Photo by Jim O’Connor/USA Today Sports
By FRANCO PANIZO
HARRISON, N.J. — The New York Red Bulls had clearly been the better side in the first half. They had created chances. They had a two-goal lead. Red Bull Arena was buzzing in full support.
All that still did not stop head coach Jesse Marsch from going into the locker room at halftime to shout at his men. Marsch wanted better regardless of how pretty New York was already sitting, and his players agreed.
The Red Bulls defeated the San Jose Earthquakes, 2-0, on Friday night, but both Marsch and the team were not satisfied with the overall performance despite being pleased with the final result. New York felt it was often too sloppy with its passing, that it failed to truly put the game out of reach and that there was a bit of a letdown from an intensity standpoint in the final 15-20 minutes.
Mind you, this was all coming from a club that was now undefeated through five games and in first place of the Eastern Conference. But you sure would have been hard-pressed to figure that out judging by the mood in the Red Bulls’ largely quiet locker room.
“You look at last week and there’s so many good teams that thought they were good teams, and then whether they underestimated their opponent or just didn’t bring the same sort of fight to the game, they came out flat. We showed some of that today,” said goalkeeper Luis Robles, whose voice was hoarse from so much shouting. “We were fortunate to get two goals, and to hold them off, but there were definitely moments when they were the better team.
“When we’re playing at home, we can’t have that. If we want guys to take us seriously around the league, not only do we have to defend our turf, but we have to make teams feel like when they leave that they got beat. I don’t know if San Jose can say that right now.”
The Earthquakes were pretty somber in their dressing room due to the number of mistakes they had in the match, but the Red Bulls, interestingly enough, were also spending a good amount of time dwelling on theirs.
The words “sloppy” and “better” were repeated over and over again, especially since New York managed to put just two of its 21 shots into the back of the net and let up defensively in the last quarter of an hour.
To the club, it was clear that improvements needed to be made across the board.
“I think when we watch the tape, the general consensus is that we can just be better in every facet of the game,” said captain Dax McCarty. “Our pressure can be better, our energy can be better, with the ball we can be sharper. I thought we were very sloppy tonight. I just thought this is a game we could’ve won, 4- or 5-0 if we’re a little bit sharper.”
Not wanting to allow complacency to settle in is one thing, but the Red Bulls seemed genuinely upset about how they performed in the shutout victory at home on Friday. There was no music playing, few smiles and not much banter amongst the players.
Yes, there were glimpses and hints of satisfaction sprinkled in here and there over the ability to gab results despite not playing to the best of their abilities. Overall, however, the players echoed their coach’s halftime frustration.
“We know we haven’t played a complete 90 minutes yet,” said McCarty. “While it may feel good that we’re getting good results, we want the performance to be better as well. I walked off the field today happy that we got three points, but not satisfied with the total performance.
“That’s a feeling I want to get rid of because I know we are capable of more.”
Page 1-5 of my 300 page plan is complete.
Practices are alot longer and everyone is working really hard. Will it work long term or will players wear out? Time will tell.
I am presently watching Clelsea and Man u.The game is highly technical but from a fans point of view quite boring.Last night’s Red Bull game was so much more exciting. Attacking soccer,even if it is MLS,is the way to go.I was on the edge of my seat fo most of the game.Watching this game, I’m waiting for the last 15 minutes for the expensive talent to perform with any real excitement.
Another good game was Tijuana and Chivas Friday night. Both teams were constantly attacking. The game was back and forth all night and it ended up a 1-1 draw. I like to watch Tijuana because they always play that way when they’re at home and it makes for exciting futbol. The English like to talk about how fast the EPL is, but some games on this side of the Atlantic are even faster and more intense.
I see a team laden with high-energy players who have the quality to barrel forward into the attack and a manager who encourages them to do that. Finally, I might add, because I’ve been saying for years this is how they should play. Petke never got that — he had world class attackers (one who he rarely used as such) but played a very conservative style with too much emphasis on static positioning and defending. I’ll say it again: MLS defenses are not good enough to reliably stop a quality attack minded team, and their counter attacks aren’t crisp enough to reliably force such a team to abandon attacking. Red Bulls won’t get a result every time, of course, but this team will be tough to defeat if they keep playing this way. Credit to Masrch for recognizing this and getting buy-in from his talent.
Petke was working with guys like Henry and Peguy – very good players obviously, but that is NOT a midfield you want to be counterpressing with. That is a midfield with which you want to break down opposing teams with passing. Petke played his squad right, and Marsch is doing the right thing with his team.
The 3-0-2 start is just what this club needed. With all the fanfare surrounding NYCFC, Red Bulls needed to grab some headlines. Pity it is not showing in the stands,…yet. It was an absolutely perfect evening for a game at RBA and the stadium was half full.
Two thoughts on the whole Marsh/Petke debate. 1) the team is essentially the same with the core of McCarty, Sam, BWP and Robles driving the team forward. Klestjian seems to be a good MLS player,…not much more. I would have preferred Mix Diskerud,…but he is not buds with Marsh. So,…could it be that this team is simply adjusting well to life without TH,…as opposed to the result of some transformative impact from the coach? 2) as others have noted above,….let’s see how the high pressure tactics work in just over a week when Red Bulls play Galaxy on Sunday and Rapids on Wednesday. Will legs be heavy?
BTW – whither Leo Stoltz? Is he injured?
Don’t you think the team’s ability to adjust to life withour Henry has something to do with the coach?
Maybe,…maybe not. Maybe Petke makes McCarty captain and the entire team,….no longer in the shadow of TH and TC,….come together and perform as they have. There have been a few good examples of MLS teams with a good nucleas of solid MLS players and no ‘big name’ DPs who do well,…RSL, Houston and KC come to mind.
Again,…I will point out that it is McCarty, Sam, BWP and Robles who are leading the way. They are ALL holder overs from last season who all performed well last year. Miazga is a Red Bull youth player who was with the club last year al well. The Curtis/Marsh additions —- Klestjian, Felipe, Lawrence and Grella have been good,…Lawrence in particular. As I have said a number of times before,…I think Red Bulls would have been better off (in the long term) with Alexander and Diskerud vs. Klestjian and Felipe.
Anyway,…I am not going to complain. The team is playing well. I am stoked for McCarty, Sam, BWP and Robles. Just hope the Ali G stays out of sight and keeps his trap shut.
agnigrin, matt, and Finito pretty much summarize the current debate over RBNY. It’s true that we can never know what Petke would have done with this roster, and that Marsch did not start with a clean slate, but I cannot imagine Petke adjusting as well as Marsch to an Henry-less team. Perhaps unavoidably and perhaps appropriately, Petke relied heavily on Genry both on the field and as a de facto assistant coach. His fire and pride are undeniable, as is their carry-over effect on this year’s squad, but Marsch brings something new. There’s no way to prove it, but I don’t see this team having the success it has enjoyed so far under Petke.
Excuse the typos. Autocorrect and moving too quickly.
We will never be able to know what Petke would have done with this team. The history books written will not show what we fans saw: one of the best man managers in the league who gave fans an unparalleled pride for their club, market, and history despite its many and continued failings. Just as you cannot wholly credit a new President for the results in his first year, Marsch’s results must be credited in large part to the work of the past couple years. Petke had an ability to embolden s fanbase and, as was said before, inspire players to play. No one thinks he’s a tactical genius or that he’s the next Mourinho. But, he was a surprisingly good coach who knew how to play to the strengths of others. And he made people forget that we were a billboard for a disgusting, body-harming explosion of sugar masquerading as something suitable for consumption. Any team named after a product that proceeded the team will suffer from an identity crisis. As a club legend, who was successful mind you, he had that rare ability.
Red Bulls have also been given an incredibly lucky schedule to start the year. As the year gets on and we have multiple game weeks, will legs begin to feel leaden? When teams start to figure out how to counteract the high press style, what will we see? I almost want to laugh at everyone screaming Marsch’s praise and saying, ‘by george! They got it right’ because this team has been extremely fortunate in scheduling so far.
I think this team has the potential to be better than Petke’s. Having the players not be satisfied with yesterday’s win is very reminiscent of comments made by Titi after the Buls won but played lousy. So in a sense you are right this team is a continuation from last year but Jesse has instilled a different mindset and tactical acumen and so far it is working. Hopefully the Red Bulls continue their good play.
The team plays with a better shape and cohesiveness than they ever did under Petke.
Highly organized in defense and a cohesive transition to offense not dependent on the brilliance of one player.
Petke is not a coach anywhere for a reason.
Marsch is doing a fine job with the team, a nice renovation project. It might keep getting better for them (every team in the league has a long way to go before being called impressive, including red bulls.)
I fear that, if they keep winning, the perception of Petke will become that he was replaced by a better coach. May be proven to be true, but right now the team is (still) winning partly thanks to his prior work. He had already turned the leaders of this current team into players other teams have to respect – Robles, McCarty, BWP, Sam. When each of those players started here there were big doubts, that Petke helped them erase. The reason, it seems to me, that the team is doing well right now is that they’ve been able to cope without their former legends in the locker room. And they have done that thanks to those aforementioned guys, in my opinion, not exclusively the newer players or the new coach or a new system. The new players are either fillers, albeit good ones, or Petke-era players who we hadn’t seen a lot yet, because they weren’t ready last year.
My reason for posting is simply out of support for a rb team that looks to have only continued what they had started building last year, at the end of which they were playing very well, high pressure soccer and attacking down the wings. Again credit to Jesse Marsch for respecting the house his predecessor built.
Wow, in reality no team should be satisfied if they win or lose. It’s a champions mentality and probably every athlete in the world has that after thought after every win.
However, I think it’s so easy to coach a team in MLS but you need to know how to manage the salary cap since it sucks and the roster.
If you can’t handle MLS salary cap and dont have the support of recruiting players then you might be in a bad situation.
Back to the easy coaching part in MLS. My point is, is that every coach in MLS has the same tactics, same kick ball game and rugby style of defending. I done see speed creativity and no real offense creativity when I watch an MLS game. So far Vancouver has the best creativity and fc Dallas might be the second team.
If some MLS team hires a mourinho or guardiola and gets him a good front office and assistant,then that team might be a dynasty in MLS sooner than later.
Look at the MLS coaches, same tactics and no real offense or real counter attacking. I know MLS play is getting better but MLS needs better coaches with some real experience.
A known coach like mourinho will make the players practice like hungry dogs and make them play like they don’t belong in the world.
Let’s be honest , if ligaMX coaches knew English, they would be in MLS by now but most of them dont want to learn English or they won’t get paid what they are worth.
Does anybody know how much dynamo is paying their Europe coach.
You’re funny.
Wow, you know that Mourinho and Guardiola are good managers. Congrats.
WTF? I guess you mean well but making sweeping generalizations is too easy.
See what I mean?
lol its funny how you criticize the defending and label it as rugby but you mention mourinho. although i do agree that it would be nice to have some mexican coaches
You must not be aware of Bruce Arena, former coach of the US national team, who took the US to the quarter finals in 2002. Under Arena, the Galaxy has won the MLS championship 3 out of the last 4 years. Isn’t that good enough for you?
The thing is that coaches like Mourinho and Guardiola have no experience with American players and our system, and our players wouldn’t understand their instructions (which they are accustomed to giving to players of a much higher caliber). This is why foreign managers tend to struggle here. But aside from that, while Billy the Kid may be a young kid, he’s basically right.
We’re a new soccer culture–our professional league has only been around for 20 years, and it’s natural that the development of coaches will lag behind that of the players. Most of our coaches grew up in the stone age of soccer: there wasn’t a professional league, few played it, and you basically couldn’t even find it on TV. Most of these guys cut their teeth in the NCAA system in the 80’s, where the level of play was god-awful and the tactics were based on what they could find from English textbooks written decades earlier. While some of them may have been great leaders and motivators, let’s be real: they were completely unexposed to the highest levels of the game. That is irrelevant in American sports: the system is a pyramid where knowledge is passed down from level to level, and obviously there’s a huge amount of communication because they are all ultimately part of the same system (the best players and coaches move on to the next and scouts are ubiquitous), and often times players that play at one level eventually coach at one lower.
In American soccer, it was never like this, because American soccer was completely isolated from what was happening in the rest of the world. Only a tiny handful of players ever played abroad. This has changed over the past two decades, and we will start to see the fruits of this: Americans who make it abroad will come back home and teach what they learned to the next generation of players. But we have to remember that the player pool that makes it abroad is extremely small, and few (if any) will become coaches. I am extremely optimistic about Berhalter, however, and hope he’ll coach the USNT one day. He is the only coach in the MLS I have ever seen that has his team play for something more than the result, which brings us to another problem: MLS coaches, because of the salary cap, have no incentive to play for anything other than the result and focus on player development. And aside from someone like Berhalter, they’ve never played in a system where any team has. I’d welcome the importing of more coaches and a concerted effort to learn from the best and develop our tactics (which are, as he said, basically kick-and-run). These things take a long time, we have to be patient. It’ll be a long time before we actually export an MLS coach to a top European league.
A wonderful example of stereotyping. Gosh, American coaches are ignorant and wallow in it, never bothering to learn anything. You are at least a decade behind the times. The best game I have ever seen the US national team play was a friendly against Japan. I think it was near the end of 2005 because it was before the 2006 World Cup and Bruce Arena (a dumb American) was the coach. It wasn’t my imagination because after the game the Japanese coach said the US put them under more pressure than any other team they played that year and they had played Brazil. Your statement that MLS coaches have no incentive to do anything but play for a result is beyond stupid. Mourinho has made a career of grinding out wins and has won more than one CL crown that way. Just today I heard an interview with Van Gaal after Man U’s loss to Chelsea. The interviewer asked him if he thought they deserved better, was he happy with how they played, and questions along that line. His response, basically, was all that counts in football is the number of goals. We played very well, our best game of the year, but they scored a goal and we didn’t. It didn’t matter how well we played because they got 3 points and we got none. I remember a South American championship a few years ago where Argentina played beautiful football and was blowing away everyone. Brazil was playing Mourinho style and most people, including me, thought Argentina would easily dispatch Brazil in the final. Brazil played gritty defense, totally shut down the Argentina attack, including Messi, and won handily. Any coach who doesn’t play for the result is a soon to be ex-coach.
So you thought we played one really good game while Bruce Arena was the coach…that’s not really much of an argument.
How is what I said stereotyping? Where are the American coaches that are not products of the NCAA system? It’s not their fault, but they haven’t been exposed to coaching at the highest levels of the game. It’s like that in emerging soccer nations. Basketball is new in Korea; you wouldn’t expect some Korean coach who had never been exposed to American professional basketball to come into the NBA and be successful. When we start exporting coaches to top European leagues, then we can say our coaches are as good as our players.
And as far as Mourinho goes, coaches that only play for the result are often fired. Mourinho is great at grinding out results but he is worthless when it comes to player development. Which is why he would be useless if he was at another club, one where he didn’t have an unlimited budget. Normal clubs have budget constraints and have to focus on the technical development of the team and certain individual youth talents.
Yes, most MlS coaches have come up through college, but you blithely assume that they haven’t learned anything. It has been discussed frequently here how US coaches are not hired in Europe, not because of qualifications, but because most Europeans have the same, uninformed opi9nion that you do. Look at Bob Bradley in Egypt. That national team won every single game, except one, better than either his predecessor or his successor, in a time of national turbulence. Going back to Bruce Arena, he has somehow managed to win with Beckham, Keane, and soon Gerrard, all international stars who have played at the highest level. I have never seen any indication that his high profile players lack respect for what he does. And to say I base my opinion of Arena on one friendly is what we call a straw man argument. You say American coaches haven’t been exposed to the highest levels of the game? Isn’t coaching at the World Cup competing at the highest levels of the game? Are they incapable of learning from their opponents?As for Mourinho, he won his first CL with Porto, a team with basically no international stars (I can’t believe I’m defending him since I don’t really like him, but I guess I have to point out the obvious). As far as player development goes, check out Eden Hazard and his development the last two years.You just throw out these generalizations without any evidence. I mean, to say that dozens of American coaches haven’t learned anything and are stuck in what they learned coming through the NCAA is just ridiculous. Have you studied all these coaches? Given them quizzes on their knowledge? Asked them questions? Talked to the players who play for them? Have you even been following the MLS closely the last several years? When I read the drivel you have written, I doubt that you have or you wouldn’t be making such statements. MLS has improved as the player pool has improved and US coaches have improved along with that.
You answer none of my arguments.
All of the MLS coaches learned soccer in the NCAA and early years of MLS. Only a handful even stepped foot from outside of that system. And only two, Arena and Bradley, were even exposed to anything outside of that, by playing against tough teams in the occasional friendly or WC game (a couple times a year perhaps)–not the same as playing or coaching there. How do you expect them to become elite coaches if they were part of a system that has little contact with the highest levels of the game?
The elite coaches from around the world all come from developed soccer cultures and learned the game under the best–almost all of them, by playing. Even the few that didn’t, such as Mourinho, at least were brought up in that system (in his case, he translated for the world’s best) and at least grew up watching soccer on TV. And in his case, having coached at elite teams for so many years, of course there’s a player or two that improved a lot under his tenure. But Hazard was widely viewed as the best up-and-coming attacking midfielder in Europe before he went to Chelsea. Mourinho is nowhere near as good at developing players as Ferguson was or Wenger is. Or Brendan Rogers. Some coaches are better at it than others, and fans from all over the world expect more of a coach than just results (some more than others, it depends on the club of course; at a club like Chelsea, only the results matter). Technical and youth development is an important part of the job and fans take this into consideration when evaluating a coach. Some coaches who win trophies are even unpopular with fans if they don’t do enough to develop young players. In my favorite team’s case, Americo Gallego is a good example. He won league titles with us but a lot of people don’t like him because he derailed the development of several promising youth academy products. This is not an argument, it is a fact.
What do you expect, that Keane and Beckham are going to say Arena isn’t a good coach? Sure, he’s a very good MLS coach, but he is not an elite coach. He was not trained by elite coaches and has no inside exposure to what coaches do at the highest levels (playing against them every once in a while doesn’t count, I’m talking about setting foot in a locker room). On the other hand, we are starting to send players to the highest levels of the game. Because soccer is new here, coaching development will lag behind that of the players. The youngest generation is way more advanced than the previous generation, and it will be like that for a long time. It’s great that Bradley did well in Egypt, but African football is also far behind Europe and S. America in terms of tactical development. I’m sure American coaches could have success there and in Asia and vice-versa. But I’m referring to the game at the highest levels, and American, Asian, and African coaches haven’t made it there yet (although the players have).
There is no European bias. They hire plenty of coaches from South America. They just realize that only cultures with exposure to the highest levels of the game are able to produce coaches. This is why we don’t see African and Asian coaches in Europe, either. Take my NBA example. No NBA team would hire some Chinese coach who never stepped foot in America, even if he was the best coach of all time there? On the other hand, some players have been able to make the jump.
I understand that you’re sensitive to a post that sounds a bit negative but it really isn’t. I’m just pointing out the obvious fact that if you have a new sport, the coach’s will not be at the same level as the new generation of players. Every generation will get better and better. And coaches like Berhalter, who learned soccer from coaches at the highest levels, will play a very important role in advancing the tactical development of American soccer. The only problem is the salary cap, while extremely necessary, is a disincentive to playing for anything other than the result.