FIELD OF SCREAMS
Turf phobia has hit the Whitecaps’ MLS opponents.
Carl Robinson has the look of a rookie coach comfortable in his own skin and surroundings and confident that his midfield is vastly improved from the aggregation that represented the Vancouver Whitecaps last season.
He wasn’t the expected or conventional choice to lead the Major League Soccer club in 2014, but Robinson’s appointment makes a lot of sense, particularly since many successful managers in MLS are men who know the league and how to build with the available talent, rather than big- name candidates with an extensive European pedigree.
Unvanquished and untied, he puts his spotless 1- 0 coaching record on the line Sunday at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif., against Chivas USA, who are also 1- 0 after a debut victory against the Chicago Fire.
“It’s very obvious that Carl has a young, energetic team that ran for him and worked for him all over the field,” Mike Petke, the New York Red Bulls coach whose team was spanked 4- 1 by the Whitecaps, said Thursday in a telephone interview. “In MLS, it doesn’t matter how much skill you have if you don’t have the get- go. The Whitecaps wanted to impress their new coach, the home crowd and they wanted to make a statement that this is a new year and a new team.”
And yet, as Petke knows, last Saturday at BC Place was not a true test of who the Red Bulls are, a team of much greater quality with the league’s most respected player, Thierry Henry, and defender Jamison Olave in the starting 11.
After equivocating on the availability of Henry and Olave last week in the lead- up to the Vancouver game, Petke virtually guaranteed they’ll be in the lineup Saturday for the homeopener against Colorado at Red Bull Arena.
“They’ll be 100 per cent available and ready to go,” he said.
Turf phobia is not an issue at Red Bull Arena, one of 15 MLS parks where a sliding goal celebration leads to grass- stained knees, not turf burns. Only Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and New England play on synthetic grounds that many in the soccer/ football world contend lead to a greater incidence of injury. At 36, believing he has to apportion his participation and pick his spots judiciously, Henry adheres to the “if- cowsdon’teat it- I- don’t- want- toplayon- it” school of football philosophy.
“It’s ( BC Place) an older kind of carpet,” Petke suggested.
“According to our medical people, it puts them ( Henry and Olave) at too much of a risk. If that was a championship game or a playoff game, they would have been playing ( last Saturday). Then, it’s a case of the reward outweighing the risk. For a first game ... it doesn’t.”
Neither Petke nor Robinson put much stock in power rankings, which tend to be based more on opinion and gut feel than mathematical algorithms. But it is illustrative that Sports Illustrated still had the Red Bulls ranked as the No. 5 team in MLS after the first week while the Whitecaps moved up three spots from their pre- season ranking to No. 12.
Quoth SI: “New York shouldn’t be too panicked about a 4- 1 loss to the Whitecaps. With Thierry Henry and Jámison Olave in the lineup, the game probably plays out much differently. The Red Bulls have just one more regular- season game on a turf field, when they play the ( New England) Revolution on June 8.”
“There are going to be times when we don’t have some of our best players, ” Robinson said after training Thursday at UBC. “We didn’t start Pedro ( Chilean midfielder Morales). He only played 25 minutes. At the end of the day, it’s about getting the three points. No matter who’s playing, no matter what team you’re playing, that’s the main thing.”
Asked if he felt Petke, with whom he has history ( they were teammates with the Red Bulls), was justified in excusing his star players, Robinson replied: “100 per cent. A manager has to pre- plan his philosophy on what he’s going to do with his players.
“I know Mikey had decided to leave Thierry and Olave at home, because they’ve got their home game ( opener) coming up. There might be times when we decide to do that. I’m sure ( striker) Kenny Miller wants to play every second of every game, but that’s probably not going to happen.”
Brooklyn- born Bruce Arena, coach of the two- time MLS champion Los Angeles Galaxy, and the Long Island born and bred Petke, a second- year manager, share more than their Empire state roots. Both men deliver the same outspoken opinions of soccer on fake grass with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
“They are disasters,” Arena said in an interview last year. “The only one that is somewhat acceptable is Portland. The others are all terrible. Seattle is bad. Vancouver is probably the worst. And New England isn’t that good.”
Providence Park in Portland comes closer than other turf grounds in MLS in achieving a passing grade since it’s almost exclusively a soccer facility first ( Portland State University plays a half dozen NCAA football games at the stadium every year). The recently installed FieldTurf Revolution playing surface rests on a porous layer than serves as a permanent shock pad. And Timbers ownership is committed to installing new turf every two years “in order to maintain a high- quality playing surface,” according to spokesman Marc Kostic.
“That’s absolutely the reason why, last year, Thierry and Olave were out there ( Portland),” Petke explained. “But, absolutely, turf affects players mentally as much as physically. I don’t want to place the outcome of last week’s game on the turf whatsoever. That ( loss) was on me. I got it wrong. Hats off to the Whitecaps. But it’s a difficult surface, older, hard, players were slipping a lot. It’s tough to get used to. A team, like Vancouver or New England, has a bit of an edge, and a home- field advantage, for sure.”
Interestingly, both pitches in Portland and Vancouver have the same FIFA endorsed twostar rating, meaning that they “mirror the quality of natural grass,” according to FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
The championship match for the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup is to be played on the Polytan LigaTurf surface at BC Place — part of the $ 528 million price tag for renovations completed three years ago — but it’s not a decision which sits well with many prominent U. S. players.
Abby Wambach, the 2012 FIFA women’s player of the year, is among a chorus suggesting a world championship played on turf “would be detrimental to the women’s game” and its unforgiving surface would lead to more injuries.
A new study at Idaho State University called that belief into question, however, suggesting that female soccer players suffered fewer severe injuries while competing on an artificial surface than on natural grass fields.
Researchers found women’s college teams had an average of 7.7 injuries — both minor and serious — for every 10 matches played on FieldTurf, compared to 9.5 injuries per 10 matches on grass.
Yet the study’s findings run counter to another report that found a higher rate of anterior cruciate ligament ( ACL) injuries on FieldTurf compared to grass surfaces in the National Football League.
One thing is certain: The turf surface at BC Place will continue to fuel a brushfire of controversy.