Roberto Mina?

By: Melissa | March 7th, 2008

Goff reports Dallas wants to trade him and we may be interested. He’s out of contract so we’d be trading for his MLS rights and immediately negotiating again. On top of that, he’s apparently already got an offer waiting for him in Argentina and, as far as MLS is concerned, no-one is confident he’s completely fit. Now before we all start wondering if SanHo might be growing all softie and turning into the gimp team, Soccer Silicon Valley sheds a little light on the O’Brien transfer and his injuries situation:

When we first linked to that story last week [Mo Johnson's comments on O'Brien's health], we commented that it sounded an awful lot like a GM searching for a way to justify letting a popular player leave his team. After reading Jeff Carlisle’s story on SJEarthquakes.com, we’re even more convinced of that.

O’Brien’s season finally ended in September when he underwent arthroscopic surgery, but it wasn’t until another operation three months later that a bone spur was found to be the root cause of his discomfort. With that ailment now taken care of, O’Brien believes that he is ready to regain his form of 2005 when he was named to the league’s Best XI for the second year running.

“I’m back to feeling like I did before,” said O’Brien. “I’m back running around with no problems, and I’m striking the ball the way I want to. It’s just a case of maintaining it now so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Hmm, maybe Johnston was right and O’Brien is on the brink of something — something like returning to full health for the first time in a year. Time will tell…

You like that? Its a quote that quotes a quote. Very meta. Ok, back to Mina. So not even Robert, who runs the FC Dallas Offside blog, is confident Mina is actually game fit:

Kenny Cooper and Roberto Mina are back from injury but I’ll be honest with you, while Kenny should be fine I have no idea what to expect from Mina, a return from a knee injury is a lot harder to predict than a broken leg.

Yikes. And after reading Robert’s FC Dallas preview post on defense, it seems to me that the Hoops may be looking to trade for a defender and I don’t know if its worth it. Thats totally NOT the maternal area talking by the way. I really don’t know if Mina’s worth losing one of our guys. Well, apparently all of this is still in the rumors stage and I guess Houston is in the mix as well so I’m not too worried about it.

Moving on… Club Quake organized a bus ride from San Jose up to the Oakland game against the Fire on April 12 (with a bbq afterwards! Damn). The cost is $25 and does not include a ticket to the game. More info is here. That link also includes info on getting tickets for the game against the Galaxy at the HDC.

For those of us in the SF Bay, The folks making that Harvey Milk movie are asking people to show up at the Civic Center Plaza this Sunday at 11am to help reenact the first Gay Pride Parade. More details are here. And yes, there’s a strict dress code since the damn thing happened in 1978. BUT does this mean someone could conceivably show up in an Earthquakes NASL jersey and try to get that on camera? And to anyone who tries, good luck.