Nelsen has big mountain to climb at Toronto FC
EVERY POSSIBLE good wish to Ryan Nelsen, a man for whom nobody has ever had a bad word, as he attempts the football equivalent of a mountaineer deciding his first climb will be on Mt Everest.
It’s hard to think of anyone else making such a lightning jump from pulling off the boots and putting on the sideline suit, harder still to think of anyone who’s made it work.
Greatness as a player doesn’t guarantee rapid progression to being a great manager. Maradona was joint FIFA player of the century with Pele. But his time as manager of Argentina, cut short after a 4-0 thrashing by Germany in the 2010 world cup, will mostly be remembered for his invitation to the press corps to kiss a personal area of his body.
What was notable about Maradona’s promotion to national manager in the first place was that there was no previous record of achievement at lower levels.
Mediocre stints at coaching clubs in Argentina in the mid90s petered out, so you can guarantee the people who appointed him to the national job were more starstruck than shrewd.
It’s the lack of any sort of apprenticeship that’s spooky about Nelsen’s new job.
Consider the moral in the career path of an iconic figure in another sport, Sir John Kirwan. Kirwan comes to his role at the Blues now with several years of high level rugby coaching experience behind him.
But when he was first coaching with the Blues, as an assistant to Frank Oliver in 2001, his resume was much thinner, just a couple of seasons with the NEC club in Japan.
With the wonderful benefit of hindsight he was appointed because he was John Kirwan, like Ryan Nelsen well-liked, highly respected, and with no real qualifications. A more logical appointment would have been working with the Auckland NPC squad. When the 2001 Blues season became a disaster, the team falling from sixth in 2000 to second to last, Kirwan and Oliver were replaced by Peter Sloane and Grant Fox.
But the 2012 version of Kirwan the coach is a very different proposition from the greenhorn of 2001. Given the rare chance of a second act, and despite the massively untested group he’s now working with at the Blues, Kirwan should be infinitely better prepared to deal with problems than he was 11 years ago. The rub for Nelsen is that while, as a captain at English premiership level, and for the All Whites in internationals, he’ll have been privy to his coaches’ plans and thoughts, he’s never been in that loneliest of positions, the man in charge.
When rookie coaches are making selection blunders, struggling to deal with prima
donna stars, and holding club owners at bay, it’s a hell of a good idea to start doing it at the sort of level where only the loyal readers of the Grimsby and Scunthorpe Telegraph are taking an interest in what’s happening.
Nelson deals brilliantly with the New Zealand media. He’s talking to a largely sympathetic group for a start, and his unpretentious, open attitude is perfect for the job.
Toronto, and the club he’s about to manage, may be a different matter. Football’s not ice hockey, so the club’s fortunes aren’t life and death stuff for Canadian sports fans, but the local paper, The Globe and Mail, didn’t smooth the way when it summed up the Nelsen news by saying the club ‘‘didn’t replace [head coach Paul Mariner] with another head coach; in fact, it didn’t replace him with a coach of any kind.’’
Jump-starting Nelsen from playing into the job was, said one Toronto columnist, ‘‘the most bizarre coaching appointment ever made in MLS (Major League Soccer).’’
When you discover MLS games are played at venues like Pizza Hut Park in Dallas there’s a temptation to think bush league, but the reality is that after losing $350 million in the first 10 years of operation, the competition is now serious.
Crowds are reaching 60,000 people (although not in Toronto) and there’s extensive cable television coverage. A lot of pride, and money, rides on Nelsen dragging the Toronto side up from the basement.
But if it all seems too daunting, there is one very hopeful sign. The multimillionaire behind the club, Larry Tanenbaum, said late last year, ‘‘I let the managers manage and, honestly, I manage by exception.
‘‘I have never been a fan of ownership that tries to manage a team. The day-to-day management should be managed by the professionals. They do it 24/7.’’
How much would the Phoenix give for a similar attitude in their boardroom?