Road skid hints at even bigger issues for Curtin’s team
As Wednesday night’s match meandered into the 58th minute and David Accam jogged to the Union sideline, two thoughts that cleave the fanbase into ideological camps surfaced.
On the one hand was relief, that after another ineffectual performance, Accam was hitting the bench in favor of someone who might provide a spark against Columbus.
On the other was a more sinister notion: Oh good, Accam will be rested and ready to start again Saturday against Montreal.
Accam isn’t the only straggler slowing down the Union, whose descent clicked down another rung Wednesday in a 1-0 loss, its 16th straight road game without a victory. But how the Ghanaian wriggled into the starting lineup for the ninth consecutive time is indicative of a larger rot: A systemic and pervasive lack of accountability that far exceeds the seeming years-long debate over whether Jim Curtin’s job is in jeopardy.
Changes in the squad appear to be belatedly arriving for Saturday’s trip to Montreal (3 p.m., PHL17), necessitated by three games in nine days and a hip knock taken by CJ Sapong in Columbus. Accam could get the rest that his struggles have been clamoring for, but the bulk of the team will remain intact, in the same spots and same formation. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Curtin’s job isn’t in trouble, either, if you believe sporting director Earnie Stewart’s pronouncements to the Philadelphia Inquirer
three weeks ago, or his responses to similar questions posed at this time last year when the Union were, improbably, in a worse predicament.
Regardless of the relative shares of blame, the root of the problem is shared: When things invariably go sideways, there’s no pathway for answerability. That’s not the same as taking blame; Curtin and his players have raised their hands repeatedly to say it needs to be better, but the incessant ineptitude has eroded any meaning from those gestures, absent any consequences when they don’t translate to action.
Take Accam, who is without a goal or assist in nine games since the Union doled out a boatload of allocation money to Chicago for his services, a deal looking increasingly like a swindle. It’s been 15 MLS games since Accam’s last goal with Chicago; that’s 1,083 minutes (plus 90 in the playoffs), including 682 egregiously empty minutes in Philly. Yet Accam plays, and plays, and plays, always right around the corner from a slump-busting action.
You could apply the same view to Curtin as he approaches the four-year anniversary of his hiring in June, a stint that puts him in the top 20 in MLS history for longest continuous tenure at a club. Yet he has earned one playoff game (a loss), two U.S. Open Cup finals (both losses) and a record so lopsidedly under-.500 that most other coaches would have been fired many times over. Whether or not it’s Curtin’s fault is no longer the question — short of suiting up and converting chances his attackers can’t, or stepping onto the field to communicate that Gyasi Zardes is lurking two yards from goal and should be marked Wednesday, there’s not much else he can do.
“It’s not one person right now. It’s the entire group,” Curtin said. “It’s the entire coaching staff. It’s the entire group of players, from player No. 30 to player No. 1. We all have to push each other in training each day; it starts there, everybody working hard and getting better, holding each other accountable.”
But Curtin’s perseverance in the job, even as the team remains mired in the Eastern dregs, represents the lack of interest, ambition and aptitude above him. And his consistency in fielding the same players over and over — even as they have proven complicit in the small matter of not winning games — isn’t a vice that Curtin has imposed but rather an embodiment of the chain of command.
It starts with an owner in Jay Sugarman who is, if not absentee, at least not in danger of being called a helicopter executive, mode of transit from his home base of New York notwithstanding. Stewart has been given carte blanche to shape the franchise, but with limited funds from an ownership group with some of the shallowest pockets in the league.
At some juncture, since the decision to fire Curtin rests with Stewart, how is he supposed to fairly evaluate the manager given the players at Curtin’s disposal? Look beyond Accam. Borek Dockal has not (yet?) yet performed as promised. Alejandro Bedoya has been useful but hardly compares to what his $1.2 million salary buys elsewhere in MLS.
Shall we continue? Stewart’s front-office pipeline to the Netherlands has yielded “left back of the future” Giliano Wijnaldum, gone in one year, and Roland Alberg, a poor tactical fit who produced without elevating the team, outweighing the relative prosperity of Haris Medunjanin. Jay Simpson appears closer to the waiver wire than the starting XI. Still haven’t figured out what Anderson or Kevin Kratz was. Charlie Davies cost a first-round draft pick. The only superlative the last two years is the development of Homegrown players, a process in motion before Stewart arrived.
All of these machinations were supposed to be in the name of competition. If Sapong struggled as he has this season, there would be someone pushing for his minutes. (Nah-uh). The growth of Derrick Jones and Anthony Fontana would spell the midfield before fatigue set in. (Nope.)
Accam is one of the first links in the chain. And if you ask why he or any other player is not being held liable for on-field ineffectiveness, then it’s fair to look a notch up to his coach. But if Curtin doesn’t bear the brunt of a team that has one win in 25 road games, then why should he impose a different regimen on players? And why would Stewart, whose two “difference-making” acquisitions this offseason have been borderline non-entities, call Curtin to the carpet? Because his job status isn’t in question, either, not from an owner who makes a dozen or so annual trips to the suite level of Talen Energy Stadium while watching the value of his investment steadily tick upward as billionaire magnates, television stars and Emirati sheiks join his club of MLS honchos.
There’s a fine line in the absence of the win-or-get-relegated imperative in the American system. Stewart was reared in the dire consequences of Europe; without that pressure, it makes sense not to fire a coach, say, between the second and third legs of a failing road trip in the name of chaos aversion. But settling for four years of middling irrelevance — in which clearing the lowest bar of competence by making the postseason is a challenge — doesn’t so much ingrain stability as it cements stagnancy.
Changing that requires someone to be held accountable for failures. And as the Union is constructed, where that accountability will come from is a mystery on par with asking, “how can they win a road game?”