He Knows His Place in Galaxy
Most coaches are so myopic. Whenever something--anything--happens, they think only about the effect it has on their team.
That’s why I admire Galaxy Coach Octavio Zambrano, instead of pity him.
He lost one of his team’s best players, Cobi Jones, for eight games because Jones was selected to play on the U.S. national team in the World Cup.
When the NHL sent its players to the Winter Olympics for the first time this year, it shut down the league for two weeks so no one would be at a disadvantage. Major League Soccer has, in effect, penalized teams for having good players.
So Zambrano lost Jones, who had eight goals and seven assists in his first eight games and was named the league’s player of the week three times. Zambrano doesn’t cry. He realizes there is a larger universe outside his Galaxy.
“There is a higher calling that we all understand, and that’s the Big Show that comes every four years,” Zambrano said. “We have to respect that, because that’s the ultimate show. I feel proud to see one of my players play for the national team. I think that it’s just as important as our games in this league.
“You have to see the big picture. I think the ones that understand the game see the bigger picture. This game has an immense amount of fans that critique the game--one saying in soccer is that everybody’s a coach. All the fans in the stands, they’re all coaches. But at the end I think there are people out there that understand what it takes to put a team together and to deal with the nuances, such as injuries, which we have had, new players coming in and having to adjust to a system they don’t know about, players leaving for the World Cup assignments, etc. etc.”
That’s how Zambrano sees it; just another thing. Like an injury. And the Galaxy has had one of those too, losing Dan Calichman because of a broken leg on May 6.
“That has been the bigger blow, because we certainly did not account for losing him for the season,” Zambrano said.
Zambrano is such a World Cup fan that he has moved his practices to the evening so the team can watch World Cup games during the day.
“I switched training sessions because I think our players can get a lot from the games and I love to watch the high-caliber matches,” Zambrano said. “In the process of player development, watching high-level games is very important. Players that watch that type of soccer, they try to imitate and emulate some of the great soccer that they see.”
Hopefully the Galaxy players haven’t been watching the United States’ games.
(One thing about the World Cup: I’d sure hate to be a coach. South Korea and Saudi Arabia were eliminated after two games and immediately fired their coaches, two-thirds of the way through a three-game “season.” There isn’t another World Cup for four years. What’s the rush? Couldn’t they wait one more week before giving these guys the ax?)
When Jones comes back he’ll have to get used to the new horse in the stable, forward Carlos Hermosillo. Hermosillo likes to plant himself in front of the goal and wait for the ball to get to him. Hermosillo’s style has thrown Welton off his game a little, but Zambrano doesn’t think Jones will have the same difficulties.
“I think that Cobi will have no problem adjusting to having a big target like Hermosillo playing with him,” Zambrano said. “It’s something that we obviously have to work on in training, to make sure that we are taking advantage of his presence and that we are doing the right thing to cash in when he’s available and we can make the proper runs. But it’s going to take some time, because we changed from being a team that had a go-to man to being a team that was more dynamic and a lot less one-dimensional. I still maintain that Hermosillo adds a lot to our team.”
So will Jones. Zambrano didn’t say it, but there is one bright side to the United States’ disappointing performance in France: Cobi’s coming back a little sooner.
