This is why we get out of bed every morning..

"Beckham's debut may be delayed."

"His injured ankle is still giving him trouble, so he could sit out Saturday's game against Chelsea. Lalas says pressure from sponsors, fans or television will not factor into the decision." via LATimes.com

It is impossible to overstate the orgy of publicity that accompanied Beckham's arrival in LA, to play for a professional US soccer team that nobody's heard of. About 80% of the publicity seemed to be driven by interest in his wife Posh Spice, the anorexic British cyborg who looks like one of the aliens from a Whtiley Streibler novel. (Never a good sign when an athlete's wife has a bigger entourage than he does.)

We assumed from the beginning that Beckham was washed up. This transaction always struck us as the equivalent of a European American-style football club importing the 2007 version of Emmett Smith to play for them, and he was married to Paula Abdul. But what do we know? (Nothing, as regular readers of this site figured out long ago.)

So we asked a friend of ours who's into European and British League football for her take on the whole Beckham move. Here is her response:

“In soccer years, Beckham is old and he is past his prime. He really has not played well for the last 2-3 years. This injury that he has is a recurring one that he has had since the World Cup last year. That's not a good sign. He did for some inexplicable reason really pick up his game ever since he announced in January that he was leaving Real Madrid for the Galaxy and he was a big part in Real winning the Spanish league...which they used to win all the time but hadn't won in the last 3 years which was actually when Beckham started playing there. It will be interesting to see how he does. Unless he really can't move at all, I predict that he'll come on for the came on Saturday even if it is just for 15 minutes. Overall, he has always been a player who is much more of a publicity machine than an actual great soccer player. He won a lot of championships with Man United but there were a lot of players on that team who were great players so it wasn't just because of him.”

So yeah, we take immense satisfaction in the upcoming anticlimax scheduled to take place this weekend in Wherever-the-Hell-it-is they play. Six weeks from now, we may even go to see him play, once tickets drop back down to the $6 per seat range.