If A Bench Clearing Brawl Happens And No One Recorded It, Did It Really Happen

Earlier in the day, reports of a bench-clearing brawl on Tuesday between Real Salt Lake and Sporting Kansas City began to emerge. Details are still a bit murky, but it seems that all sides agree that the incident that immediately preceded the melee was a hard tackle on Javier Morales by SKC’s Roger Espinoza. There is less agreement about what happened next.

Initial reports suggested that Omar Bravo may have kicked someone, but those reports were vehemently denied by Sporting Kansas City players. No injuries were reported and the two teams even played another game with reserves on Wednesday. Supposedly, there’s a fan-made video swimming around somewhere but it has yet to surface.

It may seem hard for some to believe that in this day and age, a preseason match between two first-division soccer teams could be played without anyone filming it, but that is exactly what appears to have happened. Let’s remember that this game, like so many other preseason contests, was not played in a proper stadium. For a team to get footage that is actually useful, it can’t just be filmed from the sidelines. They need to be able to get to a vantage point that allows coaches watching the film to actually see something they couldn’t see during the game. Most of these fields where preseason games are played have no such vantage points.

It all begs the question: If there’s no video of the incident and no one can really agree on what, exactly, happened, does the league have any standing to step in? For that matter, should the league just pretend it didn’t happen? At this point, it seems very difficult to imagine that the league is going to start handing out suspensions based on vague Twitter accounts like this:

Maybe McKenzie has a good point. As unfortunate as it may have been, it seems like lacking actual evidence, all parties are better off moving and allowing the two teams to settle their differences on the scoreboard the next time they face: Aug. 3 at Rio Tinto Stadium.