During MLS Cup week in Seattle, much off-field buzz swirled about Landon Donovan's move to Europe, as if it heading overseas in January during the next European transfer window was not only a foregone conclusion, but the best thing he could do at this point in his career.

The better team won MLS Cup 2009, and that's not just in the sense that Real Salt Lake played better than the favored Los Angeles Galaxy.

Not for the first time in the past few years I've had to shake my head at how much things have changed with pro soccer in America.

When it comes to owners of sports teams, the dividing line between a meddler and a motivator can be a blurry one. Some owners straddle that line, others clearly fall on one side or the other. And different people might use either one of those terms, or different ones, to describe Dallas Cowboys' boss Jerry Jones, or New York Yankees' owner George Steinbrenner.

If two titles in its first two seasons in Houston didn't get it done, and neither did posting the best record in MLS since it moved from San Jose, the Dynamo made its case for a stadium by scuffing and skidding past Seattle, 1-0, on an atrocious field Sunday.

If there's one aspect to the maddening incongruity of soccer that one must accept, it is the dichotomy that bad soccer can be very good soccer, in the sense of entertainment, as long as it's the defenders and not the attackers who are bad.

Thank god for god-awful defending. Sometimes playoff soccer is a mesmerizing matrix of synergy and skill and speed, and sometimes it is ineptitude run rampant. And sometimes it takes on a cagey, cat-and-mouse persona common around the world, with the home team pushing the issue, and the away team sitting back.