I'm sorry guys -- I'm talking to whoever it is who writes the stories that go up on the UEFA website -- but you're just not paying attention.

"I don't get no protection!" might well be the theme song for soccer's star players. It is a theme that is very much in the air at the moment. Alex Ferguson has complained that English referees are not doing enough to protect Cristiano Ronaldo, and that the Portuguese star is being systematically fouled. "It has become a tactic," says Ferguson, "someone fouls him, then someone else."

It hadn't occurred to me to judge the worth of a soccer league by looking at whether coaches like it or not, but since Jose Mourinho brought the subject up recently I've given it some thought.

It looked like a burned-out aircraft hangar. It was certainly big enough, a towering hulk of intertwined metal beams with a gaping hole in the middle. A huge metallic donut.

The extraordinary attack on ESPN TV commentator Tommy Smyth that appeared Wednesday on the web site of the English newspaper The Guardian stirs me to make a case for the beleaguered Tommy.

Bayern Munich and Coach Juergen Klinsmann took a hammering last week from Barcelona. The soccer played by Barca was a delight to watch -- skillful, swift, powerful at times, artistic at others, even both simultaneously, soccer at its most effective and its most beguiling.

Let me dismiss the coaches, for a start. I do not believe that any of the eight coaches involved in the first-leg Champions League games this week played a particularly significant role. The games -- and what superb games they have been -- were largely controlled by the players.

Sadness and weariness ... those were my feelings as I watched the despairing video of Bruce Arena trying to say something meaningful about the Galaxy's abysmal showing against the almost equally abysmal Colorado Rapids.

Professional soccer in New York City? Now there's an idea. I'll buy that. And that's what the United Soccer Leagues, the USL - which likes to define itself as an "alternative league" to MLS - is promising us.