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There's a Season-Ticketholder Town Hall Meeting Saturday morning at Toyota Park, and the special guest is none other than our new Lord of Football, the Pride of Ipswich Town, Mr. Frank Yallop of Vancouver. The Fire are soliciting questions on the team website. And Yallop is absolutely the kind of guy any writer would love to interview - smart, avuncular, quick to tell a story, good while telling it.
Thing is, they're soliciting questions. Which means, of course, that many more questions will be submitted than could be answered by a roomful of Yallops answering for days on end. Which also means, inevitably, that someone or -ones will be selecting which questions get asked. When that someone works for the club, a mysterious alchemy seems unavoidable: It's hard to ask your boss about his mistakes when you have a quarterly review coming up, right? So all the curiousity and inventiveness (and malice) gets strained right out of the question pool, and no one learns very much at all.
On the other hand, the same technology that allows the club to solicit, then sanitize, questions from the riff-raff allows us to record our curiousity here, and then satisfy it as the answers become available. This is the first of what should be a series of community stories, an effort to use the broad range of contacts and abilities in our reader base to crowd-source some answers to the many questions hidden behind the curtain of MLS secrecy.
To that end, and staying within the framework of the approaching Town Hall Meeting: If you had a few minutes to ask Frank Yallop questions, what would you want to know? Imagine it's a best-case scenario: He's comfortable, seems like he wants to get his message out there, and is generally agreeable to discussing his past, his philosophy and his beliefs about the beautiful game. What would you ask?
What would you want to know? We'll take it to the comments, where the action should be on this story.
