MLS plays the crying game

I need a little help here. Can somebody please tell me the exact moment when Major League Soccer became a league of whining, sniveling, complaining crybabies?

When, exactly, did the tiresome epidemic of carping about calls and harping on officials during matches explode so precipitously while respect for men in the middle plunged so profoundly in commissioner Don Garber's realm?

When did fretting about the admittedly uneven MLS refereeing -- although it's only slightly more unstable than other leagues around the world -- become as much a part of an MLS match day as signboards and sideline reporters? Are these soccer games or debate camps?

It seems that a certain victimization complex rules in today's MLS, in which no player is ever truly guilty of committing a foul.

Trip an attacker? Rip the ref for calling it. Use your hand to redirect the ball? Moan loudly about the alleged handball five minutes back.

And ye who be fouled, be sure to gesture wildly toward the referee, advocating your claim for a card. Worry not about a yellow card for dissent; MLS officials regularly and inexplicably dismiss time-wasting tactics and verbal abuse.

Top Five Complainers
1. Landon Donovan -- Chief engineer on the Whiny Pants Express. Always seems to expect a call because of who he is.
2. Carlos Ruiz -- May one day have to ice his shoulder, Roger Clemens-style, after a particularly active evening of arm waving and gesturing.
3. Pablo Mastroeni -- Plays hard, complains hard.
4. Ben Olsen -- A great guy, but yaps so much on the field you'd think he was being paid by the word.
5. Cobi Jones -- The last holdover from the U.S. 1994 bunch that always carried an inflated sense of entitlement.

It's not just players. The coaches have turned many an MLS sideline into a dance stage, gesticulating like Britney Spears and screaming things that momma would never approve of.

Of course, a certain amount of comment and vilification is absolutely justified. Columbus coach Sigi Schmid lobbed a few verbal mortars after the recent Columbus-Red Bull fiasco, in which three men were ejected. Suffice to say, it wasn't referee Baldomero Toledo's best day. What I'm referring to here is the constant and repetitive parade of complaining during matches. It's exasperating to see game after game dragged down by a tempest of howling coaches and enraged players.

Once things get contentious between players and the referee, making the killer pass or looking for the next opportunistic shot on goal becomes oddly secondary to the players' next chance to unload on the officials.

I can hear the chorus rising out there: "It's the referees!" And, yes, an MLS roster of referees that clearly needs some steering shares some culpability in cooking up this cynical stew. But the players share plenty of blame, too.

It's all bundled together in the same ugly cycle. The players react to wobbly or loose officiating. The officials, having gradually recalibrated their definition of abuse under the burgeoning crush of all this acrimony, permit too much of it. The players exploit this leniency, which leads to more of the tiresome histrionics from players and managers.

Things disintegrate from there, forcing a referee to start turning over cards like he's at a Las Vegas poker tourney just to regain some control.

To dismiss the players' hypercritical reproach as wholly the product of inconsistent or inadequate officiating would be like dismissing a crime wave because of insufficient policing. That is, it still takes a criminal to commit the crimes.

One plays off the other, and the whole mess drags down the quality of games and the overall entertainment value of MLS matches.

So, where to go from here? First, everyone must recognize that officiating is an ongoing issue at every level, all over the world. Seems we even had some issues at the World Cup in Germany over the summer, no?

(And for the love of George Best, I don't want anybody else telling me about the A-plus officiating in the English Premier League. I'm pretty sure I'll start bleeding from the eyes if I hear another comparison to referees in that high-profile league. Get this straight: MLS is not the EPL. Nobody expects the players to compare, and yet everybody wants the officiating to measure up.)

So everyone has to swallow hard and acknowledge that bad calls are not the sole property of MLS. They do happen. Where MLS officials certainly can improve is in match management and dealing with players, who also must be better at drinking from the placid fountain of "get over it" and learn to move on with the match.

In a sense, I don't blame the players for their tantrums and tirades. They are paid to play hard and most make earnest efforts. So it must be difficult and sometimes frustrating to deal with decisions that can be, occasionally, downright bizarre. Players will tell you they just want consistency. Fair enough.

But life isn't perfect and humans (read: referees) are fallen and imperfect creatures. So the issue then becomes dealing with the peaks and valleys that inevitably dot the officiating landscape. The professional, focused player makes his case, then returns to worrying about the match. MLS is clearly deficient in that kind of workaday professionalism right now.

Some otherwise fine coaches are setting improper examples. Houston's Dominic Kinnear seems to be one of the worst violators of this unfortunate trend. And that's a shame, because I appreciate the job Kinnear has done. His team's early playoff exit last year can even be excused since Kinnear and Co. were beating back the distracting elements of impending franchise relocation.

But Kinnear's rants have been caught too often on camera, and his complaining in the match aftermath is bothersome. For instance, he complained after a recent match that Eddie Robinson never gets a call from referee Brian Hall. Hall had ejected Robinson for a blatant, retaliatory elbow as he ran past Dallas' Carlos Ruiz.

The hotheaded stunt was so ridiculous that Hall had no choice but to dismiss the Dynamo defender. Thus, Robinson was ejected early in a match that could have seen Houston gain serious ground in pursuit of first-place Dallas. So instead of sending a message to the rest of his players that such petulant foolishness cannot be tolerated in a big-stakes game, Kinnear used the occasion to complain about how Robinson can't get a call from Hall.

And, yes, Houston got jobbed late in a match last month when referee Alex Prus failed to call a blatant trip by Chivas USA's Jason Hernandez, who did everything except head butt Dwayne De Rosario in stoppage time of Houston's 3-2 loss at the Home Depot Center.

But the Houston howls sound pretty hollow when you go back and look at the 28th-minute penalty kick Houston earned when Prus adjudged Chivas goalkeeper Preston Burpo to have brought down Chris Wondolowski.

PK? Puh-leeze. But nice job, young Chris, for selling that one.

D.C. United boss Peter Nowak, too, has been guilty of pointing out the perceived officiating slights while ignoring his own team's part in a summer stumble. After his team won exactly one match over a six-game period from late August to early September, the Washington Examiner asked Nowak about the difference in that version of United and the previously soaring one. He responded by saying "officiating," then declined to elaborate further.

Word to managers: When you're the big playa of MLS and you tie Real Salt Lake at home (which Nowak's crew had just done), it looks awfully lame to hide behind cryptic comments about the "officiating." Other than being downright silly, it sends a poor message to players and empowers them to go seek excuses of their own.

I have no unrealistic delusions here. I know that fans won't fill up Toyota Park or the new buildings in Denver or Toronto just because Pablo Mastroeni jogs blissfully back into position after being called for his next foul.

But I do believe that the overall quality of league play can climb a little if the collective player pool is properly focused on the little things that win games and less eaten up by the distraction of gamesmanship and tirades against officials. The faster a player can stop thinking like a victim, the faster he can concentrate on making that extra run around the wing or commit to that extra little edge he needs inside the penalty area. Those are little things that sharpen and enliven matches -- and win games.

Steve Davis is a Dallas-based freelance writer who covers MLS for ESPNsoccernet. He can be reached at BigTexSoccer@yahoo.com