Does David Beckham Have Another Comeback Left?

When we last left David Beckham, he was training with Tottenham Hotspur in England. Trying to keep fit and so forth.

Beckham missed part of the Los Angeles Galaxy's preseason but managed, unusually, to be on the field for the team's opening games. Perhaps his time in America has taught him the meaning of the phrase "contract year" -- the fully explicable rise in performance and effort in the last season of an athlete's contract.

Yet Beckham is hardly the driving force with the Galaxy at the moment. Soccer America's Paul Gardner, daring to risk angering Beckham loyalists once again, scoffed that Beckham hardly seems fit, which was supposedly the whole point of his winter in England.

Beckham's effect on Major League Soccer is curious. From a business standpoint, he has been a success. And yet Galaxy fans have had it with their sporadically interested midfielder. When Reuters writer Simon Evans attempted to defend Beckham's offseason sojourn, he drew a painful smackdown from BigSoccer wit and Galaxy supporter Dan Loney, who says of Beckham's play:

He is strolling through his final year, so far at least. Beckham's unfamiliarity with his alleged teammates, and his unwillingness or inability to run, pass or defend, means that unless the ball is absolutely still, he's worse than useless.

But the thing to remember about Beckham is that he has demonstrated so many times an uncanny knack for the comeback. He has restored his relationship with Galaxy fans once already. If he can play some role on a team that has a very good chance of winning trophies this season, he can do so again.

And then, one can only hope, he'll quit digging holes from which he must climb out.