Revolution coach rides career roller coaster

As important as it is in the sport in the USA, a Major League Soccer championship game doesn’t stand alongside major events such as the World Cup or European Champions League in the hierarchy worldwide.

Yet standing on the sideline Sunday at Pizza Hut

Park, just outside of Dallas in

Frisco, Texas, during MLS Cup 2005 will be a former Scotish national team player whose résumé includes those other events.

“ Before I was drafted, I did some research on the MLS coaches because I didn’t knoww hich team was going to take me,” says New England Revolution rookie defender Michael Parkhurst, who grew up in Providence, not far from Gillette Stadium, yet knew little of Revolution coach Steve Nicol. “ I learned about his background pretty quickly, and obviously he’s had an amazing background.”

Nicol played in more than 500 league and Cup matches for Liverpool — not only one of the top teams in England but a perennial force in European competition — until fan violence and tragedy prompted its ban. He played for Scotland 27 times and represented it in the 1986 World Cup.

Yet by the late 1990s, with his playing career winding down, Nicol faced a problem he’d never encountered before: no place to go.

“ I couldn’t A nd a club,” he says. “ I was 37 and made it known I’d started to do my coaching badges and was interested in getting involved with that side as well. But the phone wasn’t ringing.”

After his long stint at Liverpool, he worked as a player-coach in the lower tiers of English soccer. He played one season in the Premier League with Shef A eld Wednesday.

Not much happened until John Kerr Jr., whose father, John Kerr Sr., played in the North American Soccer League, called from the USA, asking if he’d like to play and be his assistant coach for the Boston Bulldogs, a minor league team.

“ I Agured I could wait around for the phone to ring and it might never ring,” Nicol recalls. “ The bare fact ( was) this was the A rst opportunity I’d been given as far as coaching was concerned, so I decided to give it a go.”

That ‘ amazing’ season

His new career, slow as it was to start, accelerated brie G y.

When Kerr Jr. left during the summer of 1999 to coach at Harvard, Nicol took over as head coach. When the Revolution A red former Italian international Walter Zenga a few months later, Nicol took over for the A nal two games of the MLS season and won both. Yet instead of retaining Nicol, New England hired another former international defender, Fernando Clavijo, a Uruguayan immigrant who played for the USA in the 1994 World Cup and is now a rival coach with the Colorado Rapids.

“ I was straightforward with him ( Nicol),” says Sunil Gulati, managing director of Kraft Soccer, which owns the Revolution. “ I told him it was very unlikely we were going to be going in that direction at that time. He was A ne with that and a class act.”

Nicol settled in Hopkinton, Mass., with wife Eleanor, son Mike and daughter Katy and spent the next two seasons playing for and coaching the Bulldogs. Early in the 2002 season, with the Revs G oundering at 2- 4- 1, they turned again to Nicol.

By the end of the season, they were in the playoffs, and by the end of the playoffs, they were playing before 61,316 fans at brand- new Gillette Stadium for the title.

“Just about everything about that season was amazing,” he says. “ Except the A nal result, of course.”

Los Angeles and New England battled through a scoreless 90 minutes. In sudden-death overtime, moments after a New England shot hit the crossbar, the Galaxy scored to win 1-0.

It has taken Nicol, 49- 39- 27 with the Revs, and his team three years to make it back to the A nal game. Once again their opponent will be the Galaxy.

At home — in America

His son, Michael, is a defensive end and punter at SpringAeld ( Mass.) College.

Nicol’s favorite experience with football came in 2002 at Hopkinton High.

“ That was an amazing night,” Nicol says. “ It was their biggest rivals, there’s 3,500 people there, there’s four seconds to go, it’s 35- 34 or something. He’s got to kick a 40yarder, and he kicks it. It was fairy tale stuff; it was fantastic.”