Coffee with the Caps, Monday July 29

Good Monday morning Caps fans. In a sign that it is the most Monday Monday in the history of Mondays, I forgot what day it was and that I needed to do this column. Time for another cup of coffee!

In the meantime, a thank you to the almost 30 of you who have participated thus far in the first annual Coffee with the Caps Trivia Extravaganza (TM). The quiz has proven harder than I initially would’ve guessed, with you all batting about .500 thus far in answers.

In the meantime, you can still get in on the fun here until Friday morning, when a champion will be crowned.

In other news, this weekend prompted a monumental revelation. No, it wasn’t the Caps finally cobbling together a result on the road against Minnesota United. It was that we learned Jasser Khmiri is alive!

The Tunisian central defender has seemingly been two weeks away from being ready to earn his first game time as a Whitecaps player for about two years now but there are recent reports indicating that his training has ramped up. Acquired this offseason from Tunisian giant Stade Tunisien, one of the top teams in Africa, I was really quite pumped to see the Caps going after young African talent. Khmiri seems like the kind of player the Caps should be targeting—a young player, who has not quite caught the radar of big clubs, but comes from an organization with a reputation for churning out quality young talent. He also will alleviate the need to play Andy Rose as a centerback, something for which we all will be thankful.

Elsewhere in Whitecaps world, Theo Bair has arrived in Orlando to participate in the MLS Homegrown Game against Chivas Guadalajara's U-20 side. With no Whitecaps tapped to participate in the actual All Star Game, Bair’s selection for the Homegrown side, comprising the best young MLS talent, will be a worthy substitution. The chance to train with some of the league’s elite talent is an excellent chance for Bair to make a bit of a name for himself, as outside of Whitecaps circles he has received relatively little attention. A good performance tomorrow, combined with his recent game time, will help establish Bair at a time when the Caps are likely to be moving on from Joaquin Ardaiz and looking for as many legitimate striker options as they can cram into the team. He joins Russell Teibert, Sean Melvin and Phonzie Bear as the only Caps to participate in the event.

If you’re interested in watching, the match will be streaming on Twitter (or Univision Deportes for those who want to watch in Spanish) at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT tomorrow

Onto the links:

Shameless Self Promotion

Improvement for the Caps is met with a slightly less fatalistic set of articles. Check out our match recap and report card as we make sense of the rather shocking development of the Caps not losing!

Best of the Rest

Also streaming tomorrow night will be the first annual All Star Game skills competition. I’m on the record as saying how dumb the ASG is in MLS but this is pretty cool and I will be watching

There is something called an eMLS All Star Challenge and Orlando won it, and I think its nice that they finally won something in MLS. Still don’t really get esports though

Montreal Impact signed a guy on loan from a Seria A team and he had a near instant impact. Sound familiar?

FIFA want to hustle up and expand the Women’s World Cup because they suddenly realized it can make them money