What's It Going To Take?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this anymore, but still, I'm fairly amazed that Ives has put Chicago Fire defender Wilman Conde in his First XI for last weekend.

Conde, you may recall, missed a tackle badly that led to John Thorrington having to lunge after Macoumba Kandji and get a red card for his efforts to bail out his teammate's mistake. He also had a sequence over a couple of minutes where he cleared a header right to New York and almost hung Jon Busch out to dry on a slow ball into the box that New York almost recovered.

But he had one nice defensive play on a cross that Busch couldn't get to, so I guess that means he did a better job than Tim Ward, who was everywhere on defense in the match, and Marco Pappa, who was everywhere both offensively and defensively for Chicago. Neither of those two even got honorable mentions.

At some point, Ives either has to get get over his schoolgirl crushes on certain players (Conde) and coaches (Osorio), or fans are going to have to stop taking him seriously as being the pre-eminent anything when it comes to soccer coverage.