Relevant EPL Results
- Villa 2 - 1 West Ham
- Chelsea 3 - 1 West Brom
- Everton 2 - 0 Blackburn Rovers
- Sunderland 0 - 2 Birmingham
In the spirit of new starts, Chelsea will now be referred to as such.
EPL News
- Fulham may qualify for the Europa League via Fair Play rules.
- Spurs' Gareth Bale named PFA Player of the Year
- Liverpool's Jamie Carragher got KTFO, but recovered in time to see the exciting/insane finish to the Arsenal-Liverpool game.
Relevant Table
| Position | Club | Games Played | Points | GD |
| 3. | Chelsea  |
32 | 61 | +32 |
| 5. | Spurs |
31 | 53 | +8 |
| 7. | Everton |
33 | 47 | +6 |
| 9. | Aston Villa |
33 | 40 | -12 |
| 12. | Fulham  |
32 | 38 | +1 |
| 15. | Sunderland |
33 | 38 | -12 |
| 20. | Wolves |
32 | 32 | -20 |
FA Cup Results
The final will be held at Wembley on May 14th at 9:00 AM Central.
Champions League Update
Both Spurs and Chelsea are out of the Champions League. Spurs lost 5-0 on aggregate, and Chelsea 3-1 on aggregate. Schalke 04, Spanish for "SuperWankers"* Real Madrid, Barcelona, and ManUtd are your final four.
*There will be no new beginning for those fascists.
MLS Results
MMM is new, so I don't have everyone's teams committed to memory yet. Please drop an LTE if I've forgotten to included your team, or if you'd like a team added that wasn't previously on the list.
- Fire 2 - 4 Timbers [Match Highlights] (Unfortunately, I totally called this one)
- Sounders 1 - 1 Union [Match Highlights]
- Whitecaps 0 - 0 Chivas USA [Match Highlights]
- Crew 1 - 0 SKC [Match Highlights]
- Galaxy 2 - 1 Fire [Match Highlights]
Kenny Dalglish was pretty testy after the match yesterday and told Arsene Wenger where he could go
I'm going to just keep picking more and more soccer teams to follow until eventually, someday, one of them will score a goal.
Updated with the relevant table.
Speaking of the table, here's the Jan 15th table, the last published before Sunderland sold Bent. Sunderland had played 22 games, had 33 points and +3 GD. In the 11 games since then, they've taken only 5 points from a possible 33 and dropped -15 in GD.
And it's gone from, "well, they've got home matches against Wolves and West Ham at the end of the year, that could help keep them safely in the top half of the table." to "Oh God, they still have to play Wolves and West Ham, if the Cats lose those they'll be relegated."
Meanwhile, my team pulled out of its funk and it barely matters, the way Man U is coasting to the championship. They didn't lose until the twentieth gameweek or so.
Ugly, ugly game for the Sounders and Union on Saturday, but that is what you get when you have hard rain, strong winds, and are playing against a Nowak defense. I was happy the Sounders were able to pull a point out at the end, given the circumstances, and hopefully Alvaro Fernandez (played for Uruguay in the WC last summer but has fallen out of favor lately with the Sounders) can use his equalizer as a confidence-builder. I'm not really seeing how all the pieces fit together, and I'm worried about depth at fullback, but at this point, I'm pretty sure the Sounders will score goals and be entertaining.
On the bright side of the Fire's loss at Portland, Andrew, Pappa's goal was pretty great. I think he's going to be a fun guy to watch.
Pappa's been fun to watch for a couple years now, but the Fire's back line is going to give away way too many goals for it to matter. Also Blanco's skills were pretty limited, but ever since they lost him after the 2008-09 season, Chicago hasn't had a distributor at midfield. I'm not optimistic about them making a mark in the league, especially after losing to an undermanned LA Galaxy at home.
The close of the MLS transfer window was pretty eventful. Portland added a DP (a Colombian, I believe.) Houston added two non-DPs, though one of them is a 27-year-old Spanish player who was playing for Aris in Greece. (The other hails from Trinidad and Tobago, I believe.) SKC added a French defender who had been trialing with them for the last couple weeks.
Oh, and Benny Feilhaber signed with MLS. Chivas USA is first in the allocation order for him, so they can either take him and keep him or trade him, and I suspect they will? I wouldn't expect any US Nats better than Feilhaber to be signing with MLS for the rest of the season, so it seems like it would be a waste to hang on to their position in the allocation order by passing. Ives mentions the Sounders as someone who might trade for Feilhaber, but I don't see that happening. They already more or less have too many midfielders, and the offense is built around Fredy Montero as a withdrawn forward, and over the last couple years it hasn't worked that well to pair Montero with an attacking center mid (in particular Freddy Ljungberg as a CAM, but Sigi has publicly stated that they they'd rather have more of a box-to-box midfielder paired with their center defensive midfielder, Osvaldo Alonso, than a more attacking midfielder.)
I also read somewhere that MLS is trying to bring in DaMarcus Beasley, so I guess maybe Chivas USA could pass on Feilhaber in hopes of landing DMB? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Hopefully after the last CBA was approved, there won't be any more Feilhaber situations anymore. I can understand losing guys to the big 5 leagues of Europe, but guys going to Norway and Denmark makes no sense.
The video isn't the greatest, but it's the only one I could find on youtube. EPL/UEFA has been cracking down.
Carragher injury