Minnesota United at Seattle Sounders: Keys to the match, projected starting XI and a prediction

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Minnesota United at Seattle Sounders

When: 9 p.m. CT Friday
Where: Lumen Field
Stream: Apple TV Season Pass
Weather: 74 degrees, sunny, 9 mph south wind

Context: MNUFC, Seattle and Liga MX club Necaxa are the three teams in Leagues Cup West Group 6. The Loons will play Necaxa at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Allianz Field. Seattle and Necaxa don’t play until Aug. 4 in Washington. The top two teams advance to the knockout rounds.

Flashback: The Loons beat Puebla 4-0 and lost 3-2 to Chicago Fire in the inaugural Leagues Cup group stage last summer. United then topped Columbus and Toluca, each in penalty kicks, in the first two knockout rounds before falling 5-0 to Nashville in the quarterfinals.

Series history: The Loons have lost all nine MLS matches played in Seattle since 2017, including a 2-0 loss on June 15.

“It was one of the worst days we had out in Seattle, really strange situation,” head coach Eric Ramsay said Tuesday. “We went there on the celebration of their club’s existence, I suppose, and it took a long time for the game to get going. Then we lose (Devin Padelford to a concussion). It was as flat a game as we’ve had all year.”

View: MLS continues to undercut the quality of its products. Take Robin Lod’s week for example. The Loons midfielder got a career thrill of playing in the All-Star Game in Columbus on Wednesday, but how close that showcase comes to Friday’s Leagues Cup match puts Lod as “very unlikely” to play against Sounders, Ramsay said.

Seattle didn’t have an all-star selection this season, while the Loons are expected to be without its best player. MLS’ condensed schedule is to blame.

Absences: Michael Boxall (international duty), Wil Trapp (hamstring), DJ Taylor (hamstring), Sang Bin Jeong (personal matter) are out. Lod (all-star game) is doubtful.

Projected XI: In a 5-2-3 formation, LW Samuel Shashoua, CF Tani Oluwaseyi, RW Bongi Hlongwane; CM Hassani Dotson, CM Alejandro Bran; LWB Joseph Rosales, Devin Padelford, CB Micky Tapias, CB Carlos Harvey, RWB Caden Clark; GK Dayne St. Clair.

Check-in: Rosales has become one of the best wingbacks in MLS this season, meaning he is underpaid at $93,988 in guaranteed compensation, according to the MLS Players Association. Reports out of Honduras this week has MNUFC working on a contract extension with the improving 23-year-old.

Another check-in: Franco Fragapane is out of contract at the end of the season and reports out of Argentina link the winger in a move back to his home country. MNUFC will keep its ears open to potential value in return for the 31-year-old; that’s what Loons did in selling Kervin Arriaga to Partizan in Serbia once they were unable to reach a contract extension.

Player to watch: Hlongwane scored seven goals in 412 minutes in the 2023 Leagues Cup, challenging superstar Lionel Messi for the tournament’s golden boot. The South African is also coming off a nice header goal in the 2-0 win over San Jose in MLS play on Saturday.

Scouting report: Seattle has allowed the third-fewest goals in MLS this season (29). They had three straight shutout wins until LAFC beat them 3-0 on Saturday.

Prediction: The Loons are again so shorthanded it’s hard for them to field a quality starting lineup, and Seattle has completely owned MNUFC in Washington. It’s hard not to see more of the same as Seattle wins comfortably at 3-1.

Pat Owens, mayor who led Grand Forks through historic 1997 flood, dies at 83

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GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Former Grand Forks Mayor Patricia “Pat” Owens, who led the community through the historic Red River Flood of 1997, has died.

The face of Grand Forks, N.D. mayor Pat Owens shows the strain of trying to manage her city during the April 1997 flooding. Owens’ resilience became well-known during the crisis. (John Doman / Pioneer Press)

Her daughter, Robin Owens Flurer, announced the news in an email Tuesday afternoon.

“Today, Pat passed away of natural causes at 83 years old,” Flurer said.

Owens is known for her work as mayor of Grand Forks during its greatest crisis, when the waters of the Red River rose past sandbag dikes and devastated a community that had grown used to floods but none that compared to 1997. And as much of the town succumbed to the growing waters, fire broke out in sections of downtown.

The images of the fire, in the wake of the flood, were broadcast on national television. Owens was featured prominently in that coverage, remembers Keith Lund, who is now the director of the Grand Forks Region Economic Development Corp., but at the time was a staff member at the Grand Forks Urban Development office

It was a “really stark image” that was presented to the nation, Lund said, and “she really did represent the community well.” He said her ability to connect with important decision-makers on a national level — including then-President Bill Clinton — helped direct resources to the city.

“I recall she was a great ambassador for Grand Forks during a very difficult time,” Lund said. “She had a great relationship with our congressional delegation and state leaders and was coined ‘America’s mayor’ for a period of time while we were going through this horrific event.”

In 2017, the Grand Forks Herald published a retrospective edition that marked the 20-year anniversary of the flood. In it, she noted how she was faced with a difficult decision.

In Grand Forks, N.D., President Bill Clinton toured the flooded area via helicopter on April 22, 1997 and then held a joint press conference with Grand Forks mayor Pat Owens. (John Stennes / Grand Forks Herald / Forum News Service)

“I always remember Howard Swanson, our attorney, and Ken Vein, our city engineer, looking at me and I’m sitting down, and they said, ‘Pat, you have to decide whether to evacuate the city,’ ” Owens recalled in the 2017 Herald interview.

Her response: “Oh, my goodness.”

“I was tired, and my brain went from one side to the other,” Owens said. “I thought, ‘If I make a decision to evacuate and we don’t have a flood, they’ll impeach me.’ But I thought, we have to save lives at all costs, so I signed the form to start evacuating the city.

“I think that was one thing I did that I was really happy I had done because, boy, everything started breaking loose after that.”

Amid the devastation grew a friendship with Clinton. In 2012, the Herald reminisced about that relationship.

Owens remembered that Clinton promised to help the Red River Valley cities rebuild in a speech at Grand Forks Air Force Base, which at the time was serving as a camp for those displaced by the flood. The Herald noted in 2012 that Clinton kept his word through federal Community Development Block Grants, disaster recovery assistance and funding for the flood control project.

Former President Bill Clinton is cheered on by supporters following his speech in downtown Grand Forks on March 17, 2012, at the flood obelisk. Former Grand Forks mayor Pat Owens and other city officials from the flood of 1997 in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks joined Clinton on stage. It was Clinton’s first visit to Grand Forks since the 1997 flood. (Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald / Forum News Service)

“He basically looked at the crowd and looked at me and said, ‘I’ll be with you to the end.’ And he kept his promise,” Owens told the Herald at the time.

And then, she said, Clinton kept a door open to local officials at the White House after his visit.

“Almost every time we went to Washington we’d see him,” Owens said.

Clinton came back to Grand Forks years after the flood and spoke at a ceremony at the flood obelisk, a marker near the Sorlie Bridge that notes years of high water — including the record 54-foot mark that occurred in 1997.

Owens was there, too; she took the stage with Clinton.

Related: When hell and high water came: A look back at the 1997 Grand Forks flood

Owens only served one term as mayor — a tumultuous term, after dealing with the flood itself and then directing the recovery, which at times proved controversial. In 2000, she lost a three-way race to Michael Brown, a local doctor who himself served as mayor until 2020 before being unseated by current Mayor Brandon Bochenski.

Bochenski never personally met Owens but he said she reached out via email, noting that she was watching city developments from a distance and that she wished him well.

“I thought it was amazing for her to take the time and reach out to give me well wishes,” Bochenski said. “She didn’t have to do that.”

He, too, noted her status as “America’s mayor” during the flood and commended her for “getting the community through the flood, which was obviously the worst time, at least in recent history, here.”

East Grand Forks Mayor Lynn Stauss, left, and Grand Forks Mayor Pat Owens answer questions from the media after announcing an anonymous donation of $2,000 each to flood-stricken families within their city limits Tuesday. (John Doman / Pioneer Press)

He said he feels she remained “well-loved with staff members.”

Prior to being mayor, Lund recalled that Owens served for years as assistant to the mayor. After her time as mayor ended, Owens moved to Florida.

A pedestrian bridge over the Red River — connecting Grand Forks to East Grand Forks, Minn. — bears Owens’ name.

“In grateful recognition of her extraordinary service as mayor of Grand Forks during and after the Flood of 1997,” reads a nearby sign.

Asked what image he sees of Owens when he recalls her time as mayor, Lund said it is a vision of a person who assumed leadership on the cusp of a historic community crisis.

“The image I see of former Mayor Pat Owens was that she was struggling herself with what the community was going through but stepped up in the moment to represent the community and advocate on our behalf, ultimately putting the city on the path to recovery,” he said.

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Thomas Friedman: Netanyahu: A small man in a big time?

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When I think about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address on Wednesday to a joint meeting of Congress, the first thing that comes to mind is the famous dictum “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” This is one of those weeks for Israel, America and the Middle East. A decade is teed up to happen — or not.

By pure accident, a set of profound war-or-peace tipping points have intersected this week that Tolstoy could not have made up. In the wake of President Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday to put his country ahead of his personal interests and cede power, Netanyahu — who has consistently put his personal interests ahead of his country’s to hold power — comes to Washington. And he comes facing two intertwined decisions that could provide Biden a huge foreign policy legacy and transform Netanyahu’s own legacy at the same time — or not.

It’s as if the writers of “The West Wing” on NBC decided to collaborate on a script with the writers of “Fauda” on Netflix — and they’re now wrestling over whether to make a series about a new dawn or a new tragedy for America, Israel and the Arab world.

Thanks to the frequent-flyer travels since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 of Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director Bill Burns and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Netanyahu has two huge decisions sitting on his desk that could both pause the fighting in the Gaza Strip — and Lebanon — and lay the groundwork for a new U.S.-Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran.

We are talking about the most consequential opportunity to reshape the Middle East since the Camp David agreements in the 1970s.

The first: Cease fire, hostage return

The first decision, though, requires Netanyahu to agree — right now — on a phased-cease-fire deal tentatively reached by U.S., Israeli, Qatari, Egyptian and Hamas negotiators that would trigger, in Phase 1, a six-week pause in the fighting in Gaza and the return of 33 Israeli hostages (some dead, some alive), including 11 women, in return for several hundred Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

In June, Netanyahu signaled his support for the basic parameters of this deal but since then has been toying around with certain aspects of it — dialing up and down their security importance to an Israeli public that does not always know the details — to buy himself time before signing off and possibly alienating the far-right extremists in his Cabinet, to whom he has promised a “total victory” over Hamas in Gaza.

Netanyahu has focused on three security issues. One is the movement of Gaza civilians from southern Gaza, where they have taken refuge, to northern Gaza City, where many had their homes. Netanyahu had been seeking some kind of inspection system to prevent armed Hamas members from flowing back to the north, but with tens of thousands of people who will be moving, the Israeli army knows that it will be impossible to prevent a few hundred Hamas fighters from coming back (plenty are there already) and believes it can deal with them later.

The second issue is the control of the border between Gaza and Egypt, where Hamas built tunnels and smuggling routes from which it brought in many weapons. The Israeli army, according to a source, believes it has identified or destroyed most of the tunnels and that Israel and Egypt can ensure no one is passing above ground for now — and they can build a more permanent barrier over time. The last issue is the Rafah crossing from Egypt to Gaza, which Israel says Hamas must never again control and where it insists on some inspection oversight — in partnership with non-Hamas Palestinians and some international party.

As Israeli and U.S. security officials explained to me, none of these issues should be deal breakers — unless Netanyahu wants to inflame one of them to get out of the deal — even though Israel’s top military and intelligence officials all reportedly support it now.

On Monday Haaretz quoted retired Col. Lior Lotan, a hostage expert and a close adviser to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (who is the only serious adult in Netanyahu’s Cabinet), as telling Israel’s Channel 12 News on Friday: “Now is the money time. There’s a unique opportunity in the negotiations, but such opportunities pass if they aren’t utilized. The terms of the deal include risks that the defense establishment can tolerate. All the heads of the security services say this. To counter them with a hypothetical, as if it were possible to get more through more military pressure, would be wrong.’’

At the same time, Israel’s Mossad chief David Barnea, the country’s top hostage negotiator, reportedly told Netanyahu and his far-right Cabinet “that the female hostages don’t have any time left to wait for a new hostage deal framework.”

Hamas, whatever its lingering reservations, also seems to want a deal now too. It has grown steadily more unpopular in Gaza (the most underreported aspect of this conflict) for having started a war with no plan for the morning after and no protection for Palestinian civilians. It is not clear to me who will try to kill Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar first, if and when he emerges from his hiding place — the Israeli army or Gaza civilians.

Another huge benefit of a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel is that it would be likely to pave the way for a Hezbollah-Israel cease-fire, so tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border could return home. Given the increased use of precision rockets by both Israel and Hezbollah, U.S. defense officials now believe that the biggest danger to the Middle East is a widening Israel-Hezbollah war.

Second: Relate with Saudi Arabia, isolate Iran

And now for Netanyahu’s second big decision. On a parallel track, the Biden team has worked out virtually all the details for a U.S.-Saudi defense alliance that would also include normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia — provided that Netanyahu would agree to embark on negotiations for a two-state solution. The Saudis are not asking for a hard deadline for a Palestinian state. But they are demanding that Israel agree to start credible, good-faith negotiations with the explicit goal of a two-state solution, with mutual security guarantees.

Such a negotiation, in tandem with a cease-fire on the Gaza and Lebanon fronts, would be a diplomatic coup. It would isolate Iran and Hamas. It would normalize relations between the Jewish state and the birthplace of Islam. It would give Israel the cover to enlist Palestinian and Arab support for peacekeeping troops in Gaza. And it would give Israel the cement for a more formal regional defense alliance with Arab partners against Iran.

Finally, and most important, it could create a long-term pathway for a Palestinian state once the fighting in Gaza is over and everyone on all sides grasps what I believe is the most important lesson of this war: none of the parties can afford another one — not when everyone is getting precision weapons.

As David Makovsky, director of the Washington Institute’s Project on Arab-Israel Relations, put it to me: “With two decisions — yes on a hostages-for-cease-fire deal now and yes on the Saudi normalization terms that would end the Sunni Arab states’ war with Israel and consolidate a regional alliance to isolate Iran — Netanyahu would create a win for Israel and for his partner President Biden.

Will Netanyahu rise to the moment?

“The Abraham Accords would be succeeded by the ‘Joseph Accords.’ Two legacies for two leaders: Biden and Bibi. It would be a bitter and tragic irony if Netanyahu — whose self-image is one of a strategic thinker — would miss this moment due to Israeli domestic politics and fear of his far-right coalition partners.”

Indeed, we are going to find out very soon whether Netanyahu can live up to his grand Churchillian self-image or is, as writer Leon Wieseltier once observed, just “a small man in a big time.”

Up to now Netanyahu has been clinging to power to avoid being thrown in jail should he be found guilty in any of his ongoing trials — for breach of trust, accepting bribes and fraud. As such, he has been unwilling to do anything daring on peace with the Palestinians without permission from the crazy far-right members of his Cabinet, who are demanding the “total victory” over Hamas that Netanyahu himself promised. But with the Israeli Knesset about to adjourn from July 28 until Oct. 27, Netanyahu could agree to both the Gaza and Saudi deals without fear of his government being toppled, because that is virtually impossible to do when the Knesset is out of session.

So, the world waits, the hostages wait, Biden waits, the Palestinians wait, the Saudis wait, the Israelis wait. Will Bibi, once again, be just a small man in a big time or surprise everyone and be a big man in a big time?

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

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