"What surprises me most about the MLS?" the gaffer pondered. "When the coaches have to wear the microphone."
Indeed, the Heineken-Industrial Complex that begat Thursday's Hudson River Derby Media Day in Chelsea must have had Patrick Vieira feeling like a stranger in a strange mass media land. The crass tabloid tomfoolery of the United Kingdom was nowhere to be found, replaced instead with junkets stacked on top of junkets, the kind of media cattle-call that sneering ESPN executives refer to as the "car wash."
As if that weren't horrible enough, the manager, David Villa, Andrea Pirlo, Mix Diskerud, and Andoni Iraola were forced to bounce around the seemingly endless press scrum having come straight from the airport-- they arrived from Wednesday's away date at Toronto earlier that same morning.