One TV At A Time

If you had told me going in that the Fire could take a point on the road against Chivas USA, I would have had no problem with it. If you told me we'd blow another one-goal lead late in the match to do it, maybe not so much. At any rate, not much different from the last couple of matches, as far as i could tell from my barstool. I still think Chris Rolfe should be up top and Chad Barrett should be out on the right, at least until John Thorrington gets anywhere near game shape. Except that the onscreen graphic listing the bench players had the recently released Thiago present and Thorrington not listed, despite his being right in the middle of the camera shot when it happened.

Conde is still good but not nearly as good as people are making him out to be. C.J. Brown is still a stud, and I won't throw him under the bus for the foul that led to the PK, especially since I happened to look away and missed it. Oh, and Paulo Wanchope is still underperforming, but I don't expect Juan Carlos Osorio -- who was coaching Chivas USA according to the onscreen graphic during his sideline interview -- to give up on him anytime soon, to the detriment of the team.

Production miscues aside, I'll give the broadcast crew credit for that one long, lingering shot on Jesse Marsch as he clearly wondered if he'd ever be allowed to play his style of game against Blanco. There's a chance I'll do a full rundown off the DVR, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Anyway, the barstool, and subsequent lack of pseudo-liveblogging. I needed to get out of the house, and felt like getting off the beaten track for watching soccer matches, so I decided to put my "quiet evangelist" strategy into practice. I was debating between Mystic Celt in Wrigleyville and Cleo's down in Bucktown, and ultimately decided that if I was going to go to a bar where they likely wouldn't turn the sound up, I'd go to the one with better music, which meant down to Armitage and Hoyne.

One word of advice to anyone trying to get a soccer game on at a random bar. Sometimes they actual have contractual agreements that dictate what they can show. In this case, it was something about having DirectTV College Football on 75% of the screens in the bar, but after I swore I didn't work for DirectTV, we were in business.

The guy on one side of me knew a little bit about soccer, and clearly got interested during the game. He left during the second half, and one of the people in the group that replaced him in that spot asked me a bit about the game. The guy on the other side of me was a serious soccer fan, to the point where he knew that Giuseppi Rossi was tearing it up in Europe and hasn't decided whether he'll play for the U.S. or not. Plus, he had a friend who has just interviewed for a job with U.S. Soccer. He just didn't realize the game was on, and coincidentally hadn't been to a game at Toyota Park yet.

So we had a little bit of a watch party at the end of the bar, and no one seemed to mind. It reinforced my longstanding notion that big watch parties at soccer-friendly bars, or events where you have all the TVs on the game have their place, but just getting a single television tuned to the game in a bunch of different places goes a long way to establishing that the sport and the team have a rightful and natural place in the local sports landscape, and that there is a vast untapped market of sports fans who just don't know that there's a team worth watching. You don't have to sell them on the game as much as you just have to make them aware that it's out there, and you do that, again, one TV at a time.