Who Brought In Blanco?

I was a little surprised to see Grahame Jones give Fire boss John Guppy the full credit for bringing Cuauhtemoc Blanco to Chicago. To be fair, Guppy's quotes could be taken as explaining why he was a good choice, and not who chose him.

This matters because of a conversation I had with Guppy at the outset of the season, immediately after the Blanco signing was announced. I asked him, flat-out, whose idea it was to bring Blanco to Chicago. He deflected the question entirely. When coupled with AEG honcho Tim Leiweke's statements to the press on the heels of the David Beckham news -- which were later recycled after the Blanco signing into a totally bogus rumor about Zinedine Zidane -- it seemed very obvious to me that the Blanco deal originated with AEG and not with the Fire's reported brainstorming list of Designated Player options.

Either Jones made a faulty leap of logic took Guppy's quotes out of context to fit his narrative, or Guppy is taking credit for a decision that he wouldn't take credit for back in April, which seems curious to me. Although maybe not in light of a new ownership group that is hopefully going to look at everyone under a microscope in the offseason.

In any event, I'm a bit leery of this emerging account of the Fire's turnaround, and not just because I think Dasan Robinson and C.J. Brown have contributed just as much as Wilman Conde. It's more that non-local media have a bad habit of not really knowing what's going on, as evidenced by the usually-sharp Ives Galarcep calling Paulo Wanchope's benching "controversial," and that can push an inaccurate account into the conventional wisdom, where it gets hard to dislodge.