Big Red Rocks WSD!
If you haven't heard the Alexi Lalas interview on World Soccer Daily yesterday (Thursday - 6/21), download it immediately. It was a really fascinating segment in which Big Red defended his controversial contentions that the Premiership is "an inferior product" and that MLS could compete in the lower reaches of the Premiership. The interview started at about the one hour mark.Here's the key moment in the conversation:
Steven Cohen - Okay, Houston Dynamo - current MLS champions - where do you think they'd finish in the Premiership?
Lalas - Midtable. I don't think they'd get relegated.
Cohen - Are you serious?!
Lalas - Yeah.
Cohen - Okay, well, we will have to agree to disagree.
Lalas went on to repeat his claim that any five MLS players could be dropped into the starting elevens of Premiership teams without causing any loss of form for the team. In that case, my question for you lads is this: "Which five current North American MLS players could start for a Premiership side?"
posted by gatorbob @ 2:25 PM
2 Comments:
I'd put forward Jose Altidore, Shalrie Joseph, Christian Gomez, Jimmy Conrad, and Ricardo Clark just off the top of my head.
But the three I want to send into the Prem are Landycakes, Carlos Ruiz, and Dwayne DeRosario so that they can suffer the tender ministrations meted out by the likes of Scholesy and especially that Ben Haim bastid.
Good choices, Gooner, although Shalrie is Grenadian and Christian Gomez is Argentinian so neither qualifies as "North American" per se.
Here's the problem that I see with sending MLS players to England. Apart from a few stand-outs - Dempsey and Howard, for example - most of the better players in MLS probably aren't good enough to play in the Premiership. Their proper level in Britain is probably the Championship. Yet, at the same time, the Championship is a much more physical league, which doesn't really suit the light-weight, college grad. persona of most North American players. The other factor is that there is a lot more inconsistency in the Championship, where sides can easily slide and leave players (e.g. Eddie Lewis, sigh) in the lower reaches of the professional game.
Thus, the continent might be a better place for them. My picks would be DeRosario, Mastroenni and Twellman, but only at lesser Premiership sides where they'd be likely to get a game.
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