Saturday afternoon, with a little over 24 hours to go before the Red Bulls take on the Los Angeles Galaxy, I was staring glumly out of my Manhattan window. At a snowstorm. Bad enough, but it will be worse out there in New Jersey, it always is. Out in New Jersey, where the New York Red Bulls play. That's the pseudo-New York team that faces the Galaxy in the first playoff to decide the Western Conference championship.

It hardly comes as a surprise that the so-called New Cosmos group is in turmoil. The high-flying Paul Kemsley, the hyper-Brit who has been telling everyone that the rebirth of the New York Cosmos which he was supposed to be engineering "is going to be huge."

Steve Nicol, the now-departed coach of the New England Revs, had a liking for soccer with a physical edge to it. As I take rather a dim view of that approach to the sport, Steve and I never exactly hit it off.

Is Juan Agudelo going to be a star? We've seen flashes of sheer brilliance from him, and we've seen him looking pretty ordinary. Anyone can look ordinary, but not many can look brilliant, so it is only natural to believe, to want to believe, that Agudelo has something special.

So here come the playoffs, the climax of the MLS season, when we can expect to see MLS soccer at its best. Well, maybe. Because this is when we hear a lot of that "to hell with pretty soccer, we just have to grind out a win" talk.

Inevitably, I find myself wondering: is Lionel Messi simply too good to last? I'm not saying "too good to be true" -- I've seen enough of him and I trust my own eyes.

Definitely not a good week for WADA. That is the group -- the World Anti-Doping Agency -- that works tirelessly to keep sports, all sports, free from the scourge of performance-enhancing drugs.

I have been campaigning for decades now -- obviously, in a totally ineffectual way -- for a set of obligatory referee signals to be introduced in soccer so that we know, instantly, which offense has been called.

After two weeks without watching any MLS games, I returned to the fray to watch Vancouver-Real Salt Lake. I fell asleep. Let's put that down to jet lag ... though I do believe that, had there been any great excitement in the game, I would have stayed awake.