Remember Kelly Gray? Here's an interview with the defender-cum-midfielder. When the Quakes were relocated to Houston in December of that year, the comfort zone Gray had fought to establish was wrecked. While the same was true of every member of that inaugural Dynamo squad, the Leigh High School graduate took it harder than most, and it showed in his play. Halfway through the 2006 campaign, a series of high-profile errors saw him lose his spot in the starting lineup, and by season's end, he was a fringe player at best. Today Kelly plays defensive midfielder for the Quakes: "Playing center-mid is where I've always been most comfortable, and I'm finally getting a chance to play it. In Houston, I was never going to play over Ricardo [Clark] and Dwayne [De Rosario]. You're talking about the best in the country." Word.
The Offside Rules blog has an interesting post ("Houston, we have a party") about a soiree attended by a few of the eligible Dynamo players, and of course the DynamoGirls. It was for a local "guide to current culture" magazine called Envy. Never heard of it. The article has some links to interesting pix of the affair. Thought y'all might be interested in seeing the guys in an environment entirely different than the pitch. That Holden looks like he can get downright silly.In an article about the potential of Houston's professional teams winning their respective championships, Houstonist concludes that the Dynamo is the most likely to achieve this goal. It also has this interesting fact that I never realized: All of Houston's championship titles have come in back-to-back succession. Houston Oilers 1960-61, Houston Rockets 1994-95, Houston Comets 1997-2000 and the Houston Dynamo 2006-07.
I found a link to a website where one can trade or buy videos of historic soccer games. The guy is from Austin, oddly. I say "oddly" because, as a former resident of Austin, I can attest that the area is a wasteland when it comes to soccer fandom. It has a great youth soccer environment, but it's hard to keep track of the professional game there. Houston doesn't have much over Austin, but connectivity to the world of soccer is one of the things it does have over the Weird City.
One thing I did in my years in Austin was nurture my interest in urban development and design. I'm only tangentially working in that field now -- at least the design part-- but I still have an interest in the whole subject. I recently stumbled across StrangeHarvest, a website (blog?) that discusses how today's soccer field serves as an abstraction of the townscapes of medieval England. The playing field that once included an entire town or two, today still retains abstract elements that serve as metaphorical echoes of the vernacular villages of yesteryear. It serves as a connection to the society of our ancestors, if you will. Somewhere in that minimalist arrangement of rectangles circles and dots is a trace of the landscapes of folk football: centre circle as lake, penalty area as village gateway, and goal as church. This makes football - perhaps more than any other sport - a kind of essentialised urbanism. Good stuff if you're into that sort of thing.And, finally, the US professional indoor soccer league (MISL) has folded. I'm not a big fan of watching indoor soccer, although I did try my hand at it a couple of years ago when I moved to Houston and couldn't find a convenient 30+ outdoor league to play in. Indoor soccer certainly challenged my skills and definitely my fitness. but there's a better indoor game out there. Maybe the indoor league, as a part of its restructuring, should reject the old indoor game and adopt a globally-accepted indoor game: futsal. Futsal would provide a good alternative to the outdoor game, and would radically improve the soccer skills of its adherents. It also opens the door to those who want to compete in FIFA-sanctioned competitions, and the Brazilians have shown that futsal can breed talented soccer players. This guy certainly thinks futsal could be a solid replacement for the old-MISL style of play.
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