Overseas Season Round-Up

Its a little late due to everything going on, but its time for the season round-up for the clubs overseas that I follow.

Queen of the South: As reported earlier QoS stormed through their season, being the first team in the UK to clinch a championship and the promotion that goes with it.  They also won the Ramsdens Cup over 1st Division Champions Partick Thistle.  Queens received awards galore including Manager of the Year and Team of the Year.   As soon as the offseason hit though, the negative side of their success appeared.  Leading scorer Nicky Clark will not be going up with the team as he was bought by another Second Division team, a little club you might of heard of called Rangers.  Just yesterday manager Allan Johnston agreed to a contract with Kilmarnock of the Premier League.  An impressive move by a guy who has 1 year (admittedly a great year) of managerial experience.  Next year the Doonhamers are back in the First Division after their one year absence.

Blackburn Rovers: A bad season for Rovers after last year's relegation saw them go through 5 managers and barely avoid a second straight drop, finally finishing 17th in the Championship.  Venky's ownership continued to spin the club out of control, leading to as many off-field problems as on-field problems.  Leadership seems to be getting sorted out but the club still has quite a financial crisis which will tie their hands for the coming season.  The bumpy ride isn't over yet.

CD Tenerife: After two seasons in the third division and coming oh-so-close to promotion last year they got over the hump this year.  They won their group by 3 points and then won their promotion playoff 3-2 on aggregate over L'Hospitalet.  Facing Alaves for the Segunda B championship they lost by a two-leg score of 3-2.  Next season its back to their normal stomping grounds of the Spanish Segunda where they'll meet their Canary Island rivals Las Palmas.

Melbourne Victory: The Victory bounced back from a rough season with a 3rd placed finish in the A-League behind Western Sydney and Central Coast, who ran away from the rest of the pack.  3rd place was good enough to get the A-League's AFC Champions League qualifier spot for the 2014 competition.  Much like MLS, the A-League's season is offset from much of the rest of the confederation which leads to a big delay between champions league qualification and actually playing.  In the A-League playoffs the Victory won their first round battle before losing to eventual champions Central Coast in the semis.

TSG 1899 Hoffenheim: This is a new club I've been rooting for, thanks to my sister and brother-in-law visiting that part of Germany a couple of years ago and bringing a scarf back from the club for me.  Hoffenheim was backed in 2000 by one of the founders of SAP, at the time they were playing in the 5th division of German soccer.  Between 2000 and 2008 they earned 4 promotions to end up in the Bundesliga. The club is also the home of 2 young German-born American Nats players, Daniel Williams and Fabian Johnson, and a 3rd American, Joe Gyau, who has played for the U.S. youth national teams.  This year Hoffenheim struggled in the Bundesliga, going through 4 different managers, ending in 16th place and in the relegation playoff.  In the playoff they beat Kaiserslautern 5-2 to keep their place in the Bundesliga for the 2013-14 season.

So, two teams promoted and none relegated, not a bad season.  Next year there's 2 top division teams (Melbourne and Hoffenheim) and 3 second division teams (Queen of the South, Blackburn, and Tenerife).

Relegated

My Overseas Roundup of the teams I follow is coming a bit late this year because I had to wait for the Spanish promotion playoffs to finish today.  Unfortunately its pretty much universally bad news.

Blackburn Rovers - EPL - Finished 19th of 20.  In the biggest failure of the year Blackburn Rovers was relegated out of the EPL.  The same year a 5th team finally joined the ranks of EPL winners Blackburn were relegated for the second time since the founding of the EPL, the only EPL champion ever to be relegated (but when the only other ones before this year were Man U., Arsenal, and Chelsea that's not a huge surprise).  This was Venky's first full season in charge of Rovers and they proved they don't have a clue of what they're doing.  My fear is that this coming season will be the first of many in the Championship.  Unlike last time we were relegated we won't bounce back up the next season.  Let's just hope our plummet stops in the Championship!

Queen of the South - Scottish First Division - Finished 10th of 10.  Money finally caught up to the Doonhamers.  They were barely able to keep the team full-time and had to slash all of their existing contracts to so that.  They put everyone, including the manager, on one-year deals in order to remain financially viable and from an economic perspective it worked, but at the cost of our First Division spot after 10 years.  The club has announced they plan to stay full-time in a bid to move back up to the First Division ASAP.  They turned down investment from an outside company, deciding that they club should remain in the hands of local Dumfries fans.  The club will be moving training back to Dumfries from Glasgow (where its been for the last few years) and are laying new surfaces for the stadium and the practice field this offseason.

CD Tenerife - Spanish Segunda B - Finished 2nd of 20.  The Spanish Segunda B is split into 4 20 team groups with promotion playoffs for the top teams.  Tenerife was unlucky to be draw into the same group as Real Madrid's reserves and not surprisingly the royal backups ran away with the group.  The group winners only have to win one home-and-home playoff series to clinch promotion (which Real Madrid B did) while the 2nd-4th placed teams in each group had to win 3 such series.  Tenerife won the first 2 and went into today's promotion playoff final at home with a 1-0 deficit to Group 2's 2nd placed team, Ponferradina.  Unfortunately despite having the home advantage they lost the game 2-1 and will remain in the Spanish Segunda B for another season.

Melbourne Victory - Australian A-League - Finish 8th of 10.  This was expected to be a rebuilding year for the Victory, and it was.  After hanging around the edge of the playoff spots for the first 2/3rds of the season a series of poor results in the final stages found them dropping to 8th and staying there for the last third of the year.  Melbourne were 8 points out of a playoff spot, missing them for the 3rd time in their 7 year history.  The A-League is going through a lot of financial issues right now so its hard to tell what kind fo season to expect next year.

Rough Overseas Season Ends

Long time readers will remember my Weekend Roundup posts on the 4 overseas teams I follow. This past offseason was very busy for the Rapids so I stopped doing the regular updates, but I figured I'd do an end-of-season Roundup on them.

Queen of the South - Scotland Division One

QoS had a rough year due to the bath weather in Scotland. The team had 11 different matches in December and January postponed due to snow and frozen pitches. They managed just 3 matches in that time period which put a financial hurt on the club that they managed to struggle through, then it put a competitive hurt on the club in the back half of the season as all those games had to be made up. The team managed to make the final of the ALBA Challenge Cup (Cup competition between all DI-DIII teams), which was originally scheduled for November 28th but due to weather and rescheduling didn't get played until April 10th, which Queens lost 2-0. The team finally finished 5th in Division One, a solid finish given their congested schedule.

Blackburn Rovers - English Premier League

Rovers started out well, sitting in mid-table and getting an influx of new cash as the team was sold to the owners of Indian chicken processor Venky's. Fans saw them as the white knight riding in to bring Blackburn to the next level, but they immediately became the villains as they fired manager Sam Allardyce and replaced him with assistant manager Steve Kean in early December. No cognizant explanation was given and after that point Blackburn plunged down the table, highlighted by a 7-1 loss at Old Trafford. Blackburn later had to watch United celebrate their EPL title at Ewood Park after a 1-1 draw in the penultimate game gave the Red Devils the championship but did not assure Rovers of safety. That didn't happen until the final week when Blackburn went to Wolves and took a 3-0 lead in the first half, only to hold off a furious comeback and win 3-2, assuring themselves of another year of top-flight football as they finished 15th.

CD Tenerife - Spanish Segunda Division

After dropping from La Liga last season Tenerife had high hopes of bouncing right back up. Unfortunately just the opposite happened. CDT lost 6 of their first 9 games and didn't win until game 10. A good streak gave a little hope, but 8 and 10 game winless streaks doomed the team. Tenerife had 3 manager changing this year, which didn't help. With one game left in the season the chicharros are already relegated to Segunda B for the first time in 24 years with a guranteed 20th placed finish (out of 22 teams). They have a chance to salvage something out of this season this weekend as they travel to Las Palmas for the Canary Islands derby. The teams tied in Santa Cruz de Tenerife earlier in the season so the winner on Saturday, if there is one, can claim dominance of the islands until the teams meet again. Unfortunately Las Palmas will not be going down with CDT, so they'll be able to flaunt that until Tenerife recovers.

Melbourne Victory - Australian A-League

The Victory, coming off a disappointing loss in last year's final to their rivals Sydney FC, was hoping to continue their dominance of the A-League. Unfortunately it appears that they tried to push their aging team one too many years before rebuilding as the team suffered from mixed results all season, highlighted by captain Kevin Muscat committing an unforgivable red-card tackle (similar but worse than Mullan's) that got him banned for 8 weeks until the end of the regular season. He announced his retirement at the end of the Asian Champion's League, in which the Victory finished last in its group. Melbourne managed to finish 5th and qualify for the playoffs, but they were bounced in the first round by Gold Coast United. The team seems to have started a rebuilding process before next season.

Why Melbourne Victory?

As promised, an update to my list of teams that I follow. I've done previous posts about the Colorado Rapids, Queen of the South, Blackburn Rovers, and CD Tenerife. As well as the now defunct Kildare County and my brief following of My FC team Ebbsfleet United. This time we're heading to the land Down Under for the Melbourne Victory of the Australian A-League.

I had a passing interest in the Australian league for its first 3 seasons, mainly due to its similarities with MLS. Its a new league in a country that's been dominated by sports other than soccer. Its fighting a number of the same issues MLS did early in its life, like small crowds in large stadiums, possible over expansion, and trying to get respect on the sporting landscape. Since Rupert Murdoch seems to own all the TV rights to the league we get a game or so a week on Fox Soccer Channel here in the States so it made it easy to peek in on the league and see what was happening.

It wasn't until right before the 2008 MLS season that I really picked a team to follow. One of my other hobbies is strategic board gaming. If anyone has played Settlers of Catan you'll know what kind of games I'm talking about, along with what people think of when they think of wargames. The largest community for that hobby on-line is at BoardGameGeek. As with any large community discussion tends to spread beyond the original reason for the gathering and a forum for soccer fans was created. At one point the moderator of that forum, an Aussie, asked for suggestions of which MLS team he should follow. I suggested the Rapids of course, and my arguments were apparently convincing as he has taken up the burgundy & blue! I would assume he's the lone member of the Australian Rapids Supporters Group. ;)

After he decided to follow the Rapids I decided to follow his A-League team, the Melbourne Victory. They tend to show up on FSC every couple of months (more often than Blackburn lately) so I've gotten to see a handful of games the last couple of seasons. Their level of play is about equal to MLS, though I think the best MLS teams could handle the top of the A-League (which would include the Victory). Over the short 4 year history of the A-League the Victory have won the title twice, and won their version of the Supporter's Shield those same two years. Currently Melbourne are in 2nd place, 3 points behind hated rivals Sydney FC with a game in hand. There are 7 games left for the Victory before the playoffs and it looks like Melbourne will have a shot at being the first repeat champions.