picture courtesy of the FC Gold Pride twitter feed cheers David!

Ok. So now we’re looking at Washington, Boston, and Sky Blue to fight for a post-season. Boston are one point behind Washington and Sky Blue are two points behind Boston. Sky Blue have two more games to play while Washington and Boston have just one. I’m getting nervous just typing this.

And the W-League final is set. La Sol affiliates, Pali Blues will play Washington Freedom affiliates, uh, the Washington Freedom.

Boston Breakers 2 – LA Sol 1 Kelly Smith scored in the second minute and that was pretty much it right there. Kristine Lilly scored again in the 55th minute. Coach Tony said Boston was embarrassed over last week’s defeat and coach Abner’s response to the loss: “even after they scored the second goal, we never put our heads down.” Seems that was pretty accurate assessment. in the second half, Brittany Bock scored for LA and Marta had a couple of chances caught by Kristin Luckenbill while Luckenbill saved a Miyama free kick in the 90th minute. In the post-game quotes, Abner talked about Marta disappearing late in the second half. Coupled with the Breakers’ loss last weekend to Chicago when Smith sat on the bench, I wonder if these teams suffer more because of their marquee players than other WPS sides who have what I would call a more even roster.

FC Indiana 3 – Chicago Red Stars 2 I believe FC Indiana are right now actively looking for investors to become a new WPS franchise so even though this one was just a friendly, I’m counting it in the wrap-up. FC Indiana coach Shek Borkowski complained “the performance was not good enough” but they outshot Chicago 12 -7. And two of the goals scored were from Laura Del Rio – who was a Red Stars international draft pick before either being let go or choosing to return to Indiana. Not entirely sure what happened there. It may seem a bit shocking that the Red Stars would fall so quickly after beating the Breakers so badly, but this Red Stars squad had Lydia Williams in goal and substitutions in the defense leading me to believe coach Emma used this game as a chance to beef up the depth in her backline. Smart.

Washington Freedom 3 – Saint Louis Athletica 3 Ummm, Hope Solo. If I could have a word with Hope Solo right now, it would go along the lines of: what the f*ck. Actually, cause this one was televised and thanks to Justin I got to watch it, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what she’s telling herself. And according to the wise words of Peter Wilt (told to me in a bar of course), when we get a brand new pro league, the national team (mens or womens) changes pretty dramatically. So heads up to Hope – Barnhart is looking real good right now. In the first half, Daniela put two on the board for STL and in the 69th minute, Eniola Aluko brought the score to 3-1. Except Lisa DeVanna and Sonia Bompastor managed to score in the 79th and 90th minutes. Clearly WPS is not the league where you can call the game and cut out early to beat the lines to the bathroom. And while Hope had a pretty bad day broadcasted on national television, the big scandal of the game was a hard tackle Wambach made to Daniela late in the second half. Daniela had to be carried off in a stretcher and apparently passed out in the locker room because of the pain. After the game, Wambach said her tackle was not malicious but instead she slipped on the rainy pitch. Okely Dokely.

Find more videos like this on Women’s Professional Soccer

FC Gold Pride 1 – Sky Blue FC 0 Okay, I’m currently kicking myself for missing this game. Especially after I read (thanks twitter) that some of the fans were trying to get a little atmosphere going in the stands. Yo – sign me the f*ck up for that. And here’s my review of this game: when you watch a lot of MLS, you forget that late-game substitutions are supposed to help bring extra energy and a new strategy to what’s already happening. Substitutions are NOT supposed to expose how little depth you really have past the starting eleven. And of all the WPS teams, FC Goldeneye got this one covered. The first half saw great offensive runs from both sides saved by Barnhart and the Sky Blue goalposts and in the 39th minute Jenni Branam saved a PK from Tiffani Weimer. The back and forth continued throughout the second half until substitution Ann Robinson received a pass from substitution Adriane and scored the game’s only goal. Afterwards, coach Albertin commented: “I think it’s quite remarkable that we’ve had six different players score this season, in only our fifth game.” As for Sky Blue, the return of Christie Rampone wasn’t enough to solidify their defense and their overflowing offensive talent still could not eek out a goal. Coach Ian’s post-game comment: “The problem for us is that we’re attacking somebody else’s goal.” Yes, yes you are.

(Okay, in all fairness, this is the complete quote: “The problem for us is that we’re attacking somebody else’s goal, and all of a sudden we’re getting counter-attacked. The problem started way up in the field, and then we weren’t compact enough to handle the pass at the end.”)

So tune in sometime this week for a preview post and possibly more posts if I discover an interesting tidbit or two. Speaking of, thank goodness Joel McHale went to Australia last week because he mentioned on The Soup the latest scandal down there. A video a few Aussie Rules Football players made of their mascot (a rubber rooster named Boris). In the video, Boris goes to the grocery store, puts a condom over his head, then sticks his head into a frozen chicken. The players had to apologise and maybe even got benched (honestly, I don’t care enough about AFL to really follow this story). I say, the only crime here was the use of a sh*t Ludacris song for the soundtrack – which the Australian media called offensive to women. Ummm, that song is only offensive because it’s completely stupid. When I read Ludacris was going to start an acting career, I got excited because I hoped that meant he’d stop making crap albums. Unforch, the dude knows how to multitask. Anyways, consider this your video of the week. Enjoy Boris wining and dining the chicken after having sex with it in the frozen isle. I wish all sports mascots were this entertaining.

Sorry, it won’t embed so click here

You always hear about men having lesbian fantasies, or how they think its hot for two women to hook up. So why then, do people always use the “lesbian factor” as an excuse to hate womens basketball? I’ll tell you why: because men love lesbians, as long as they’re straight. I realize a straight lesbian is a total oxymoron. But what I mean is, men don’t mind girls getting drunk and making out with each other, or singing songs about kissing girls, because at the end of the day, those same girls are still in the market for men. Meaning the guys still have a chance to have sex with them. But as soon as you remove the do-ability factor, the hope that he might have a chance at getting her in bed, men all the sudden are just not that interested. Random men come up to me all the time and tell me, “I could take you 1 on 1.” It doesn’t matter if they’re 50 pounds overweight or haven’t picked up a basketball since high school. For their ego to stay in tact, they need to sincerely believe its impossible to get beat by a girl.

And the second coment in this post…

I played Division I women’s college basketball, infact, I played against you Chantelle, yet I have never attended a WNBA game and most likely never will. Quit frankly, women’s basketball plays second fiddle to men’s basketball because of a lower level of skill and athleticism more than some convoluted theory about men hating lesbians.

…to which Chantelle replied

Some people may wonder why I posted an article like this. It’s because the issue of sexuality comes up in at least 75% of the candid conversations I have with non-fans of the WNBA. I’ve never been one to walk around the pink rhino in the room, so lets talk. I encourage everyone to be candid, RESPECTFUL, and lets just have a conversation.

And the readers did have a conversation. The post contained 193 comments and Chantelle responded to many of them.

While me writing this isn’t a demand that WPS players start “keeping it real” in the blogosphere, it is an acknowledgement that talking about or writing about the more controversial topics pertaining to women’s sports should not be discouraged. A player should not feel they will get in trouble if they want to discuss these things. Or as the Because I Played Sports blog put it, after they posted their podcast interview with Chantelle, “Keep airing these topics – we need to keep having these important conversations. Most importantly, we need ALL women in the sports industry to participate.”

Perhaps this player takes lessons from the Kelly Smith school of fouls?

And to make a longish story short, I will BE AT the Chicago Red Stars home opener and if I’m sober enough, I will update this blog with as many stupid anecdotes and silly pictures I can find. So there’s something to look forward to I guess and if you – person reading this – will also be at Toyota Park (I think I’m going to Saturday’s Fire game too), then please do say hi.

So in the meantime and in anticipation, here’s your picture of the week (which could also double as “caption this…” just what is she saying?)

What the fuck y’all

The new Women’s Professional Soccer league will allow selected players to post short Twitter notes, called “tweets,” during its inaugural game between the Los Angeles Sol and Washington Freedom March 29 at Home Depot Center, league spokesman Robert Penner said.

Yup. And before that, the WPS twitter page asked for feedback on the idea (I totally replied that they should NOT censor the participants – bring on the explicitives! You wanna be real then be real!). And Nick has graciously offered to retweet the official game tweets for the rest of us who are perhaps too lazy to go and follow every single WPS player & staff member’s twitter feed:

My pledge to you, the reader: If they tweet, I tweet. I’ll tell you who’s tweeting, why they’re tweeting and what they’re tweeting about. Is it redundant to retweet? Only if you’re not listening.

Thanks! Green’s feed is here. He also promises never to post the score. Whew.

And just to give the live-tweeting participants some twittery ideas, Here are my favorite feeds of the moment:

Rob Corddry The guy who used to be on The Daily Show. He recently fired writer Michael Ian Black over an Ugly Word of the Day tweet then took applications through twitter for a replacement. The winning tweet: “hey, what’s the deal with traffic?”

Diplo The dj & producer. Firstoff, his pic is Alf the alien. He tends to poke fun at very famous in the twittershpere Puff Daddy (Diddy? Doody?) along with pretty much every effin thing he does & sees. He recently saw an eagle outside his studio then spent many-o-tweets wondering where the eagle went and if we all want to follow his eagle (no idea if the eagle has a twitter feed… yet).

Michael Sheehan I recently convinced a company I work for to migrate a significant portion of their IT infrastructure to the GoGrid cloud. A while back, while I was working on this, I tweeted something about the Grid that annoyed me. GoGrid employee Sheehan replied and helped me out a bit. We’ve been following each other ever since. He tends to post articles about how new technology & social media is shifting quite a few businesses (not just IT) as well as his own reviews of various (usually open source) applications. And I think he’s the guy who started the twitter-trend to follow a father every Tuesday.

So there you have it. My top twitterers of the moment (this list changes almost weekly). Season kick-off is in a few days and I think this post means I’m now officially back and regularly writing about this crazy messed up league. Huzaah.

The new San Jose Earthquakes, now known as the San Jose Earthquakes, will be the most improved team from the year before. Also, San Jose goalkeeper Joe Cannon will finally find an outlet to solve his endless excess energy issue by suiting up for San Jose’s women’s professional soccer team, the Gold Rush, as Josephine Cannon.

SIDE RANT: Now he can finally put his autographed Brandi Chastain sports bra to good use.

I look forward to watching Josephine in action at Buck Shaw although she’ll have a tough time competing against Barnhart for the #1 goalie spot.

(Okay guys. I’m taking a little blogger break for a few more days. I’m just a bit burnt out right now. I’ll be back before the season starts. I swear. Pinky swear.)

And on top of all of that, I’d like to invite WPS investor Steve Nash to join in. He already has an account – even though he doesn’t update it very often. I’m hoping this is just because he’s kinda new to the game and learning the ropes. Unlike his buddy Shaq who took to the program like he freakin’ invented it (when he was last in San Francisco he went looking for the Twitter offices to take them all out to lunch and asked for the address over Twitter). Seriously, Shaq is taking Twitter to a whole new level. Other athletes should be taking notes. Recently, Shaq twittered he was in a restaurant and invited anyone reading to go say hi. Well, some people did. Love it!

In other news, the WPS Pre-Season Schedules were announced. Training Camps open March 2.

Fish is delicious but what the hell is phishing? Phishing is the attempt to create an almost identical version of a website to trick you into typing in your username and password so someone else can get a copy of it. Twitter faced this problem because some nefarious person (or persons) sent users direct messages asking them to click a link that took them to a site that looked just like the Twitter login page EXCEPT the url was listed as twitter.access-logins.com. This nefarious person (or persons) was (were) banking on the user to not notice the slight difference. Lucky for said nefarious person(s), many users didn’t.

And brute force hacking? Sounds painful Only painful in the sense that it’s time consuming. Right after the phishing scandal broke, Twitter faced strike two where some 18 year old kid ran a little program he (or she – we just don’t know) wrote to attempt to login to Twitter over and over with a giant list of words from the dictionary until one worked. This hack is extremely common, extremely easy to do, and extremely effective. And it worked for 33 high profile twitter accounts including Barack Obama, Facebook, Britney Spears, and… uh…

Oh, and this hack is extremely easy to prevent too. All one really needs to do is put processes in place that space out the times when a user can login and/or lock their account after a certain number of unsuccessful attempts. So I fully expect the folks at H.Q. to have this little hole plugged up well before Friday’s draft. Although, secretly, I think it would be hilarious if some 18 year old kid targeted a fledgling professional women’s sports league and jammed its twitter page with silly and sarcastic micro-blogs. Think of the publicity!

In a retracting economy that has seen the loss of one team (Houston) in the Women’s National Basketball Association and layoffs in the National Football League and NBA, Atlanta and the WPS hope to trade on the sport’s intimacy and to offer advertisers unique value. Puma already has signed on as a league-wide sponsor. Playing in small venues—Yurcak Field at Rutgers University in New Jersey, for example, will seat 5,000 for home games of Sky Blue FC—the WPS might be the perfect downscaled sport for downscaled times.

Franchises in the women’s league cost $1.5 million compared to $40 million in Major League Soccer. The Wall Street Journal continued a prospectus on Dec 15 by concluding that the WPS “will more closely resemble minor league baseball than Major League Soccer” (Matthew Futterman, “Women’s Pro Soccer League Scores Deal with Puma,” subscription only). As for the “beer an inning” challenge that sometimes prevails at minor-league ballparks, perhaps we could substitute a beer for every throw-in?

And yes, I CAN TOTALLY GET BEHIND a beer for every throw-in. But seriously. I think Turnbull is taking a chance at looking a little bit beyond whatever gut fears exist over the economy to suggest that markets do in fact still exist. And hey, he may not be too far off. For example, smartphone shipments are expected to rise 8.5% this year. That LinuxDevices (my bias) article claims the cell-phone upswing is due to consumer interest in cheap, converged devices (i.e. they do more than one thing). So Joe Six-Pack (can’t resist) is looking for more bang for the buck and WPS might just be that right kind of product.

Another good point Turnbull brings up, is the effort from the League to find local ownership for each team. He explains the advantages while describing Atlanta’s owner, T. Fitz Johnson.

Johnson offers a contrasting portfolio to the Russian oligarchs portrayed in a recent Sports Illustrated. Some of the latter are splashing out up to $7 million per year on women’s basketball teams… Johnson is likely more approachable than these Russian counterparts. He gladly schmoozed with a young player who, inspired by sea creatures floating in turquoise aquarium water, suggested “Sting Rays” as a possible team nickname.

Putting the WNBA aside, even compared to the old Atlanta Beat, then owned by the Cox media conglomerate, with WPS, we may see that effort to establish personal interest from the new owners go a long way to keeping these franchises afloat. Just today, I read that Russian internet startup, Sup just laid off 12 out of 28 employees over at Livejournal. Oh and by the way, that includes the entire engineering department so if you have an lj blog, you may want to export it for safe keeping. Just a fyi. And not to knock Russia, but it’s just an example of a place that is very very far away from here… except, as we’ve recently learned, if you live in Alaska. But, for now, there are no WPS teams in Alaska so I’m letting this one go. Personally, if Livejournal folds, I’m going to miss Oh No They Didn’t (and its football counterpart which I know has been linked to on Kickette and The Offside in the past) especially because ONTD is where I met my friend Samantha. We struck up a friendship after having a conversation about Eric Wynalda in the comments section of some random post. Viva la Internets!