“There wasn’t a lot missing today,” he continued. “A centimetre’s difference here or there and things might have been different but the game's like that. Even though we came away empty-handed today we are still on track to achieve the objectives we set at the beginning of the season.”

“It’s just what happened,” Davidson said after the match. “I reacted wrong. For all of it, I just want to apologize to all the players. It’s very tough to play pretty much the most of the 90 minutes with 10 men. I just want to apologize to all the fans and supporters that came to watch the game."

“It wasn’t the kind of second half we wanted to have,” admitted captain Davy Arnaud.” If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, we weren’t in the second half, it was our worst half of the year, I would say, but we still came out with three points and in MLS you have to grind out results sometimes. That’s just the way it is. At the end of the day we leave with another win.

After starting unbeaten in four, the Vancouver Whitecaps are now winless in just as many after a 3-1 loss to Sporting KC at BC Place Wednesday evening.

And, while the Whitecaps came back in stoppage time to draw Sporting Kansas City 3-3 on Saturday, they surrendered a 93rd-minute last-gasp goal to New England’s Ilija Stolica and had to settle for a 1-1 draw with the Revolution in front of 19,396 fans. But the talking point won’t be the Stolica equalizer. It will be the bizarre sequence that followed Eric Hassli’s penalty-kick goal in the 56th.

The referees are on strike in Scotland. They have had it. They’ve had it with the criticisms of coaches and players. They’re tired of being made the scapegoats whenever a close decision goes against a fiery manager with an axe to grind. Good for them. They’ve gone on strike, leaving the Scottish FA scrambling to find refs for this week’s matches. Polish and Portuguese refs who the SFA thought it had secured to officiate this weekend’s games have gone back home. Scotland did find enough foreign refs to keep the Premier League going, so fans could be treated another weekly instalment of Rangers, Celtic and Everybody Else.

As the Colorado Rapids gathered on a platform placed at the centre of BMO Field, jumping up and down, surrounded by sky-blue confetti, holding the MLS Cup aloft, FC Dallas midfielder Dax McCarty stood on the field, staring at the celebration. The rest of his FC Dallas teammates, losers of a 2-1 decision after extra time in Toronto, had left the field. But McCarty stood and stared at the Rapids’ celebration. Wondering what could have been. Wondering what would have happened if a ball off the foot of Colorado sub Macoumba Kandji hadn’t taken a strange deflection off defender FC Dallas George John in the 108th minute and looped past the goal line. What could have happened in penalty kicks had John’s last-gasp effort at redemption, from point blank range, not been stopped by the outstretched hand of Rapids’ keeper Matt Pickens.