America Needs a 'Beast'!

Ha, ha! Yes! I take away two things from this unraveling: First, the sheer joy of knowing that Arsenal's young line is in form. That bodes quite well for the future. Sure, a lot of that is import, and the transfer window gives, and the transfer window takes away. Nonetheless, at its foundation, the Gunner side is playing great football right now. "One-nil to the Gunners!"

The second thing I take away from this is how young the side is, not only for Arsenal, but for some of the Liverpool side, as well. Contrast that with MLS. Recently, Freddie Adu--theoretically, the American version of Theo Walcott--worked out with Manchester United. Sir Alex was unimpressed. Europe has a culture of breeding young footballers that we don't have. You see it in this tie. We can somewhat imagine an eighteen-year-old playing NBA (because we've seen it in Kobe Bryant and LeBron James), and it happens in MLB. But (true) football is a physical and demanding sport, especially at the pace it is played in the Premiership (and the Carling Cup tie today was a conflict of Premiership sides). Who can think of eighteen-year-olds playing in the starting lineup of an NFL team and being competitive? If 'soccer' is ever going to catch on here, the MLS style and structure won't get it; we will have to rethink our expectations for our kids. Now, we expect everyone to go through college. In the future, perhaps we will give our kids the leniency to go to college, trade school, work--or football academy. . . .