Landon Donovan entered the Cup on Tuesday night, though not the one he might have hoped to be gracing a month ago. As his erstwhile national team colleagues rested up in Brazil, after their dramatic World Cup game with Portugal had become the most-watched soccer game in US history, Donovan was appearing in front of a relative handful of fans in a US Open Cup game at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina.
Not that these more modest Cup dreams fared any better, as despite a 63rd minute substitute appearance by Donovan, an LA Galaxy side packed with starters crashed out in extra time to the NASL side Carolina Railhawks.
The US Open Cup is one of the world’s oldest, though perhaps least known cup competitions, and given the lack of promotion and relegation in US soccer, it offers one of the few possibilities for lower league sides to test themselves against MLS opposition. The NASL is currently the second tier of US Soccer, but maintains a spiky relationship with the number one MLS (which has an affiliate partnership with the third tier USL Pro).
That spikiness finds form in the Cup. Donovan had made Tuesday’s journey in the first place because the Galaxy claimed to be “sick” of losing to the Railhawks, as they have in each of the past two Cup competitions, and so had decided to play a much stronger team than the reserve sides MLS teams traditionally contest early rounds of the Cup with. The first-teamers, also including Robbie Keane, may have expected to sweep Carolina aside, but despite a late siege on the Carolina goal, they were beaten by an extra time Daniel Jackson goal.
Ironically, when NASL, or an earlier incarnation of it, was the top division in the 70s and early 80s, its teams used to ignore the Open Cup completely. Now it offers its teams their only route to CONCACAF Champions League competition, as well as the rare branding opportunity of bloodying an MLS nose or two along the way.
Literally, it seems. In the last round the reigning NASL champions New York Cosmos beat their city rivals, the MLS New York Red Bulls, in a bad-tempered game that saw the Red Bulls Chris Duvall ejected towards the end of the game for a wild foul. This time it was the Cosmos who lost their discipline as their players Ayoze García Pérez and Jimmy Ockford were both sent off late, along with Philadelphia Union’s Michael Lahoud, as the Union scrapped to a 2-1 extra time win.
Not that the Cosmos were the most undisciplined NASL side on the night. Atlanta Silverbacks amazingly went down to eight men after a mass melee, but still held on for a 2-1 win over MLS side Colorado Rapids, who were reduced to a marginally more respectable 10 men themselves.
So two NASL sides advanced to the quarter finals, even though lower league opposition had been significantly thinned by the start of this, the competition’s first ever fifth round. US Soccer had increased the field to 80 teams this year, necessitating the extra round of games.
In the all-MLS ties the 2012 winners Sporting KC crashed out 3-1 to Portland Timbers, last year’s semi-finalists. The Timbers are pursuing this competition as keenly as their Seattle Sounders rivals, who won three successive Cups and subsequent Champions League experience, between 2009-2011. Their win put them on a collision course with the Sounders in the quarter finals as Seattle faced off against San Jose in the evening's late game. In the end a physical game finished 1-1 after extra time before the Sounders won 4-1 on penalties to set up a Cascadia derby in the quarter finals.
In Texas, a lively derby between Houston Dynamo and FC Dallas saw Dallas go through 3-2 after extra time. Their reward is a trip to Carolina, who having knocked out the first string Galaxy side, will be undaunted by further MLS opposition.
Two games will be played tonight. Chicago Fire will host Columbus Crew, while New England will host the last remaining USL Pro side (indeed the last non-MLS side to win the trophy, in 1999), Rochester Rhinos.
Back in Cary, North Carolina, Donovan trudged off the Railhawks' second field (their main one was being re-sodded) in front of a local crowd that could be fairly reckoned in the hundreds rather than thousands — or if you like, the size of a single decent-sized, though hardly standout, USA viewing party for this World Cup.
In the 2010 World Cup, shots of such crowds being sent delirious by Donovan’s dramatic late winner over Algeria, seemed to document a high-water mark for the sport in this country, only for the exponential burst of enthusiasm of the past week to surpass it already during the 2014 edition. Four years and one day after scoring his iconic goal, Donovan was leaving a modest field in Cary with his beaten team. Whether he may have made a difference in Brazil we’ll never know. But on the night, he hadn’t made a difference in North Carolina.
