Wanted: Offense, Reward: Happy Fans

By: Melissa | March 17th, 2008

I’ve got to spend a little bit of time this week writing a MLS season preview for San Jose but it shouldn’t be too terribly hard because the club is still plagued by the same issues that smacked it in the face after November’s Expansion Draft: i.e. a somewhat ineffective offense with zero depth. I’ll save the rest of my thoughts for my upcoming action packed preview but Jeff Carlisle at MLSnet echoes the sentiment. According to Carlisle, the team saw a pretty effin huge number of trialists but cut most of them while Yallop’s attempts to woo a seasoned striker to the Yay have fallen short. So now there’s less than three weeks until the first game against LA and after judging our first team’s performance against Toronto’s mostly trialists squad on Saturday, we need some serious help.

Now I’ll definitely be one of the first to shout out “In Yallop We Trust” so I firmly believe his meticulous methods for finding the right guys are good ones. And Carlisle gives us a little bit of insight into Our Gang’s lengthy efforts. Federico Arias was sent home because of “lack of fitness” while both Takayuki Suzuki and Martin Aslund left despite scoring goals in pre-season games. Even our man, Fabrice Noel, is no longer training with the club because of national team duties but he still remains on the radar (whew!).

Former Colorado Rapids forward Fabrice Noel opted to spend time with the Haitian under-23 national team rather than continue his Quakes tryout, although Yallop hinted that the door was still open, however so slightly.

“[Noel] needed a bit of a quicker answer from us,” said Yallop. “He wanted to know [yes or no], and I said ‘At this point, it’s a no.’ But I know all about him, and I like his traits. I told him to go do his thing and we’ll keep tabs on him.”

So that leaves us with our T&T trialists Conrad Smith and Hayden Tinto (Tinto went home while Smith traveled with the team to Charleston) and among others, Matt Taylor, who makes me happy to see more Chivas players infiltrate our ranks and subsequently bring the awesome.

According to Doyle, there’s still the possibility of more scouting trips to Costa Rica and England but Carlisle points out, unless Our Gang finds an out of contract player, we likely cannot bring him in until June. And according to Soccer Spin, we may be interested in 33 year old Argentine Facundo Sava but since he’s still playing for Racing Club, does that mean we cannot immediately use him? There’s also former Quake, Jamil Walker, who was recently waived from DC United. Honestly, I would not be surprised to discover he drove down to South Carolina as soon as he got the boot from DC.

Either way, I suspect we’ll see a new signing of some sort on the horizon. Well, I certainly hope so.