Matias Almeyda sports his new haircut at the ESPN Wide World of Sports. Photo courtesy of Paul-Michael Ochoa / mlssoccer.com.
Updated Monday, July 6, 7:50pm PT with tweets from Grant Wahl about FC Dallas and Nashville SC.
It’s no secret at this point that the #MLSisBack tournament, aka The COVID Cup, is not going as well as Major League Soccer hoped. There is plenty of justified concern as to whether there should be a tournament at all, starting from it being in the middle of the worst (or second worst if you consider Houston’s ICU situation) COVID-19 hotspot in the US right now (which is frankly not at all relevant to the situation) to the fact that FC Dallas withdrew from the tournament after importing a minimum of 11 positive cases into The MLS Bubble.
Let’s set aside the fact that the tournament probably shouldn’t happen at all, and it only exists for rich owners to find some way to not lose a few million dollars within corporations which are completely sheltered from the rest of their portfolios (and probably will not lose value whatsoever when they are sold).
MLS messed this tournament up by not having each team go into a local bubble for seven to eight days ahead of travel to Orlando — travel which has been largely protected by private chartered flights and buses. Doing this would have ensured that all teams had all their COVID-19 cases caught through daily PCR testing, full-well knowing that a lot of false negatives show up in these types of tests based on public data from Johns Hopkins Medicine. Together with Eliot McKinley and Ben Wright, this writer broke it down for American Soccer Analysis on Monday ahead of FC Dallas pulling out:
With FC Dallas withdrawing, the logical move would have been to take Nashville SC back out of the East’s Group A and add them to the Quakes’ Group B. However, Nashville SC has their own set of COVID-19 case issues, as new Twitter starlet @MLSCovidCup tweeted on Monday:
And then these two tweets from Grant Wahl about other teams likely wanting FC Dallas and Nashville SC out of the tournament, and it not being left up to them.
Don Garber, speaking to the Associated Press on Monday, said he would shut down the tournament, if it came to that.
Whew, this is heavy stuff.
Where does this leave the San Jose Earthquakes? The Quakes were the first team to arrive in The Bubble almost two weeks ago on June 24th. That means the chances at this point they have brought in a positive case to Orlando are near zero. Now it’s a matter of staying healthy and, literally, social distancing and wearing masks.
How does this affect their chances in the tournament? It’s actually really simple: by not being able to practice together, due to the Santa Clara County orders, there was concern that they were falling behind other teams. In reality, they were spared unnecessary COVID-19 exposure. And by arriving first into The Bubble, they have had the time to get all their testing done and flush out any positive cases. The Quakes come out looking like geniuses here, and all those teams who rushed to get players together on the pitch? Not so great. Here’s how it worked:
While there were concerns the Quakes would face exposure first, the opposite has been true: they’ve been the most protected. While there were concerns the Quakes wouldn’t survive in the Orlando heat and humidity, they may be the healthiest team and have had two weeks to adjust to the time change and to the weather.
They also have had time to build camaraderie and unity, which has clearly been happening.
Does that look like a team you would want to face right now? Don’t think so. Portland and Seattle are arriving to the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort looking like they are scared out of their minds to walk into The Bubble. The biggest concern the Quakes have is Seattle could be importing as-yet-undiscovered positive cases that will not be flushed out by this Friday, although if no positive tests are produced ahead of the game, that would be a very low probability (less than 1%).
If asked a month ago about San Jose’s chances, they wouldn’t have been very high, given their first two results. Turns out Almedya and Co. might now be the team to look out for. Rested, healthy, in sync, and ready-to-go, they look more like the team we saw in July of 2019. Just the thing to make a deep tournament run.
