Xolos - Puebla, Liga MX Running Blog

This game is slightly delayed on the Azteca America channel I'm watching, but hey, I'll survive. 

1 - Benedetto and Pellerano attack, earn a Xolos corner, than another.
2 - Beasley is backed up by ref - too close to corner. Benedetto scores!
3 - Dude is a scoring machine. I think Arce sent the ball in. Benedetto scored via header near post.
4 - I think Orozco should have been marking Benedetto. Ooops.

When Beas was the business against El Tri

Luis and I were reminiscing about players who were especially effective versus Mexico, and DaMarcus Beasley was in the discussion, though he hasn't featured for the USA of late.

This piece updates what he's doing now.

Those rampaging runs up the wing Beasley used to make? Not really the style of any of the Americans coming up now.

Beasley back to usual self

DaMarcus Beasley didn't score but he played a valuable role in the midfield on Sunday. Seems like he's recovered from his knee injury just fine.

Audio of Beasley here.

Bease knees

Aw, ain't he cute?

This is the only picture I took at USMNT training yesterday, because then my battery died. Luis took a bunch today, though. So before he puts all those up, I thought I'd put mine here.

DaMarcus talked about how he had to be patient with his latest injury - and how he sometimes wasn't patient, yelling at James Hashimoto, the U.S. team trainer, out of frustration at times. Beasley called it, "the first real bad injury of my career."

Bummer for Bease

DaMarcus Beasley is done for the year. After hurting his knee in a Champions League match on Tuesday, Beasley will have surgery and will likely miss the remainder of the SPL season.

How does this affect his standing on the USMNT? In the first half of next year, Beasley probably won't play any role on it. He'll miss the Mexico game on Feb. 6 and whatever other friendlies the US schedules afterward. He could be healthy by the June qualifiers, though the US won't need him to get past Barbados/Dominica. He should be healthy by the fall and could see action in the semifinal qualifying round which starts in August.

Obviously, this is a much bigger blow for his club career. Beasley went through some tough times before settling in with Rangers and was faring well for himself. Though he won't be starting from zero once he gets back, he's going to fight another uphill battle to establish himself whenever his knee allows him to play again.

Steven Wells on U.S. sportswriters

Or heard the (white) cream of the American soccer press in Berlin groan and tut and mutter as US soccer player DeMarcus Beasley refuses to play the "polite negro" and lambasts Bush for his mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina. ("Totally inappropriate!" hisses one, red in the face with anger.)

Who is DeMarcus? DaMarcus, I know. When exactly did this Berlin lambasting of President Bush take place? Why can't I find anything about it? It's not simply that I find it a bit difficult to believe that not one U.S. sportswriter covering soccer (considered a communist sport by some Americans, seriously) would be thrilled if a player got political to any degree (and to their credit, players such as Beasley have spoken out strongly against racist incidents that they've experienced abroad), but what I really think is strange is that I can't find any foreign press mentioning this Beasley criticism of Bush and Katrina. It's hard to believe that any world press members would have hushed that up politely out of deference to Bush. I've been using search engines on the Internet for hours now trying to find any evidence of this lambasting. I've tried German, Spanish and French varients on keywords.
Hey, if anyone else has better luck finding what DaMarcus supposedly said, please let me know.