Losing a vital home game is never going to look good. When your opponent comes back from 2-0 down, when it scores four goals and could easily have had more ... well, the coach and the players have to be ready for a blizzard of abuse.

The ghost of the Cosmos -- the celebrity team that also happened to play pretty damn good soccer -- still hovers intriguingly over the New York soccer scene.

As the soccer world swirls frantically around me -- the Gold Cup is climaxing, the European under-21s are at a crucial stage, the U-17 World Cup is just beginning, MLS is giving us nine games a week -- as all that activity engulfs me, occupying every waking minutes, suddenly, today, came word that John Kerr was dead.

Here we go again -- in fact, as it's Frenchman Michel Platini I'm talking about, I can very nicely use the French phrase. It's deja vu time.

A 2-1 loss to Panama is hardly the end of the world, not even the soccer world. It does not mean the USA's elimination from the Gold Cup, a tournament it is thought capable of winning.

What a farce! Five Mexican national team players suspended for taking a banned drug. Well, not quite. Suspended because a drug test found traces of the banned drug clenbuterol in their urine.

Trying to extract meaning from this past weekend's clash between the USA and Spain seems to me an endeavor both hopeless and fruitless.

Who's the ref? It's a question that needs to be asked about every important game. We know that ManU's Alex Ferguson pays close attention, because he's had his say about how referees can influence the result (and he's been fined and told to shut up as a result of his pronouncements).