The Pan-Pacific Tournament, and What it Tells Us About MLS

If you watched the opening games of the Pan-Pacific Championship last night, you saw some free-flowing, attacking football that proves MLS can compete in the rest of the world.

Oh, and you also saw the LA Galaxy.

The two games of the night were a study in contrasts. The LA game shows what happens when you build a team entirely around three players — Landon Donova, Carlos Ruiz, and, of course, David Beckham — and two of them (Landon and Ruiz) are injured. New Galaxy coach Ruud Gullit may be going for “sexy football,” but what he’s got at the moment is more “Borat-style porn film.”* The final Galaxy 0-1 Gamba Osaka scoreline flatters them in a huge way. (Although I’ll be the first to admit that the second half looked a whole lot better than the first.)

Houston, on the other hand, showed why they are two-time MLS champs. They played some free-flowing, attacking football and actually looked like they’d taken the field together at the same time before the opening whistle. They scored three goals in the first half and looked dangerous at other times. Final score 3-0.

To be fair to the Galaxy, Gullit was treating this game as a trial for their many draft picks and trialists. At one point there were only three veterans on the field — forward Edson Buddle, midfielder Kelly Gray, and Beckham himself, who went the full ninety and looked a little the worse for wear at the end. Oh, and Josh Tudela, if you can count a one-year player who didn’t even take the field until midseason last year. (No offense to Josh, but I wouldn’t consider him a veteran player just yet.)

Yes, it’s still early in the preseason, but not too early to draw a few conclusions about what’s going on in the world of MLS:

1. Yes, MLS can compete in the world! Granted, Sydney FC isn’t Chelsea FC, and the A-League is not the EPL or La Liga. But Houston dominated this game, and they looked good doing it. It’s only a matter of time till our best teams regularly make a name for themselves in international competitions.
2. I won’t say it’s impossible to build a team around names, but the current salary cap makes it highly unlikely. The Galaxy are now desperately trading veterans to make room under the cap, which leaves a whole bunch of inexperienced players on the field at the same time.
3. When those names are injured, watch out. The Galaxy without two of their three names is a team made up of low-paid rookies.
4. Beckham can’t carry a team alone. Yes, he delivered a few pretty throughballs and fought the good fight. But most of the time he just looked ready to catch the next plane back to England.
5. The designated player (the star player who can be paid outside the salary cap) may be a good thing, but there are costs. The Dynamo have no DP. The Galaxy, through some interesting wheeling and dealing, have three. Draw your own conclusions.

I’m very anxious to see Saturday’s games to find out how Houston stacks up against a top J-league team, and whether the Galaxy are really as bad as they looked last night.

The Pan-Pacific Championship, as discussed earlier, is the matchup of top teams from Japan, Australia and the US. (More here.)

* Alas, I was not creative enough to come up with the “Borat porn film” image on my own. It came from my Galaxy page reader “Playtherapy.”

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Category: Australia, World Football