Perfection? You're looking for soccer perfection? Maybe we got as close as we're likely to get with Barcelona's win over Real Madrid on Monday. That scoreline, 5-0, is one you don't see too often in top class soccer these days, so it's worth noting that the team that was so mercilessly murdered by Barcelona, was Real Madrid ... one of the world's best teams, a team on which vast amounts of money have been spent, a team that was sitting on top of Spain's La Liga.

We've seen quite an array of descriptions attached to Dimitar Berbatov of Manchester United. Not easy to pin down, this guy. Positionally, for a start: A forward? A playmaker? A midfielder? A goalscorer? Maybe, at times, A Waste of Space?

If ... all the American television commentators for soccer were on strike ... If they all mysteriously lost their voices ... If they were all wickedly kidnapped by a foreign power ... If they all suddenly elected to become Trappist monks ... If Voldemort had cast an evil spell over them all ... then, yes, for any one of those reasons, I could just about find myself agreeing with ESPN's decision to import Brit commentators.

Quite a game. And there'll be plenty of differing opinions about exactly what sort of a game the MLS Cup was. Conor Casey, voted the game's MVP (presumably for scoring a goal while sitting on his ass) told us "it wasn't the prettiest game." Minutes later, an overheated Alexi Lalas said "for me, it was the most physical MLS Cup in history" - and he meant that as praise.

I've had my say on this topic of the allocating of World Cups before, several times. To repeat: I think it makes no sense, is in fact absolutely asking for trouble, to put the vote in the hands of a small group of people, most of whom have little or no direct knowledge of what is required to make a good bid, and thus no way of assessing a bid. Assessing a bid, that is, in the only way that it should be assessed, on its merits.

On Tuesday, MLS Commissioner Don Garber gave us a 24-minute State of the League address -- sort of a pep talk, really, because almost everything he had to say was either positive, or was positively interpreted.

Here's one that I'm absolutely delighted to have got wrong: I thought the Galaxy would beat Dallas. Not because they play better soccer, they don't, no sir, but because of their "effectiveness" and the home-field advantage.

I begin to despair of ever making any sense of Howard Webb's refereeing. He is held out as the best of the EPL referees, maybe the best in the world -- he did, after all, get the World Cup final this year. And all things considered -- to wit the massive provocation of the dirty Dutch -- he did a good job of keeping his head in a very difficult situation.

Some stats for you. I've been rummaging around in the rosters of the European leagues as published in the November issue of World Soccer, paying particular attention to the foreigners in each league.

Let me deal first with the Columbus-Colorado game -- if only because I wish to get the least interesting part out of the way quickly. Very little good soccer to be seen here -- though, inevitably, the game got pretty exciting toward the end as both teams sought the vital winning goal. As neither team managed to get it, we instead were transported into the mystic realms of the shootout tiebreaker, and the whole two-game series -- all 210-plus minutes of it, was reduced to just one player.

No, frankly, it was not a major surprise that the Red Bulls would screw this one up. Simply because, whatever heights the mounting euphoria about their path to MLS Cup may have reached, it was surely pretty obvious that they were not playing well.

A mere three minutes into Sunday's playoff game between the Seattle Sounders and the L.A. Galaxy, we had the familiar sight of Dema Kovalenko engaged in a physical pushing-and-shoving altercation with an opponent. But the incident was unusual in one respect: This time it was the opponent, Osvaldo Alonso -- who had committed the foul.

Last time, you may recall, I was bitching about the sheer tedium of the playoff game between Colorado and Columbus. I asked the question: Does playoff soccer have to be like this?

Last time, you may recall, I was bitching about the sheer tedium of the playoff game between Colorado and Columbus. I asked the question: Does playoff soccer have to be like this?