Rookie Conor Chinn smiles on draft night. Last night, his two goals gave RBNY the 2-1 win over Philly. Also, Le Toux has dumb cleats. He’s “nationally ranked”

Evidently, the “Con-man” is in Toronto now. Can’t wait ’til he has to take goal kicks at Red Bull Arena

This guy’s life = better than yours, Jon Conway. Also, I know you’re mad and probably found your way into a suit of “Hans Backe” skin, but letting go of Danny Cepero like that was bogus. Oh well.

That being said, enjoy that rad clip of “world renowned freerunner Ryan Doyle” treating RBA as his own personal playground.

Photo Credit: Seth Binsted/The Breeze

In today’s MLS Expansion draft, we expected to see Amado Guevara, Frankie Hejduk or Eddie Robinson taken to help coach Peter/Piotr Nowak build the nucleus of what should be a pretty decent team in Philly next year. Instead, we saw a good, scrappy bunch of kids (including RBNY’s Nick Zimmerman) leaving their digs for “greener” pastures in Philadelphia.

There were no superstars taken, no former league MVPs. No players with U.S. national team caps, or players with multiple all-star appearances, or even players with ties to the Philadelphia area. When the final list of players chosen by the Philadelphia Union was announced, we were treated to a group of MLS players who could make up the type of tough and tenacious team that Nowak likes, and Philadelphia fans will want to root for. [SBI]

The fact that Zimmerman was left exposed (eff you Jeff Agoos!) makes me very, very angry. The new sporting director is on his way (believe me, it’s no damn secret who it is!) but we couldn’t find a way to hang on to a kid that had proven that he got it. We didn’t let Sassano or Sinisa go for similar reasons and dammit, I wanted Nick around. Now that $5 thing I bought off that kid in the Giants Stadium parking lot isn’t worth $h!t.

Ugh.

In what is being called the “fastest goal in a professional soccer match,” Saudi striker Nawaf Al Abed scored 2 seconds into the match when he caught the goalkeeper off his line. Thankfully, the goal played little role in the final score (save for totally deflating the team who conceded it) as Nawaf and his team ended up winning the game, 4-0.

From the YouTube description: “Straight from the kickoff, Al Abed spotted the Al Shoalah goalkeeper off his line and that was all the invitation needed for the striker to try his luck from the halfway line. With power and accuracy, Al Abed launched a shot goalwards which flew of the keepers head and into the net ”

That, kids, is why goalkeepers must ALWAYS be paying attention. ALWAYS.

We’re not going to sit here and say that this type of play is acceptable, but this level of “bush league” play in WOMEN’S COLLEGE SOCCER is so…so…completely hot. In case you need a point of reference, the above clip features New Mexico’s Elizabeth Lambert (15) beating the ever-loving crap out of BYU’s Kassidy Shumway (21) in the Mountain West Conference semifinals. Here at IHJC, we only encourage this type of brutality against our namesake (only kidding, sort of) but it’s important that the kids understand that while jostling on and off the ball will always be a part of the game, stuff like this most certainly shouldn’t.

Even still, chick fighting is pretty hot, right?

Man, what a great day. Soccer by Ives just wrote the sweetest 4 words I have ever read: RBNY “waived goalkeeper Jon Conway”. I am BEYOND ecstatic that this happened at all; that it took this long is scary, but with with “Duckman’s” departure last week, as long as we don’t spend cash on any major, overpriced acquisitions (read: Khano/Rojas), we are finally headed in the correct direction. The last two-three seasons have been very difficult for this RBNY/Metro fan as my (now-)wife and I made the season ticket splurge two years ago and got to witness not only last season’s amazing playoff run, but this year’s epic collapse as well.

Yes, the chips seem down, don’t they? Who cares? 9 months ago when we launched, most people told me I was just bitter and crazy and that no one would EVER agree with me. Well, RBNY let the bum go and I kinda proved that I was right all along. While I don’t welcome the bad karma of wishing another man out of a job, I have a feeling he’ll probably con his way into another gig soon enough (and if the NJ-area player ends up in Philly and plays a role in hurting us, I will FREAK). He wasn’t the team’s only problem, but he was a big one.

I heart you, RBNY. Agoos is next.

Last season, our precious Danny wasn’t granted his rightfully earned Goal of the Week for his 81-yard blast into the net, the first for an MLS keeper. In order to make it up to him, let’s all vote his amazing save against “The Wookie” Dan Dichio as MLS’ Save of the Week, mmm kay?

Go here and vote now, he’s currently in 2nd with 23% of the vote! (edit: as of 3:25 PM ET, Danny’s in the lead with 26% of the vote, but it’s close…keep spreading the word!)

(Update: 6/18 – 4 PM ET)

Rare is the day that I actually get an opportunity to sit down and rebut an intelligent and thought-provoking blog post, but here’s an example from Monday [Not every steroid scandal is quite what it seems]. Honestly, I don’t really do that here, this was designed as an attention-grabbing blog PRIOR to the performance-enhancing drug suspension of Major League Soccer’s own Jeff Parke and, the namesake of this blog, Jon Conway. I was bored and the guy has rubbed me very wrong personally so I made this as a way to entertain myself and the fans/season ticket holders of section 105 (we sit in row 9 and I am pretty easy to find if someone wanted to talk about my opinions or even share their own!) and it didn’t catch a lot of heat from players, but there was some. We still get grief from other Metro/RBNY supporters because they feel that what we do/think is disrespectful when, in fact, it’s just in fun. Always has been.

My number one issue with “the original incident” for which RBNY goalkeeper Conway got banned was this: he never did what Mike Petke managed to do in under two pages. He never explained what happened. It could have been a simple press release to Soccer by Ives or The Original Winger or someone, anyone. When the situation was brought up again this year, he declined to answer in a Mark McGwire-esque manner (“I’m not here to talk about the past”) and left that to the “press” who didn’t really dig too deep. To be honest, no one cared.

The suspension from last season was a great opportunity for the sport and the league to take a stance against WADA and some of their testing criteria and instead, they did nothing. Player representative John Wolyniec wasn’t cleared to make a statement, Don Garber merely announced the suspensions, but nothing else was done. Yes, the suspension made me happy because I think Jon’s a bit of a douche, but in my haste to crap on Jon Conway (which I started doing about 2 weeks prior to the suspension), I neglected Jeff Parke’s role as well and that wasn’t fair. I always said that “something wasn’t right about the test” and Petke’s blog post brought that question up on a larger stage at ESPN.

If in the next few days we start to see Mike stepping out and speaking up on these issues, that’s great. MLS should have done this last season. In not doing so, they allowed a larger misconception to spread: that Conway and Parke knowingly ingested some type of performance enhancing supplement despite the fact that it was an over-the-counter/GNC supplement that metabolized into a banned substance. My main questions that were answered in the post at ESPN were that (1) yes, MLS does give its players a list of substances that are prohibited: however, (2) there are items that don’t start off on that list that might end up there after our bodies process them. That’s not good news and if that is the case and the league is the body sanctioning the drug testing via the WADA guidelines, why weren’t follow-up tests conducted? If they were, why weren’t we alerted and wasn’t this situation brought to the WADA’s attention? Obviously the training staff wouldn’t have been able to identify a potential conflict if Conway or Parke brought the supplement in to the office, and that’s not good.

Without those answers, Mike, the most you can get out of this is that the players had no reason to believe that what they were taking didn’t meet the guidelines on the card presented to the players in preseason (which lists the 100 or so prohibited substances) but we can’t tell people what it is? If they did, why not make the public aware of it. There is the chance that whatever reaction the body has to this supplement could be fatal in a small number of cases. You might not believe it, but you can kill some people with most gums, diet sodas or even Powerade or Gatorade due to a sugar-like additive.

Without THOSE answers, it really feels like you were paraded out here for us to listen but you didn’t answer the big questions. I respect you as a person, obviously, and appreciate everything that you have done for the club and in your career, but without facts, we only have anecdotes and your position at ESPN should put the league and club in a different, more positive light. The mistake that occurred wasn’t your fault, but what is the harm in addressing the events that led up to, and followed, that day in October?

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From the article:

Cosmo Girl: KISSING ON THE FIRST DATE?

Cepero: Absolutely necessary. [Cosmo Girl]

You go, Danny. Slip that lucky lady your golden tongue.