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Welcome to The Daily. It's Tuesday, August 23rd with Greg Lalas.
I'm Jason Saghini. Champions League gets back underway tonight.
The MLS teams puting their 5-0 record on the line.
Greg, it gets a lot more difficult tonight, and it starts in Monterey where Seattle takes
on the defending champions. The Sounders are going south of the border
with long memories of what happened last time they were down there when they had a 2-nil
lead, and then they gave it up late. This time they're not going to go down with
a full squad, saying we gotta give these guys some rest.
They've been playing a lot of games. Plus they have the US Open Cup next week.
It's a long stretch right now in August for Seattle, so they're gonna go down with a couple
of reserves in the lineup. He still thinks, and he said this in the press
yesterday, he still believes that they can get a result down in Mexico.
If any team is deep enough, you would think Seattle would have the depth for it.
That game is 8pm tonight on Fox Soccer Channel. Afterwards, at 10pm, you can see Colorado
taking on Reals Espana from Honduras. Jason, they're going down there with a lot
of confidence with that 3-2 victory last week at home in their first group game.
Reals Espana, they say they know what to expect from Colorado.
Their head coach Zanabria coming out and saying we were expecting them to come out with their
"North American and very English style." He basically said they're going to be very
vertical. Well, he does seem to have an idea of how
Colorado will play, but the Rapids are going to be without some of their players.
Mastroeni's not making the trip. Pickens not making the trip.
Defender Marvell Wynne also staying at home. Sort of like Seattle.
They have a lot of games right now. They want to give the guys some rest.
Another team that gets back into Champions League action tommorrow is FC Dallas.
FC Dallas in the news this week because of something else.
That's George John's pending transfer to Blackburn. Some more details came out about why he is
back in Greece. He took a trip to Greece to pick up his passport
or at least his ID card because although he said he had his citizenship, he never actually
had the paper passport. If he wants to get past the work permit process
in the UK, he needs to have that when he goes there.
Both his agent and the club have said that the personal deals are not done yet with Blackburn.
They still have to negotiate that. MLSsoccer.com spoke to the agent yesterday
and he said that he thinks it's going to be done by either the end of Tuesday.
At the latest, on Wednesday. FC Dallas on the other side just saying look,
here's a guy, he just got a great deal in front of him, and we can't stand in his way
if he's going to make this move. We talked about that and more on ExtraTime
Radio yesterday. We had ESPN's Taitur Thordarson on.
We also had Graham Zusy of Sporting KC, the reigning player of the week in MLS.
Then talking a little bit about his hair. We were talking about mohawks here on mlssoccer.com
for the last couple of weeks. Zusy coming out with a little promise that
if Sporting Kansas City wins the MLS Cup, he's going to do something with his hair.
Now people have a reason to root for Kansas City.
One last detail we should mention. The North American Soccer Almanac comes out
today on mlssoccer.com As if you needed another reason to come back
to the site, Greg, tell them about it. Well it's a little bit of a snapshot of how
far MLS and soccer in the United States and Canada has come in the last 15 years.
It's a mixture of sort of fun pieces and infographics, and of course some features about some of
the factors that have played into MLS's incredible growth, especially over the last 10 years.
If you're one of the people that took the survey, you can log on later and start seeing
some of the results as it rolls out this week. That's all we have for The Daily today.
We'll be back tommorrow with more.