Couple of items of business today. First, a hearty thank you for your responses yesterday; I'm glad to know you haven't all signed up to some sort of football news reading technology that made you USSF D-2 geniuses in a matter of seconds. I'd be a little ticked if I'd missed out on that.
I'll share my own methods now. I hate Google Reader, for several reasons. First off, most of the time circumventing HTML is fine, especially as most of us are on fairly straightforward platforms (WP, Blogger) there are several areas where this is criminal. Like with Run of Play, for example. Second, I've added way too many feeds in way too many sub-categories, and the result isn't "more" news" but just a glut of text in the main reader, some feeds with ads, some not, some with all-caps headlines, some not, and even when I try my damnedest, a lot of it tends to focus on the same shitty stories on the Premier League or extremely boring MLS DP rumours. Third, well, a lot of the blogs I added when I first collated it a year ago are dead, or have mutated. This involves a certain amount of fiddling all of the time, and for someone who requires Google Calendar to schedule when I'm going to go down and pick up the newspaper on the stoop, this means I will never fiddle.
My non-Google Reader solution is pretty inelegant: I have a saved tab on Chrome with all the stuff I read there, but even that gets cumbersome (I have to click and read each one! Google Calendar is already full today!) So taking a page from Dave of Dave's Football Blog, with a lean sixteen (one six!) feeds up on GR, I'm going to go ahead and drastically cut down on the glut, keeping only the regulars, the guys who bring the goods and bring them semi-regularly updated. Hopefully this means I will never again miss out on the fact that RoP turned three way ass back in October, and I didn't say happy third birthday. In any case, potential movers and shakers on the web, you should smell the opportunity.
The second bit of business surrounds the Sporting KC nonsense. I heartily agree, it is stupid, but its awkward Europhilic redesign is nothing new in the long weird history of American soccer (my America includes Canada for now). The best example of the awkward hybrid is the United Soccer Association of the 1960s. On the extreme Anglophile end, you had Toronto City (self consciously styled after the many "City" clubs in England) a team that once featured former England internationals like Danny Blanchflower and Stanley Matthews. But Toronto City and the Boston Rovers played in a league with more traditionally American names like Detroit Cougers and New York Skyliners. Not that it mattered from a player perspective; all the teams in the USA were shadow teams brought over wholehog from clubs in Britain.
The NASL was formed to be a distinctly American league with traditional American style nicknames, but the move didn't spring up from the soul of American soccer—it was meant to distinguish the league from its European forebears, even though the NASL was formed in large part in response to the positive US interest in the 1966 World Cup, interest generated in large part because England won. In fact, it's hard to find a moment in the long history of American soccer where Europe in general and England in particular doesn't feature. The Miracle on Grass, for example. Even my favourite little Canadian club that could, Galt F.C., marked the height of its success by beating British clubs in an 1888 overseas tour. I'm not saying this to defend the rebranding, I'm just saying Kansas City Wizards to Sporting KC represents one of the more wild oscillations in American soccer's identity crisis.
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