Steve Davis' weekly column, drilling down on five hot topics in American soccer
1. A better U.S. player pool today than yesterday
This is a head-spinning time for U.S. Soccer supporters, reeling to digest everything happening. The sky-high hope for Project Klinsmann has dissolved into something that looks like stark pragmatism. The road to Russia just got a little longer and more worrisome. And does the re-appointment of a once-and-future men’s national team manager represent regression, or is it just a temporary speed bump on a destined path to bigger and better?
So we should excuse anyone who doesn’t quite have their wits about them at the moment; stress can make fools of us all.
But one wrong-headed sentiment seems to be out there, and from some respected voices, too: That the U.S. player pool is somehow, some way, diminished today. That Bruce Arena had a superior pool of talent back in, say, 2002 during that stunning World Cup quarterfinal dash, than he does today.
Now that is over-thinking things. (And we know what over-thinking can do, right? If you’re not sure, go ask deposed national team boss Jurgen Klinsmann, who could write books on “over-think.”)
Yes, the national team of 10-15 years ago rose to a good place around Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley, Oguchi Onyewu, Bobby Convey and a couple of others from that splendid fourth-place side at the 1999 FIFA Under-17 World Championship. Claudio Reyna was around to orchestrate the midfield. Brian McBride could score. Brad Friedel or Kasey Keller heroically back-stopped it all.
But in the three most important ways, the current crop is every bit a match.
First, the current pool is healthy in difference makers. Jozy Altidore, for all his critics, scores at a rate equal to the best of the U.S. best. His international hit rate (37 goals in 99 appearances) compares to Clint Dempsey’s and out-strips Landon Donovan, Brian McBride, Eric Wynalda and anybody else near the top of the all-time scoring list.
Michael Bradley’s performances have been in-and-out lately, but if you think running the midfield is easy at international level, go back and look at some of the toxic reviews of Reyna’s performances. (Like Bradley, some are unfair, failing to recognize that it’s not easy to be the engine room when things around you are more clickety-clack than you’d like to believe.)
Goalkeeping difference makers? Sure, Keller could be a giant. But if you don’t think Howard (when healthy, of course) isn’t a world class shot stopper and conductor, you aren’t paying attention.
The only thing lacking in the current pool is a talismanic figure like Donovan – but you’ve seen Christian Pulisic play, right? It’s coming.
Second, depth. This is where it starts looking foolish to compare the current pool with, say, 10-15 years ago. Back then, if you played in a good European league you were pretty much an automatic U.S. starter. Now?
There are quality men in good leagues in Europe or Mexico who can’t get a U.S. start. Seriously! Look at just a partial list of U.S. men at impressive club addresses who still have to fight their way up the U.S. depth chart for starting assignments: Lynden Gooch, Omar Gonzalez (once Geoff Cameron returns from injury), Aron Johannsson, Perry Kitchen, Terrence Boyd, Greg Garza, Eric Lichaj, Alfredo Morales, Tim Ream, Jonathan Spector, Jorge Villafana and Danny Williams.
Consider this: Former Colorado Rapids defender Shane O’Neill is now at NAC Breda in the Netherlands, the same club that paid Earnie Stewart’s wages for a lot of his U.S. national team years. Stewart was more or less an automatic U.S. starter for a decade; today O’Neill isn’t even in the U.S. player pool conversation.
That’s not even mentioning all the good MLS men. Sacha Kljestan just completed the rare 20-assist season and he was barely cracking Klinsmann’s rosters. Matt Hedges, just voted best MLS defender, couldn’t get a call-up.
The point is, Arena today has two-times, three-times, maybe four-times the number of good options available for selection. Whatever player attributes he values most, it’s out there.
Finally, in terms of up-and-comers, I’ll fuss and fight with anybody who tries to tell me there were more in the pipeline in the early 2000s than now. Can we talk about Kellyn Acosta, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Justen Glad, Emerson Hyndman, Jerome Kiesewetter, Jordan Morris, Keegan Rosenberry, Wil Trapp, Walker Zimmerman and Gedion Zelalem? (Apologies If I missed your personal favorite “next big thing” – let’s just stay on point here.)
There’s pretty much no other way to see it: The U.S. player pool is in a great place. The best place ever. There’s ample food at this table. If you’re staring at it and still hungry, well, that’s on you.
2. Anybody wanna play dominoes?
The “coaching dominoes” are falling like never before in the domestic pro game. Not just “falling” actually; we’re seeing the dynamic effect of rising and falling dominoes.
Clearly Jurgen Klinsmann was the big domino here, the corner piece if you will. But this period of high transition within coaching ranks with last summer’s hirings and firings.
Remember the names “Sigi Schmid” and “Jason Kreis” and try to keep up here:
Arena just left a vacancy at the L.A. Galaxy. What a peach of a job that is! There’s every reason to believe the StubHub Center will continue to be a place for stars – especially now with crosstown rival LAFC setting its feet, ready to swipe as much buzz and hubbub as possible from its crosstown rival.
So? Will the Galaxy hire from within, which means Curt Onalfo? Or ask a current MLS man to “upgrade,” say a Peter Vermes or a Gregg Berhalter (who played at L.A. under Arena)? If so, that would leave an opening to fill. Perhaps Sigi Schmid?
Or … Schmid still has a house just down the road from the StubHub Center. And since hiring from the past is in vogue, well, remember that Schmid won a championship previously with the Galaxy. Plus, the Schmid-to-LAFC idea remains out there.
Would Jason Kreis be under consideration if he wasn’t put in place in Orlando? Perhaps. Heck, he might even have been in the national team coaching conversation. But he’s in Orlando, where Adrian Heath just couldn’t do enough to please the bosses in a year and half in charge.
Heath, by the way, is reportedly the man to lead Minnesota’s expansion effort.
We also have a high-profile figure moving into MLS in new Atlanta boss Gerardo “Tata” Martino. Game changer in the coaching ranks? We’ll see.
Now consider that Arena, Heath, and whoever takes the Galaxy and LAFC gigs will need to staff up. That will cause more coaching dominoes to do their thing. (Martino, with precious little MLS experience on his staff, may want to pick off a league assistant, too.) So, this thing’s not done.
3. On the media and Bruce Arena
Journalists who cover domestic soccer – I proudly and happily raise my hand here –know two things about Arena: The guy wins like nobody’s business, and; his antagonism toward the news media is legendary.
Arena, truly one of the dominant soccer fixtures here, is about to super-size himself, establishing an even more substantial footprint thanks to his second appointment as men’s national team coach. He’ll find an expanded portion of the Fourth Estate now paying attention to soccer. So, words of advice to the newbies:
Covering Bruce Arena as a journalist is one part standard professional endeavor, but also one part schoolyard bully standoff.
Believe me. I’ve seen this movie before, through his D.C. United days, through the man’s first term as U.S. men’s national team manager and through his days presiding over placid L.A. Galaxy Valley. It’s always an adventure – and you’re always wise to steel yourself for the fight.
First, he’s famously cranky and sometimes downright uncooperative, especially after loses. More than once he sent L.A. Galaxy assistant Dave Sarachan out to deal with the press after setbacks.
It took me a long time to turn over whether Arena’s curmudgeonly ways were an act, or whether “grumpy and quarrelsome” were legitimately his default states of being. Now I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere in between.
Plenty of players and staffers under Arena talk about how much the guy cares for everyone. That tells you he’s got a real heart beneath all the bluster and famous Arena arrogance. And you can’t watch Arena get emotional talking about Landon Donovan and think otherwise.
Plus, I’ve caught Arena in a few unguarded moments, where he’s chatty, funny and, yeah, even friendly and engaging. That part tells me some of his curmudgeon-ness is just “shtick.” But darn sure not all of it.
He doesn’t suffer fools. Which is to say, Arena doesn’t put up with silly questions, any queries that demonstrate you aren’t really paying attention. Ask one of those and you’ll get a face full of Arena’s biting sarcasm. Probably an eye roll, too. On the other hand, ask the right question and you might just get a “headline,” because Arena has a reputation for being candid, sometimes to the point of near self-destruction.
Mostly, what you need to understand is that Arena remains a scrappy Long Island kid at heart. He’s got some schoolboy bully in him. So, you just gotta know your stuff and stand up to the guy.
I remember a one-on-one with Arena form the Beckham Days, when the club had plenty of media from here and abroad on the prowl. On a couple of cushy hotel lobby sofas, we did the reporter-interviewee thing. I asked, he answered, all standard stuff – until he went into Prickly Pete mode.
So I reached over, turned off the recorder and asked in an annoyed tone, “Why? Why does it always have to be adversarial? Why does it always have to be a fight with you?”
Arena smiled. I’m pretty sure he even relaxed a little bit. “It doesn’t have to be. … Let’s keep going. What else do you want to know?”
4. Who gets MLS awards? You might be surprised
We heard a bit of consternation wafting out L.A. over Jelle Van Damme, who certainly had an outstanding season along the Galaxy back line – but who has been shut out so far in the MLS award season. (A place on the Best XI team seems likely; that list has yet to drop.)
Some faces soured when Van Damme did not get Defender of the Year (it went to FC Dallas’ Matt Hedges). More when MLS Newcomer of the Year went to Seattle’s Nicolas Lodeiro. Why the frowns? Was that a little entitlement at work? You know, fans and worker bees at the self-professed “super club” believing they deserve a little more because, well, just because?
So I bothered myself to count, thinking perhaps the Galaxy has done just fine in the annual list of MLS indy honors. And you know what? They don’t dominate the MLS individual award game.
Oh, the Galaxy does fine – but proportionate to the number of titles won, it’s not weighted unfairly.
That’s especially true if we look at the last 10 MLS years, about the time it started becoming measurably more difficult to win an MLS Cup due to the increased size of the field. (Before 2006 just 12 or fewer teams competed for the title.)
Counting up the most significant voted-on awards over the last 10 years – let’s go with MVP, Goalkeeper of the Year, Defender of the Year, Rookie of the Year and Newcomer of the Year – the Galaxy has six.
For a club that has won three MLS Cups in that time (and appeared in one other final), that doesn’t seem out of line. But you know who does seem to have a disproportionate share? D.C. United has eight awards in that time, more than any other team. And zero titles!
Reason? Hard to say. Media counts for a third of the vote on these things (along with a MLS players and MLS staff), and a larger share of the leagues writers, bloggers, broadcasters, etc., do tend to cluster toward the East coast.
After D.C. United and the Galaxy, a few teams come in with three or four, but those two teams (both managed for a time by Bruce Arena, for whatever that means) have the most.
5. The Little Five
5a. Ozzie Alonso has been sensational this season for Seattle. Nico Lodeiro has been all that and deserves Newcomer of the Year. Jordan Morris likewise deserves his Rookie of the Year award. They have all been rightly heralded in 2016. But this deserves saying, too: Chad Marshall just keeps getting the center back business done, winning pretty much all the important challenges Tuesday against Colorado.
5b. Both home teams won in Tuesday’s big night of conference semifinal first legs. But importantly, both scored road goals. Toronto, with two of those pearls, has reason to feel good about getting back home. So does Colorado, although Pablo Mastroeni’s team cooked up just one away goal. But consider this: The Rapids are remarkably comfortable playing in one-goal games (and by extension, a “one-goal series”). Not only did they overturn a tougher deficit to the L.A. Galaxy in the last round (returning in the second leg without a road goal,1-0 down), they were a league-best 13-4 in one-goal games this year. That’s the hardened Mastroeni influence.
5c. On the other hand, when Rapids midfielder Jermaine Jones steps on the field for Sunday’s second leg, he’ll be playing his 4th game in 17 days, with travel between each one. He’s 35 years old.
5d. There was a surprising degree of snark and outrage over Tuesday’s delay in Montreal, where the field was mis-marked. It certainly wasn’t the club’s finest moment. But in the end the system worked (where officials arrive 90 minutes before the match to inspect the field). And in the end, the delay was about 30 minutes. In the big picture, there’s far, far more serious and consequential stuff that can go wrong.
5e. In a wildly entertaining game where the stars shined (Jozy Altidore, Michael Bradley, Ignacio Piatti and Sebastian Giovinco all scored or assisted) and where both coaches had tactical high and low points, the introduction of a lunch pail guy may have turned the series. Will Johnson’s entry gave Bradley less ground to cover defensively, freeing him to create and get the offense going faster. Plus, it gave the visitors some missing bite, and helped wear down Montreal’s well-aged midfield.
Steve Davis has covered Major League Soccer since is first kick in 1996. He writes on-line for FourFourTwo and co-hosts the weekly radio show/podcast ESPN Soccer Today on 103.3 FM in Dallas. Davis is also the radio play-by-play voice for FC Dallas on 100.7 FM.