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?

Yesterday, RBNY lost veteran defender Jeff Parke to the Seattle Sounders. This made some people sad, but I wasn’t among them because, frankly, I am still bummed about the MLS Cup loss.

On Wednesday, the Red Bulls lost defender Jeff Parke (No. 2 on the club’s career list of most games played in the regular season with 132) to the Seattle Sounders in Major League Soccer’s expansion draft.

Then in the waiver draft, the club reacquired Mike Petke (No. 1 on the club’s games played list with 134) from the Colorado Rapids.

Parke, 26, one of team’s most reliable and inexpensive defenders since he was drafted 60th over all in the 2004 M.L.S. draft, is serving a 10-game suspension after violating the league’s substance-abuse policy. (Goalkeeper Jon Conway was also suspended with Parke and both missed the team’s run to the league championship game last Sunday.) Parke earned a shade more than $58,000 last season and Seattle will need to negotiate a new pact with Parke, whose contract has expired.

[New York Times Goal Blog]

Ugh. So how did we make up for this? We re-signed Mike Petke! Yay us. Boo Jeff Parke.

(Honestly, after the suspension of Parke and Conway for use of performance-enhancing drugs, I never bagged on Parke because he issued a statement. That illustrated a bit more regret than Conway’s lack of ANY statement. Eff Conway, and we’ll miss you Jeff Parke.)