Comedy of errors

I showed up at the USMNT practice yesterday, trying to juggle everything that had spilled over the front seat of my little car from a hard right turn coming off the freeway. I was worried I'd miss the chance to interview players because on the drive to the parking lot by the field, I could see most of the players already on the sidelines. Troy Perkins and Matt Pickens were in the parking lot, putting equipment in one of the vans. I said hello to Troy while I tried to grab my recorder, credentials and hurry to the field.

"You don't have to rush," Troy said, as I tripped and dropped stuff. "It's only halftime."

It turned out I really didn't have to rush at all, because the scrimmage versus Hammarby was a closed session. No viewing of the game, no interviews allowed after. I need to read the media info emails they send out more carefully.

So I retired to the HDC lounge again, hoping the wireless was up to check email. It wasn't, but I was just in time for Alexi Lalas and Frank Yallop exiting to catch the second half of the scrimmage (not closed to VIP's). Lalas stoped briefly and chided me for writing in my espn.com story that he is the coach of the Galaxy, suggesting, although doing so lightly, that I apologize to Yallop about the error.

It wasn't my mistake, though. I have my original draft of the article, in which I've written "manager", but somehow the copy desk changed that to "coach". Probably someone thought I was using the English term of "manager", which abroad is used instead of coach. But I know very well who coaches the Galaxy. I saw the mistake as soon as I read the article that morning and had the editors change it, but the MLS media folk in New York had long since compiled that day's articles and sent them off in a single long text email to all the general managers around the league.

I tried to explain this to Lalas, but he was basically in transit at the time, so I'm not sure it got across.

I decided to hang around to see if I could interview Charlie Davies, the young American who has signed with Hammarby. The club's media guy gave his approval, and Charlie was willing. My tape recorder jammed, though. I've dropped it one too many times. Desperate, I appealed to Rigo Cervantez, the Chivas USA media guru, for assistance. He kindly loaned his recorder and then I stayed a while longer in the lounge to transcribe the interview so I could return his machine.

Today's capper was that when I originally wrote this post, Blogger went on the fritz for about an hour.