Yeah, he definitely got a hand on that one. Bad refereeing and terrible that something as crucial as a WORLD CUP QUALIFYING MATCH should come down to a missed call.

Thierry Henry is one of this generation’s legends of European soccer. The 32-year-old striker has been a member of the French national team since 1997 and has scored over 50 goals for Les Bleux – to say nothing of his nearly 230 goals in club play. He was one of the faces of Gillette shaving products stateside and has also been featured in innumerable soccer advertisements here and overseas. He’s also, as FOX SPORTS notes, guilty of one of the most flagrant uncalled handballs in the history of international play; step aside, Maradona. [Sports by Brooks]

You got to finish matches early and make it so that those blunders cannot effect the outcome as they will happen. Obviously.

The Univ. of Stony Brook Men’s Soccer team advanced to the America East Championship game over Hartford by a score of 3-2 in a penalty shootout. That’s not the cool part.

I actually know Dan Gaspar, Univ. of Hartford coach, but his keeper is a total weirdo for his cartwheel trick. Just saying that my tricks with blades of grass and my “Laurel and Hardy routine” were far better than this is. Word.

[Stony Brook v. Hartford Men’s Soccer Semifinal Shootout aka Cartwheel Guys h/t The Original Winger]

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)

Yeah, O-SORRY-O and JC gotta go. No wings being played against a team that attacks on the wing (Colorado)? Two crosses played to the far post (at the far post!) that are headed in for goals?

I know playing for Red Bull must be terrible, but if Erik Stover thinks JCO deserves a chance to right this ship, he’s sadly mistaken. We are BAAAAAAAAAAAAD and if you wonder why only 10K people managed to show up to watch this terrible game, you are effing really clueless.

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. (more…)

With a 4-1 win over SJ, RBNY are officially NOT the worst team in MLS. Hooray!

A Red Bulls team that scored a league-low five goals in 720 minutes scorched the net four times in 40 minutes. Jorge Rojas scored his first two MLS goals inside of 20 minutes. Juan Pablo Angel added a third in the 22nd minute and Mac Kandji made it 4-0 five minutes from halftime. [Soccer By Ives]

I’d like to think that my bout of “not-the-Swine Flu” totally influenced the “God of Influenza H1N1″ to knock Conway out for the game. The above screen shot, which was(n’t) taken from the game feed, shows that I was right. Don’t touch him, Albert, it looks like someone’s got “the swine”!