Beckham did not receive a kind reception from fans in The Riot Squad during the AC Milan match yesterday.

As long as he plays his ass off and keeps the drama down to a minimum then I’m fine with his return to the team. He is definitely fitting in much better (playing-wise) than he did at the end of last season.

Some video and links about his unwelcome debut:

BBC Sport
LA Times
ESPN Soccernet
Kansas City Star — Beckham a Bad Sport?
Goal.com — Beckham Taunts Riot Squad

I not going to do a real post-game analysis, just leave you with some thoughts and impressions and invite everyone to leave their own.

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I’m warming up to the idea that you don’t have to be the best team in the league, just the best team in the stadium. Obviously the Galaxy weren’t the best team in the stadium tonight, but they played well, well enough to earn a draw playing their “A” line up against a “B” line-up from AC Milan in the first half. The second half, in which there were a total of 9 subs by the Galaxy and something similar from Milan isn’t really worth talking about in that manner.

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How much of my Galaxy commenting and blogging life have I spent dogging out Alan Gordon? Frequent readers, know it’s been a lot. Well no matter what I or anyone else ever says about Alan Gordon ever again he can always point out that he scored against AC Milan. That’s right, he buried a dandy cross from Landon Donovan in the corner of the net, one-timing it so the keeper had no chance. Good for him.

While I’m at it, good on Bryan Jordan from blasting a corner into the back of the net for the second Galaxy goal, tying the game in the second half.

That’s right, the Galaxy’s two goals came from Gordon and Jordan. There’s got to be a silly chant there someplace.

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I was disappointed not to see Oguchi Onyewu on the Milan side. Where was he? Will he be on any part of the tour?

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Edson Buddle went out after about 20 minutes with an injured foot. I hope it isn’t bad, but I would surprised if he plays in the next game. Thank you Mr. Arena for that depth I was talking about yesterday.

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Lots of booing of David Beckham for the first 30 minutes or so, but by the time he was subbed out in the 75th minute he had a lot more people on their feet than booing. I feel for the die-hard fans who feel wronged by him – I wanted the circus to leave town and make the loan permanent back in pres-season – but he’s played good futbol in the two games I’ve watched. He’s playing hard and making smart plays and the team is better when he’s on the field. Now if he could just get his deadball touch back and stop blowing long-range passes…

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This bugs me about futbol fans in the US: cheering for a foreign team over a home-grown domestic side. I get that in many cases fans are born into cheering for a specific team, much like people get born into a religion. So I get if your family has AC Milan roots or whatever. But showing up to the HDC to support Milan over the Galaxy is a bit like showing up to battle between the Rebel Alliance and The Empire and rooting for the Death Star. It’s like being on Darth Vader’s team. Not that the Galaxy-as-Rebel-Alliance analogy really stands much deep scrutiny, but you get my drift, right? Where are you people during the regular season while MLS is helping to build futbol culture in this country? Watching TiVO’d Euro-league games probably. That’s weak.

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That game makes me feel even better about how the Galaxy will do over the rest of the season, pending the status of Buddle’s foot.

Here are some of the stories about the game.
Andrea Canales at Goal.com with a game recap
Agence-France Press focusing only on the booing
Jahmal Corner at Reuters
The Associated Press
Larry Morgan with the MLSNet recap
Nick Green at 100 Percent Soccer has a mess of posts including this one from the game itself
Full AP story in the LA Times (what? No Grahame Jones?)
The party line from the Official LA Galaxy blog run by Jaime Cardenas (he says Buddle has a hyperextended big toe)
Running blog from MLS Rumors

Here’s fan-taken video of Bryan Jordan’s goal off of a corner from Becks (DAVID if you are reading this, it looks like it is shot from your STH seats!).

What about you guys? What did you see? How did you feel about Beckham’s home debut? Were the boos justified? Did his workrate help calm anger? How do you feel about Gordon and Jordan getting the Galaxy goals? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

And while I was scrolling through photos of the game from Getty Images I came across these two photos. At first I thought they were duplicates. And then I saw that they were different, and perhaps looked photoshopped. But then I realized that it’s probably the same shot taken within a second of the other by two different photographers. Yeah, I’ve got nothing better to do with my time.

Both Landon and Becks have reunited with their respective national teams in London for Wednesdays friendly. Several sources are reporting that the US is looking good to defeat England. I’m not so sure about that, but it should be a good game nonetheless. Jeff Carlisle has a good article previewing the match. As we all know, this will be Donovan’s 100th cap. Congratulations Landon! But I’m particularly interested to see his play on Wednesday. He has been doing more strength training this season and has been punishing defenders so far this season, so it’ll be interesting to see what he can do on the national level — especially when there are so many other good US players that need to be marked. Mark him one v. one and he’s guaranteed to slip dangerously by his defender several times. Can you tell I’m a big Donovan fan? Oooh, it’s going to be so fun to watch!

Of course, Beckham will be there for his 101st cap (a much greater feat when playing for England). It’s quite possible that he and Donovan will be marking each other. The media is reporting a big to-do about David Bentley going after Beckham’s starting spot. I’m not sure why the hoopla, of course that’s what Bentley wants to do. And Capello hasn’t decided yet whether or not the right wing spot is Beckham’s to lose. For the 2010 World Cup Bentley may become a better choice than an older Beckham, but let’s wait and see how things play out shall we?

The Galaxy’s next game is Saturday, May 31st, against Streamer FC Toronto FC. It will be broadcast on Direct Kick, and Fox Sports West.

This Edmonton Journal article captures the game well.

Playing minus Carlos Ruiz and Landon Donovan, Major League Soccer’s leading goal scorer (thanks hugely to Beckham) and with a full set of second stringers, the Galaxy lost 2-1 to an inspired Vancouver side.

Beckham set up his team’s only score, by Alan Gordon, who converted a sublime cross from Beckham to tie the game 1-1 in the 43rd minute.

Overall I think both sides got what they wanted. The Whitecaps got great ticket sales (over 30,000) and a good showing by Becks. The Galaxy got some good practice in with several junior roster players getting minutes. It also gave Ruud and Cobi a good look at the reserve players.

But I swear I’m going to start a petition or something to get Ruud to play Wicks. He must be seeing (or not seeing) something that we aren’t privy to.

I’ve poked around on cbcsports.ca to see if there will be a video of it and I can’t quite tell. If you know where it will be broadcast, please post and let us know. Meanwhile, I’ll be dusting off some more of my Canada jokes.

Nowak says he wants to see more talent and team options before naming his Olympic squad.

This is great news for these three — and it will benefit the Galaxy as well. More playing experience, especially internationally, can only increase the skills and experience they bring to the Galaxy. And wouldn’t it be nice to grow one of our own players for a future starting job on the senior roster, rather than trading all of our developing talent away? I am a big fan of Julian Valentin too. I’m hoping he can break into the starting defense sometime this season.

AP Newswire – This just in, Landon Donovan creates international incident when he purposely crosses himself 50 million times before taking a penalty kick. After completing his hat trick, Donovan mimics the use of a bow and arrow and playfully “attacks” coaches and players on the Iranian bench as if he was a Crusader. Donovan ends his display with running with his arms extended, which looks like the “bomber run” done by British Players, but might be construed at creating a “cross.”

Yet another one of those things I wish I’d thought of first.

Whatever. Our boys are apparently going to play Iran in May. (Despite previous Galaxy front office protestations to the contrary.)

Iran. You know. The country that won’t let women come to their home games? Yeah, that Iran. (Is this still the law? It was, then it wasn’t, but now I think it is again.)

I’ll let Andrea Canales tell you all about the game itself in her ESPNsoccernet article, including some interesting bits about the Iranian community in LA and how its history intertwines with that of the Galaxy, and about the whole “soccer diplomacy” thing.

For my part, I’d like to give you what I thought were some fascinating links I stumbled across when I was researching news about Iran’s coach search. (As of a month ago, they were in the middle of managerial musical chairs. It’s apparently not quite resolved.)

But while I was looking into that, I found a fascinating page called Iran Sports Press, which pulls no punches in its criticism of the Iranian sports hierarchy. (And remember here that Iran doesn’t exactly have free press. And also that Iran recently faced FIFA sanctions for political meddling in football.) My guess is that this site is run by Iranian ex-pats, but I’m not certain of this.

TEHRAN- Iran’s coach Ali Daei launched a furious tirade against his football federation on Tuesday, threatening to quit and revealing he is still waiting for a contract to sign.

Daei, the holder of the world record for international goals, was appointed in March to reverse the flagging fortunes of the Team Melli in its World Cup campaign. However with crunch qualifying matches approaching in June, it appears that relations between the ex-Bayern Munich striker Daei and federation head Ali Kafashian have reached an all time low.

“If Kafashian does not have time to talk with me about friendly matches and my contract, then I am not free either,” Daei told the Hamshahri newspaper. “I have not won my honour so easily that I can lose it this way. If things go on like this, we should think about something else and they could appoint someone else who they like.”

Also on the same site, I found this description of challenges facing the Iranian game:

Clemente [Former coach, who was fired before taking the job] is being handed a shattered National team, who have not trained together for more than a week in the last 6 months, half of the foreign based players are regular benchwarmers, players are psychologically frustrated at the shortcomings in Iranian football state in the past year or so, and the team is under pressure of expectations to smoothly qualify for World Cup 2010.

Works for me. If we’re going to turn our boys loose against the best team another nation has to offer, let’s at least make it a dysfunctional one.

And it’s too bad, too, because the article is fascinating — all about Ruud’s culture shock in coming to the land of the salary cap.

One of the most interesting parts is about the trials and tribulations of fielding a Reserve team. I think we all kind of knew most of this. But I for one didn’t know the extent of what’s involved in actually tracking down players who can play for the Reserves on any given week.

“I’m sure that when people think of LA Galaxy, the picture that comes to mind is not of our staff making phone calls to friends on Friday to see if they can play in a reserve game on Sunday, but, strange as it may seem, this is the reality,” reveals Gullit, sitting in the sun near the VIP area of an empty stadium. “Two weeks ago we had a game at home [against San Jose] and I had two of my office staff from the commercial department playing, two people whose job is to sit in the office all day doing their work. We needed bodies and we didn’t have bodies, so we asked them to play, they wanted to play and they just played. There are 26 players on our roster, five were out injured. This left us with 21 players, but there is a rule [in Major League Soccer (MLS)] that prevents reserve team players from playing for more than 120 minutes within the space of 48 hours. If they have played the day before in the first team for 90 minutes [reserve games are usually scheduled for the following day] you can do the maths.

“In the first reserve game of the season at Colorado I had a few players who could play for only 70 minutes and another who only could play for half an hour. So what did we do? We started with 10 men because we had to. You can say that it’s only a reserve game, but you can’t operate like this because the reserve game is important. Why? Because of the development of my injured players and players who have to practise their rhythm because they haven’t played for a long time.

“If I have a reserve game and come up two men short, what happens? We have to call people from their job, maybe a carpenter, and they just come to play with our reserve team. If we play in Toronto, we have to call people in Toronto because no one will travel on their own all that way. Of course, we laugh about it a little bit, but in the end it’s not a laughing matter and it’s not good. We need to have a full squad that trains together. I haven’t been able to build up a reserve team because I’m only two months here and it’s not possible, so this is an example of the things I am trying to adapt to. I’m not trying to change it yet, I’m trying to adapt to it, but in the end I’ll say, ‘You need to do things in a certain way because otherwise it’s not serious’. Really, it’s ridiculous.”

The rest of the article is very interesting too. A reminder of how far we have to go. But at the same time, you’re kind of reminded of…oh…I don’t know. “Bad News Bears” or some other “Coach succeeds in bringing ragtag group together to win the title” kind of movie.

Starring David Beckham, as himself.

(As long as they don’t cast Will Ferrell as Ruud Gullit, I’m good with this scenario.)