Bill Hamid on vacation in London

UPDATE: Stand down, false alarm. According to the club, Hamid is just on vacation in London. The original story continues below.

Three days ago, Bill Hamid tweeted that "packing is stressful." Most of us who saw that just moved on, because packing can be stressful, especially around the holidays. However, given D.C. United's recent history with communicating training stints, a tiny red flag started stirring in the back of my mind.

Well, now that flag is a Les Miz-sized banner: Bill Hamid tweeted again today that he is in London and is attending the match between West Bromwich Albion and Queens Park Rangers. West Brom, of course, is the team that Hamid trained with last offseason and is a team for which he still seems to have a great amount of respect. As is typically the case after an American trains with a European club, all of the noise out of England during and after the training session was that West Brom was about to make a move for Hamid, something that United was never going to let happen then. But now its two training stints in two years with the same club, even though the club has a different manager than last year.

The main worry, however, is that there is still radio silence from the D.C. United headquarters. Last year, Hamid's training stint was announced in October, immediately after the team's season ended, and he left for training immediately thereafter. This year, both Andy Najar and Hamid have gotten to their foreign destinations without a word from the team, and with much more space between the season and these stints than in the past. And both of these stints are creeping suspiciously close to the opening of January transfer window. We have already been on Najar Watch; now, we may have to inaugurated Hamid Watch as well.