PITCHING A FIX
U.S. soccer needs to get younger, find coach who bleeds red, white and blue
ITony Meola of Kearny, N.J., who played in goal for the United States Men’s National Team from 1988-2006, gives Post readers his thoughts about Tuesday night’s elimination from the World Cup and where the team goes from here. Meola hosts “Counter Attack” weekdays (5-7 p.m. ET) on SiriusXM FC, channel 85. As told to Kyle Schnitzer.
became a World Cup fan in 1982, watching Italy win it. All of the same things I felt Tuesday night I felt in 1986. That year, when I saw Costa Rica beat us one-nil on some channel probably 500 people in the country were watching, I said to my father, “How can we not qualify for a World Cup? We’re the United States!” I say it again. “How can we not qualify for a World Cup?” It can’t happen again in our lifetimes, and it shouldn’t if we do the right things.
This didn’t all start Tuesday night. This has been building and building with this team. It just hasn’t been a group that’s performed consistently.
I was writing some words down for our radio show and the ones that came to mind were: gutted, confused, angry, pissed, shocked, embarrassed by the way this whole thing turned out. Having said that, I still have some compassion because I see the players getting questioned for their effort. I know there wasn’t a guy out there who didn’t give an effort. I highly doubt there was a guy on that field who didn’t want to go to the World Cup. Now we have to ask questions why it happened.
There are a lot of guys who are on the north side of 30 years old. Had it qualified, I think this team would have looked drastically different than it looked right now. I think coach Bruce Arena realized as qualifying went on that the team was just getting old. He’s spoken openly about how in 2006, in his f irst stint as U.S. coach, he should have changed about a third of the team and brought some younger legs in. That’s not going to sit well with people but that’s the reality. Father Time is undefeated.
The 11 players, the substitutes, the coaching staff, they didn’t get it done. Bottom line. It’s no secret to them. It’s clear. It’s obvious. But I separate that from where we are short-term in soccer, and where we are long-term, which is the concerning part for me about what direction we are going.
Short-term, it’s clear. I love Bruce. He’s like a father to me. I would expect Bruce to step down in the very near future.
Who do you bring in next? There will be foreign names in there. I’m not opposed to foreign names, but our next coach has to be someone who has bled in the national team jersey, day in and day out, throughout their career. Someone who’s worn the jersey, who’s played in the World Cup, who will feel every moment of a loss and will continuously bleed for the jersey. That should be the criteria for the next coach.
What we’re going to hear is there is going to be a worldwide search. We did this already. Now it has to be the younger generation, guys who are coaching in the system and will feel the same way as a coach as they did as a player.
One guy who comes to mind is Tab Ramos. He’s in the system. He’s been through five Under-20 cycles, so that’s 10 years with the
Under-20s, twice as an assistant and three times as a head coach. He knows the American youth player better than anybody does at this moment. Peter Vermes is a guy whose name is going to come up; it came up this time when Arena replaced Jurgen Klinsmann last November, as well.
There are others, but they have to understand American players, understand their system. They can’t be guys who, if it doesn’t work out here, they’re going to get a job in Europe or with a South American national team a month later. This has to be life or death for them. That’s the direction I’d like to see the national team go.
Long-term, this has been one of the problems with U.S. soccer: “Who are we?”
When I came up through the system in the late ’80s and early ’90s, everyone wanted to be like Tahuichi, the Bolivian youth club, and we were going to develop players like they did. Then Portugal won the two youth World Cups with Carlos Queiroz, who came here and was part of developing a plan, Project 2010, which was supposed to ensure the U.S. would win a World Cup by 2010. So we switched from the Bolivian way of doing things to how Portugal was doing it. We went from a South America philosophy to a European one.
In 2011, Klinsmann came in and we were going to use the German philosophy. And there were other philosophies in the middle of that. Brazil won the World Cup and all of sudden we were going to see how Brazil was developing.
I’ve said for years: We were a kick away in 2002 from having a chance to be in the semifinal of a World Cup. We played Ger- many in the quarterfinal. We had them pinned up against the wall for the entire game. If there had been VAR (video assistant referee) in that day, we would have had a shot to go to the semifinal.
My point is, why can’t we be a better version of ourselves every single time around? We’re athletic. We’re getting better technically. We’ve always been pretty intelligent players. Why do we have to be everyone else in the world, and more importantly, why do we keep on changing? Why do we keep on bringing in a foreign coach? One of my fears with bringing in a foreign coach is once again we’re going to change philosophies on who we are. We’ve done this for the last 20-25 years. We need to be a better version of ourselves. We didn’t see that Tuesday night.
With this being said, I believe in the future of our game … the future is now!