Points of Obvious Refinement: Real Salt Lake at San Jose Earthquakes

As winter rolls back in, I’m reliving the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic and digging through the depths of various streaming services. The other night I came across a show with a former Top Gear host called “James May: Our Man in Japan”. No spoilers, but there are a lot of haikus throughout the show, so I decided that I would boil down my normal points to haiku.

Bemused Behavior

The inspiration for this poem is the five yellow cards, four of which were for unsporting behavior. I think every other time I write this column I bring up the yellow card problem Real Salt Lake seems to have this year, so we’ll skip it as rhetorical. It’s just becoming a joke at this point.

An alternate title could have been “We’ve Been Here Before”, but I really can’t get past the alliterations.

Yellow yellow card,

Everyone needs a yellow,

Unsporting will work.

Beckerman’s Bounty

This poem is inspired by captain Kyle Beckerman who is two matches away from his 500th MLS match. Three-hundred and fifty of them in the red and blue of Real Salt Lake. He came on in the dying minutes of the San Jose match, but will need appearances in the next two matches to secure the magic number.

The alternate title was “Captain Oh Captain”.

Captain Kyle goal,

Please, a Beckerman goal please,

A captain’s bounty.

Spaghetti Splatter

My final poem is inspired by a saying we use a lot in software development, that I had to edit a little since there’s usually some no-no words.

“Throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.”

Coach Freddy Juarez has a Carson, CA size bowl of spaghetti to throw out on Sunday against the LA Galaxy. There are players who haven’t seen the pitch in 2020 and some who haven’t seen any meaningful minutes. Might as well throw it out and see what happens. It probably can’t be any worse than losing to FC Dallas at home, right?

Alternate title: “Ugh”

The bowl is round shape,

It can hold many treasures,

Throw it, Freddy, throw.