Soccer Notes.
All through the offseason the talk was of Clint Dempsey going to Liverpool, but the U.S. star won’t be going to a UEFA Champions League team after all. He almost went to Aston Villa, a team more likely to end up in the League Championship than Champions League, until he put his foot down. He won’t be going to Liverpool, which had its late bid rejected as being too low. After a day of drama, Dempsey, who made it clear he didn’t want to play for Fulham any more, ended up staying in London. The 29-year-old Texan joined London rival Tottenham, pending the results of a medical exam, for a fee reported to be 6 million pounds ($9.5 million)…….FC Nordsjaelland’s Michael Parkhurst, who played collegiate soccer in the ACC with Wake Forest, is enjoying life as he also prepares for Champions League action where his Danish team will find themselves in group action against Chelsea, Juventus and Shakhtar Donetsk. Parkhurst also was on the field for the recent U.S. MNT in World Cup qualifiers against Jamaica….. Americans Geoff Cameron and Maurice Edu returned from CONCACAF World Cup qualifying just in time for their Stoke City’s first game of the season against defending Premier League champions Manchester City, while U.S. defender Eric Lichaj and goalkeeper Brad Guzan are preparing for Aston Villa to take on high flying Swansea City…..D.C. United suffered a devastating blow on Thursday when it was confirmed captain Dwayne De Rosario, the 2011 MLS MVP, was lost for the rest of the 2012 season with a knee injury suffered early in Tuesday’s Panama-Canada World Cup 2014 qualifier at Panama City’s Estadio Rommel Fernandez. De Rosario will be sidelined 10-12 weeks after an MRI on Thursday confirmed he had suffered a grade III MCL sprain……Even with all of the financial troubles with the Glasgow Rangers, U.S. MNT captain Carlos Bocanegra was willing to stay with the club that has been dropped to the fourth tier in Scottish soccer. However, with the transfer deadline only 90 minutes away, he accepted a transfer to Spanish club Racing Santander, a club with its own financial problems. Santander filed for voluntary bankruptcy last year, was relegated from the top flight for the first time in a decade and is still tens of millions of Euros in debt…..Former Hermann Trophy winner and Wake Forest All-America Marcus Tracy is the latest player to join MLS via a weighted lottery process, one of MLS’s complicated player allocation mechanisms. He went to the Western Conference-leading San Jose Earthquakes after spending three injury-marred years in Denmark before being released by AaB Aalborg at the end of the 2011 season…..D.C. United has signed midfielder/forward Chris Pontius to a new long-term contract. The 25-year old is the club’s longest tenured player and is leading the team this year with 10 goals in 24 games (19 starts)…..Paris St. Germain is making a push for the French women’s league which has been dominated by two-time European champion Lyon. PSG has signed several players, including U.S. Under-20 scoring star Lindsay Horan (injured), and has announced interest in several U.S. WNT stars, including former Lyon goalkeeper Hope Solo……It’s a good bet that most U.S. MNT fans expected Jermaine Jones to be the first player suspended with yellow card accumulation, but it was Clarence Goodson who drew a one-game suspension with his second caution in three games and had to miss the USA’s 1-0 win over Jamaica in Columbus, OH…..Christen Press (Stanford) and Yael Averbuch (UNC) scored to give fourth-place FC Gothenburg a 2-0 win at last-place Djurgarden in Sweden’s Damall-svenskan. Americans were also winners in France and Germany, where the women’s seasons are just beginning. Press, an alternate on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team, now has 14 goals in 14 games to rank second behind German Anja Mittag of leader LdB Malmo with 18 goals. Averbuch was one of several U.S. internationals to move to Europe during the summer.