Filed under: US Soccer, U.S. Men’s National Team
Nobody who hires a coach is going to be too concerned about his fashion sense or grim public persona. Wins matter, and by that metric, Bob Bradley really had only one mark against him during his four year tenure — his team failed to defeat Ghana in the second round of the World Cup.
Should the U.S. have won that game? Ghana was ranked 32nd in the world heading into the tournament, compared to the Americans’ 14th. But nobody takes those positions too seriously. The Black Stars boasted players who were regulars in the English, Italian, French and Spanish leagues, among others, along with a core of youngsters who won the 2009 Under-20 World Cup. They were the best African team in the competition.
The real issue, it seems, was that expectations soared when the U.S. won its group and when Ghana, Uruguay and South Korea emerged as the obstacles on the road to the semifinals. U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati admitted that immediately after the loss to Ghana and again on Wednesday, when he spoke to reporters following the announcement that Bradley will coach the national team through 2014.
“If we had finished second in the group and played Germany (in the round-of-16) and lost in overtime, 2-1, my guess is that we all would have felt differently, even though the final outcome would ahve been the same,” Gulati said. “With a little time to reflect, and you look back, it was a good World Cup experience. It hasn’t’ changed my view that we all would have wanted another game or two.”
Sure, but only the most myopic of American soccer fans would insist that the U.S. is among the best eight teams in the world. It’s really difficult to make the World Cup quarterfinals, and no coach on the planet would be expected to take the U.S. there without a good dose of luck. The Ghana game was a 50/50 proposition, and the Americans took it to overtime and got beat. Beside that, Bradley won the 2007 CONCACAF Gold Cup, finished first in the region’s World Cup qualifying competition and beat Spain on the way to the 2009 Confederations Cup final.
Yet fans across the country seem apoplectic that Bradley’s contract was renewed. His team gave up early goals too often in South Africa, but there’s no real evidence that it came down to coaching. He played Ricardo Clark and Robbie Findley against Ghana, yes. Hindsight suggests those were bad moves, but there aren’t necessarily players who would have performed better. Plenty of other decisions worked out (Benny Feilhaber, Jonathan Bornstein, etc.), and all coaches have players who screw up. As Gulati said Wednesday, there were 31 teams wishing something had gone differently at the World Cup, not to mention the 170 or so that didn’t even qualify.
So what, exactly, were the biggest arguments against retaining Bradley, other than the fact that he’s a bit aloof, rambles a lot and not foreign enough to satisfy the legions of self-hating American soccer snobs? Bradley can’t develop teenage players, nor can he spur more people to by tickets to MLS games, thereby boosting the revenue/salary cap for a league that needs to continue to improve. He has to work with what’s available, and what’s available is a team good enough to make the second round of the World Cup. Which isn’t bad for a country that’s been taking soccer seriously for only 25 years.
On Wednesday, FanHouse asked Bradley to reveal what he thought he should have done differently during his tenure as a whole or in South Africa. Where were the mistakes? What should he have improved upon?
“It’s always the ability to be more successful in the hardest games,” he said. “For example, we had stretches in the last four years where our defending as a team wasn’t very good. We worked a lot to make sure that there’s a good understanding on the field in terms of how we move, where we pressure, how we cover each other, and yet when you get to the most difficult games that doesn’t always mean that you do it as well in those games as you need to in order to win. Things get put to the test. It may be at one point that things are quite good. A little while later it shows as much as we’ve improved, it must continue.
“We have really tried to make sure that our players, through this entire cycle, understand what the levels are, understand what the best teams do well. We’ve played in games that have tested us to perform at that level and to give players a real first-hand experience of how we need to continue improve, and when I talk about the work continuing, it’s with all that in mind.”
So his biggest regret is that there were moments where the U.S. simply couldn’t match the best teams in the world, whether it was team defending, finishing or handling an untimely turnover. Lots of other coaches have those same regrets. And other, far more famous, accomplished and European coaches, have more. Fabio Capello’s England was a petulant disaster, from John Terry’s press conference mutiny to Wayne Rooney’s post-game temper tantrum. Its second-round elimination was far more disturbing than the U.S.’s.
Raymond Domenech presided over the most embarrassing World Cup meltdown in history, and ended his tenure with France by refusing to shake the hand of South Africa coach Carlos Alberto Parreira. Marcelo Lippi selected an aging Italian side that was nowhere near good enough to handle the rigors of a World Cup, Sven-Göran Eriksson suffered a first-round elimination and Carlos Queiroz’ Portugal played well in one of its four games. These are the types of coaches that angry American fans want to replace Bob Bradley. Did they all suddenly become morons after crossing the equator in June, or does soccer really come down to which players perform best at a given moment (or lousy referees)?
There are more accomplished coaches than Bob Bradley. But they all have strikes against them as well, and to his credit, Bradley runs a program that represents the United States with dignity and honor. And isn’t that what it’s all about? There are no strikes, player mutinies or scandals. His players work hard and enjoy playing with each other, and his team doesn’t turn every big-game handshake into a fistfight like the Mexicans. Bradley didn’t turn every press conference into an antagonistic battle like Diego Maradona and Dunga, and he’s not a mercenary who will jump ship at the first sign of hardship. He fields a team that real American soccer fans can be proud of, for the most part, and with which they can identify.
Gulati said that he and Bradley were stopped three times Monday on the way to Starbucks to get coffee following their negotiation, and fans “thanked him for the World Cup performance.”
There’s that, and the on-field accomplishments outlined above. All of those, it seems, should outweigh the loss to Ghana. If Bradley continues putting Findley and Clark in positions they can’t handle, then there’s cause for consternation. But in the meantime, it’s hard to figure out how Gulati could have gone in a different direction.
Jürgen Klinsmann is an almost allegorical representation of what we wish the national team coach to be. His record isn’t that spectacular. Third place at the World Cup is great, but few traditional soccer powers hosting the tournament have done worse, and the Germans needed Argentina to shoot itself in the foot to get to the semifinals. Joachim Löw’s work with the team in 2006 and 2010 may have had more to do with the performance, anyway. Klinsmann didn’t last a full season at Bayern Munich in 2008-09.
Bradley isn’t the perfect coach. But that doesn’t mean that at this time and in this place, he wasn’t the right man for the job. It’s hard to find tangible evidence to the contrary. It would have been nice to have beaten Ghana. But if anyone is driven to improve, it’s Bradley himself.
“I’m not easily satisfied,” he said Wednesday. “There are always two sides to this. There is a side in terms of what the team is all about, how it competes, what are the performances like. We look back at this cycle and in those ways we felt good about those things. In those ways, the response around the world and at home was positive.
“At the same time, we recognize that at every tournament you want to go as far as you can. You want to win and you want to make the final. We feel good about what we have accomplished, but that doesn’t mean that we think it’s all perfect. That’s what motivates us and our players so we’ll continue to work at it.”
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Wed, Sep 1, 2010
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