MLS Expansion Teams Go 2-for-2 In Downright Spectacular Home Openers

We always knew the Cascadia additions to Major League Soccer would be special. We just didn’t know they’d be this special, this soon.

The Portland Timbers saw Vancouver’s impressive home opener on March 19, and raised last night—producing nothing short of a landmark moment in U.S. soccer history while downing Chicago 4-2 in their first MLS game at Jeld-Wen Field.

Feeding off the high-voltage energy of the sellout crowd, which kicked off the night by singing the national anthem—all 18,627 of them, in goosebump-inducing unison—the Timbers took the initiative early, and never looked back. (Well, not until a late charge by Chicago that made the game all the more interesting.)

The atmosphere was second to none, anywhere on the planet, and the home team rose to the occasion, playing an inspired 90 minutes.

Complete highlights here:

For a roundup of quotes on the occasion from players, coaches, execs and observers, click here.

Besiktas Fans: “We Are All Pluto”

Last week, The New Yorker ran a feature on rabid Turkish soccer fans (just about the only kind, apparently), and while we usually dislike “look at the crazy soccer hooligans” stories in American media, this one delivers some golden nuggets.

Jozy Altidore’s Bursaspor features in the article (even if he and fellow American-in-Turkey Freddy Adu both go unmentioned), but the focus is on Besiktas and its rivalries with the other two big clubs in Istanbul—Galatasaray and Fenerbahce.

If you had to choose one of those three to support, we would strongly suggest the “underdog,”’ “working-class” Besiktas. The main reason being this:

“‘We Are All Black,’ proclaimed one banner, after rival fans had made reference to the race of the French-Senegalese Besiktas star Pascal Nouma. When Fenerbahce disparaged a Besiktas manager whose father had been a janitor, there were banners saying ‘We Are All Janitors.’ And when an international committee of astronomers removed Pluto from the list of planets [supporters group] Carsi took up the cause: ‘We Are All Pluto.’ ”

That sealed it for us. As long as Altidore’s Bursaspor (and Adu’s second-flight Rizespor) are not involved, we’re pulling for Besiktas.

The piece, by Elif Batuman (a brave woman: she ventured into the terraces solo), contains multiple other high points. Such as:

“During the course of the Rapid Wien game, the covered stands recited several anti-Fenerbahce chants, a staple of the repertoire no matter what team Besiktas is actually playing. The most famous anti-Fener chant, sung to the tune of ‘Those Were the Days,’ consists of three lines pledging an end to swearing in soccer, followed by the chorus ‘But one last time, suck my d***, Fener.’”

And:

[A handful of old-timers from the supporters group, Carsi, discussing the turf wars that raged when the three Istanbul clubs were forced to share Besiktas’s Inönü Stadium]

“There would be news of a fight. Five hundred people would head straight there, some with guns. Have you seen the movie ‘Braveheart’? It was exactly like that.”

There’s a lot more good stuff in the story, including Carsi members joking [?] that they should kidnap Batuman, the supporters’ obsession with donating blood, and one fan’s assertion that he doesn’t care about extraterrestrials because, “Even if they exist, they’re hardly going to be Besikstasli.”

Check out the complete article in the March 7 edition of The New Yorker or read it right here if you have a subscription.

World Cup Withdrawal? “Pelada” Will Ease Your Pain

It’s been two days since the end of the World Cup, and if you’re like us, you’re probably feeling like someone took your ball and left the playground. It’s tough, we know. But last night we found the perfect cure for the post-tourney blues: Pelada, a hugely compelling documentary that follows two former college players, Luke Boughen (Notre Dame) and Gwendolyn Oxenham (Duke) on a global pickup-soccer odyssey.

With their pals Rebekah Fergusson and Ryan White behind the cameras, Boughen and Oxenham visited 25 countries in 12 months and came back with extraordinary footage of games with moonshiners from a dire slum in Kenya, inmates in a Bolivian prison, and hijab-swaddled women in Iran.

They play with South African construction workers building World Cup stadiums, with businessmen atop Tokyo skyscrapers, and with Peruvian women in the Andes mountains.

The New York Times likened Pelada to the landmark surfing flick, Endless Summer, and that’s an apt comparison, but it misses something important: While surfing rocks (we could watch Riding Giants all day), soccer is the people’s game—a fact that Pelada drives home like Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s strike against Uruguay in the World Cup semis.

Aided by nothing more than their considerable skills on the ball (they both can play) and their graceful human decency, Boughen and Oxenham gain access to places and people that most travelers and media lenses rarely glimpse. The film is a riveting travelogue all the way through, but it jumps to another plane altogether when the Americans visit some of the more dicey locales.

In addition to the Bolivian prison and the ravaged Kenyan ghetto, they make stops in Jerusalem to join a pickup game between Arabs and Jews—just days after an awful terrorist attack—then follow that up with their government-supervised jaunt to Tehran, where, if Oxenham plays soccer, she will be breaking the law.

Here’s a clip:

You can buy the DVD here, or check out one of the nationwide screenings listed here. Pelada is also available on iTunes.