Tour comment: Blue stars lost in US Galaxy

Jul 24 2007 by Nick Smith, Liverpool Daily Post

EVEN clad in deepest Everton blue, they wandered across Manhattan Beach and hardly turned a head.

A lone bartender’s cry of ‘Hey, Blues drink in here!’ from the patio of his establishment was merely a typically under-stated American way of drumming up business, his recognition based more on him not being colour blind than being a regular trans-Atlantic visitor to Goodison Park.

And only a handful of Sunday afternoon cyclists stopped to watch the unusual sight of the beach volleyball court being invaded by a raucous game of head tennis.

Even the weather denied its guests a sunny California welcome, as dark clouds slowly crept over the Pacific with all the dreaded menace of the 18th hole at Carnoustie.

Hence, the arrival in LA was as low key as any business trip should be. But long before they entered the Galaxy yesterday morning, Everton already knew they had stepped into a different world.

A world where Phil Neville, when asked about the one true soccer celebrity among his team-mates, begins his appraisal of Tim Howard with the words: “One of the greatest goalkeepers in Everton history is Neville Southall.”

Not something he would have to say to reporters after wandering off the Bellefield training pitch, you would hope. But the Salt Lake Tribune ran the quote with the confidence that their local audience wouldn’t have a clue who Southall was without the other Neville’s explanation.

An identity crisis pretty much all footballers suffer from over here – apart from ones who can miraculously be declared fit for a game despite being barely able to walk. If David Beckham had wandered across the sand for a training session it would have made for some of the most hysterical beach scenes since the opening of Saving Private Ryan.

Yet when Everton rolled up at his new home ground of the Home Depot Center yesterday morning it was clear that the front page slot reserved for the main story of the sport section of Salt Lake’s daily publication was set to be screwed up and thrown in the bin marked ‘irrelevant’. Entering pens that hold the Galaxy training pitches wasn’t exactly US passport control.

After the team coach meandered across some deserted concrete and pulled up close to a line of non-descript mobile offices, they breezed in unnoticed.

It says a lot about how much the media over here are enthused by a Premier League (or ‘EPL’) squad being in its midst that they were scarcely more troubled on their way out despite the gathering TV crews and camera-clutching supporters – only two of whom bore Everton blue. Beckham’s fame indicator has, of course, long since vanished off the scale but he could hardly have a better one than the interest shown in a hobbling 32-year-old turning up to watch his team-mates in training.

Even Galaxy’s second most famous player, Abel Xavier, was barely interrupted in his march on to the training area as the home players swapped with their guests from Merseyside.

You can hardly mistake the Portuguese defender anyway because of his stubborn refusal to shift the shock of white hairs from his head and chin, but the only mobbing he was subjected to was courtesy of various former fellow Everton employees. The public and the press? Only there to see one man, a man who has, bizarrely, become bigger than his sport on this side of the pond.

It’s not as if LA Galaxy don’t have a facility and a surrounding fitting for a global superstar, something which becomes obvious during the palm-treelined drive stretching away from the stadium’s gateway. Modest in size the actual arena might be, but an outer area furnished cluster of pristine tennis courts and the aforementioned training pitches gives it an impressive, polished look any Hollywood make-up artist would be proud of.

But you get the uneasy feeling that there’s more excitement being generated by the erection of some grandstands and sporting apparatus at the back of the stadium, for a major four-day event that’s one of the biggest of its kind in the world.

The sport? Skateboarding.

No wonder footballers struggle for notoriety if someone sliding up a half-pipe gets the juices flowing round here. And while the aforementioned Salt Lake Tribune at least had the decency to recognise Everton’s presence, the LA Times’s ignorance of their arrival in town was almost as rude as their reference to the ‘British Open’.

The only local soccer story was headlined ‘Your daily dose of Beckham’.

Self-mocking in its own involvement in the circus it may be, but if he can only get three pars dedicated to himself in a side column, what chance has the rest of the football world got?

It will continue to be buried beneath the front-page sellers of baseball, basketball and American football, when that season resumes.

It’s understandable that Everton haven’t decided to capitalise on any (wrongly as it would turn out) perceived buzz over here by arranging a second friendly. Anything that isn’t Beckham-infested struggles to even acquire sideshow status.

So Everton – and this is the way David Moyes likes it – can now quietly go about their business.

That is, after all, what football is.

But in Los Angeles, it’s not as big a business as its newest resident, and the long-term effects of that will surely see the sport continue to make the American dream come true.