I don't get it. Now we're faulting the announcers for not evaluating things in relation to their team?
We were an average team last year.

Justin Davis is a BLUE!

For real. I think going 4-0 against Atlanta last year was about average.

I bet that's not going to be the case this year.

WTF Borfor Carr. Where did that guy and his ridiculously fast first step come from?

Okay, all throughout the game yesterday I was impressed by Cristiano Dias, he played hard without attracting a bunch of fouls and he made a great sliding tackle in the box...

...but, when watching the defensive f'ups that led to two of their goals, I'm not sure Dias was where he should have been, was someone else supposed to be watching our left back position and where were they when the ball was played into that side?

How did everyone else rate his play?

P.S. Carr was dynamite yesterday as was Navia(?), they played well and deserve credit for the goals. They're going to be an exciting team to play this year. Unlike the Failhawks - amiriteguiz, woooh.

I think the point was that the guys were smack talking the whole match. It was my understanding that the NASL wants the announcers to be at least some what even handed. The comment about us being average should have been followed by the commentary that their GKs sucked, and that they had a bunch of immature fools who flip off drunk adults when they are in the beer garden with their impressionable 12 year olds.

I see Atlanta winning a few more matches this year. However, they still have a young team and have a history so far this year of conceding goals quicker then the FC Dallas backline (nice goal by Noonan last night to level the score with LA Galaxy against Dallas.)

BTW, Joe Warren's GAA was also very average too. What was it, something like 0.9?

Our left was wide open that game.

The formula was the same over and over again...

center/right, cross to left, shot/cross in for a goal.

Atlanta was actually a decent team last year, but had horrible goalies. Easily the first sever or eight games last year were a disaster with Jimmy Mauster, or whatever his name is.

Now, for what it is worth, I find the Atlanta announcer to be decent, I find the color commentator to be sub-par. A bit smug. Case in point on Saturday night.

He's a master of the absolutely obvious. They definitely try to fill too much time for my liking.

Yes.

Oh, what the hell...

I'm in just that kind of mood. So I'll explain it to you.

[Insert the disclaimer here, with an additional note that I'm being only semi-serious.]

Yes, we are faulting the announcers for not evaluating things in relation to their team.

Because it is their team. Literally. They are paid shills for the Silverbacks. Part of the organization.

There is nothing more lame than the post fight interview in boxing when the defeated fighter and his cornermen keep deriding the world champion they have lost to four straight times, three by knockout.

It sounds petty and deluded.

And it's not like either of them are some kind of top-flight experts. One of them was a two-time All-American at Emory U who washed out of New Zealand semi-pro soccer after one year and is currently a Marketing Director for an internet set-up, while his partner is the Assistant Sports Info Director for Emory. We're not talking Ally McCoist here. Or even Ray Hudson. Or even the Hudson Brothers.

And as for the Stars being average, well, let's approach it this way...

The main on-the-pitch goal for every team in the league is to win the league championship, and the Stars we're the only team in the league to do that, while every other club in the league did not. That makes the Stars the best team in the league until some other team wins it or the Stars are eliminated from the chance to retain it.

You could prattle on about regular season record, time of possession, playing style, number of players on the all-star team, or any number of other factors that you could use to evalute the relative placement of the rest of the teams in the league. You might even use them to rank current champions against former ones. Or even champions of various organizations.

But that's not what the shills from Atlanta were doing. They were simply revealing that they couldn't see or understand how the Stars could do what they did against their team and the rest of the league.

But the Minnesota Stars ARE the champs. And they remain the champs until someone takes it from them. And a champion, by the very definition of the word as it relates to sport, isn't average. Because the average athlete or athletic team doesn't win a championship. However they did it, through talent, smarts, guts or combination thereof, they raised themselves above the average and reached the pinnacle of their sphere of athleticism.

If you think an average team or athlete can win a championship, then the concept of champion means nothing, signifies nothing. It renders the goal of winning a championship meaningless. If winning a championship doesn't mark you, for the time you hold it, as the best of your class, so to speak, then what is the point?

I'm not sure I'm ready to toss aside one of the main unifying concepts denoting athletic excellence in favor of a mish-mash of amorphous, arbitrary and frequently contradictory sets of standards used by pundits, also-rans and their followers who can't really understand how a particular champion has achieved what they have.

"And I'm sure not ready to do it on the word of two shills from Atlanta" maintains

That little old jersey collector

Me

I close with a previous observation made about another team by Kevin Keegan that he might have repeated if he had been hired to shill for Atlanta - "I don't think they're as good as they are."