"A huge embarrassment."

Photo from news.lalate.com

The (first and new) Guinness International Champions Cup is going on right now in the USA. International soccer matches are a great thing for the fans here--we get to see some of the big names play on our soil, and it's good for those of us who don't have money to go abroad and see our own teams.

I watched (and covered the Reddit thread for) the Juventus and LA Galaxy game tonight. Honestly, I expected Juventus to win. The black- and white-striped gentlemen of Italy have won the Italian league for the last two years, and they have players who are probably just a higher caliber than the American side.

But lo and behold, LA just won 3-1 over the bianconeri, in a surprising victory. After losing to Real Madrid (same scoreline, just reversed for LA) the other day, they seemed to have attacked the pitch with renewed vigor at Dodger Stadium. Juve, on the other hand, looked tired and her players seemed a little out of it.

It was a surprising win, yes. But the commentator I heard tonight (an English fella) kept going on about how this was an embarrassment for the Italians, how the Italian papers were going to rip them apart, how, "even though this is a friendly," it would have terrible implications for Italy.

True, the MLS is not storied in history, it doesn't have the money to buy top names like Andrea Pirlo, Arturo Vidal and Carlos Tevez, and it's based in the country that still calls the sport "soccer." And true, Juventus could have handily beaten the Galaxy. Why didn't they? Maybe they were tired, maybe they didn't want to hustle, maybe they didn't have their best players on and that made all the difference. But in this friendly, is it truly an embarrassment that they lost?

I take the commentator's mocking of the game as an insult to MLS, not to Juve. He was, essentially, saying  it was embarrassing for such a good team to be beaten by the little American squad, much like an MLB commentator might say it's an embarrassment for the Yankees to get beaten by the Columbus Clippers. The MLS isn't the best league by far, but every now and then it has flashes of brilliance, and puts together good teams that can score some good goals.

Let the haters hate, I say--but tonight wasn't an embarrassment. Things went right for the Galaxy and wrong for Juventus. It happens. It's sports. And if there was any embarrassment there, it was because Juventus didn't seem to have the hustle they needed, and seemed a little lackluster on the pitch--not because they lost to a smaller side.