, with 2 points from 2 games. After 2 games last season, the Union had 3 points. Let me know if you want me to update this all season – I thought it might be interesting to track and compare.
Jay Simpson was injured but appears to be okay.
ICYMI: The Union signed GK Jake McGuire.
Local
Bethlehem Steel has rearranged a few friendlies due to the expected inclement weather.
MLS
MLS has seen many good expansion teams recently, but Minnesota United is proving to be a cautionary tale after losing 6-1 this weekend and they are now on pace to allow 170 goals this season. Maybe putting a target on their jersey was not the best idea.
See the rest of this weekend’s MLS scores here.
Tim Howard returned from injury.
LAFC will be entering MLS in 2018 with no counterpart.
Around the globe
The Canadian Men’s National Team is set to take on Curacao in a Gold Cup warmup. It will be the CanMNT’s first game in Montreal in seven years.
Tottenham advanced easily to the FA Cup semifinals but lost Harry Kane to an ankle injury, and Millwall fans used some racist chants. Arsenal and Manchester City will be joining them, and Chelsea and Manchester United are competing for the final spot.
Liga MX did not play games this weekend due to a referee strike. Two players made intentional physical contact with referees during last week’s games and the referees felt the imposed punishment was not harsh enough.
Kazuyoshi Miura became the oldest professional goal-scorer as he notched the only goal in a 1-0 win in Japan’s second division. Miura is 50 years old. Wow.
Is Samuel Umtiti the most important player on Barcelona?
Highlight of the day
Memphis Depay turned and fired into the net. From midfield.
That under cooked Minnesota team is an interesting story. The team was clearly not built terribly well. I’ve watched a good portion of both matches so far, and they look good moving the ball around, but fall apart on the final touch on the attack — with poor decision after poor decision, and the defense might as well be a couple of pylons. I suspect they won’t get blown out by 4 or 5 goals every match, but they might really struggle to get 4 or 5 wins.
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Bedoya should have blamed himself rather than the media for his failure to communicate re: the Altidore comments. Though, I think the term dustup is even more grand than the moment deserved. It was a pretty benign comment and Altidore’s reaction was a little bit childish. Guess it’s drama this league tends to go without so it gets a lot of attention.
Yeah they look ok when they have the ball but they are so so so terrible defensively.
It is going to be a loooooong seasons for Minnesota.
Can we play them before September, please?
I probably wasn’t the only one googling when the Union play Minnesota 15 minutes into the ATL-MIN game.
Chicago and Houston are killing it. Hope we can keep our momentum and end up with more points than these 2 teams that were terrible last year.
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Boy was it cold on Saturday! Quite amazing that both teams did not seem to care about the cold. And that the Venezuelan boy on Atlanta played in short sleeves and ended up with a hat-trick in the snow!
Looks like the investment Houston made in Torres two seasons ago is going to finally pay dividends.
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Was at the game Saturday. Was quite comfortable until about the 75th minute, after the sun had gone down and it felt like the temperature dropped about 5 degrees. There’s nop way I would have survived that Minnesota match Sunday. I’m actually kind of surprised they didn’t postpone it. That field looked barely playable.
The orange ball was a nice touch.
I too was at the game and I agree. If they had started that game at 2 pm and the sun was out the whole time, it would have been a different story. The 2nd half was cold as hell.
Man, I thought the Union were hard done by Geiger on Saturday. Then I saw Jelle Van Damme get two yellow cards for *not touching* a Timbers player. I see your Geiger Counter, and raise you a Holy Toledo. http://cornerofthegalaxy.com/2017/03/12/10-man-la-galaxy-fall-to-portland-timbers/
Love that Spurs ran up the score on Millwall in Son’s defense. While I love the “noone likes us, we don’t care” chant that Sons Of Ben appropriated from Millwall, I’m glad that’s all we’ve taken.
just wanted to note while watching the condensed replay last night, Tommy Smyth dropped schlimazel in his color and Dellacamera was like “a bit of a what?! schlimazel?!” while i was like “thank you, Tommy. i now have to opening to Laverne & Shirley in my head” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJzF8_df1R8
Smyth’s divisiveness in the booth is evident on twitter but he gets points from me for this one.
It was well timed by him. A Ray Hudson-ish moment to be true. For the remainder of match however…oh boy I’m gonna have to surrender.
The Union reserves played Maryland yesterday.
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http://www.brotherlygame.com/2017/3/13/14900406/union-draw-again-in-scrimmage-with-university-of-maryland
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Nothing major of note but it did get players like Alberg, Ilsinho, etc minutes for fitness and sharpness.
two other notes:
the guy next to me was berating Jones’ play and i was like “are we watching the same match?” however we both were in agreement that the screech that came from Giovinco was embarrassing.
I can see how Giovinco got hurt cause he weighs like 12 pounds, but it didn’t seem violent to me. Gooch is our new Califf. Giovinco got Califf’d!! HA!