Kyle Beckerman and RSL have a tough road ahead in 2010. (Getty Images)

We only have a few more clubs to go in our preseason look-ins. Now we’re getting in the home stretch with RSL today and hopefully closing out the rest of the week San Jose, Seattle and Toronto.

Today we take a look in to see how the defending Major League Soccer champs are doing this winter. Jason Kreis and company have started to really get into building up a core group of players to work around. That was key to their late run and success last year in the playoffs.

Now it becomes a question of do they have the depth to deal with a bigger and tougher schedule in 2010? They lost a few key players this winter like Clint Mathis to LA, Yura Movsisyan to Europe and Chris Seitz to the expansion club in Philadelphia. They did however pick a couple guys off waivers, which has been their bread and butter these last couple years along with drafting pretty well in January’s SuperDraft.

Lets see how well RSL is doing this winter and what pieces of the puzzle that they have left to build on. (Note: I’d like to thank Randy Davis from Keepin It Real for helping me out with this preview) Continue Reading…

Jimmy Conrad and Josh Wolff will try to keep Columbus winless. (Brian Stevens, WVH Photo Correspondent)

Week eight has already kicked off with a bit of a bang with two draws on Wednesday night in Kansas City and in Salt Lake City. The RSL-LA draw was something to talk about for sure while the DC-KC draw was pretty much expected.

Time to shift focus to the weekend however as we have plenty of games on the menu to keep us going. Seven games this week, on three straight days. We have all conference battles except for one match tonight in New York with San Jose and the Red Bulls. Also this weekend we have a couple rivalry games like in Texas between Houston and Dallas. And in the east we get to see a lovely battle with Chicago and New England, two clubs that really don’t like one another.

As always feel free to post your score predictions for this weekend’s action below. Continue Reading…

As the All-Star rosters are now official, its time to put together the group of eleven that didn’t make but had a damn good reason for making it. I’ve stated my opinion on some that got snubbed but figured that it would be best to put out a full starting lineup of guys that didn’t make the All-Star festivities.

If you got someone who was snubbed let’s hear it.

I’ll keep with the same 3-5-2 formation that we’ve been using for the All-Star game.

Keeper:

Jon Busch, Chicago Fire: Easily putting up the best numbers of any keeper this season. It was clear that it was going to be tough to beat out Matt Reis but surprising enough Busch had to contend with Pat Onstad too. The Canadian won since the game is in Toronto and Busch is left with nothing.

Continue Reading…