If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of Coaching Kitchen

Poor Steve Sampson, ripped by his players and ripped apart by the media. How can such a thing happen to the U.S. national team coach? Why isn’t he getting the respect he deserves?

Well, guess what. This is the real world. This isn’t the mollycoddled, soccer-mom world of Saturday morning AYSO games. This isn’t the rule-booked-to-death world of NCAA soccer.

This is the World Cup, and if a coach can’t cut it, it’s open season as far as fans, the media and, yes, sometimes even players, are concerned.

So perhaps the lesson the United States should have learned in its brief and altogether unpleasant stay in France is that it’s time to grow up or get out of the game.

Does Sampson think he is the only coach to have been attacked for his team’s pathetic performance? Does he think he is somehow being singled out for criticism by the media?

The fact is, Sampson got off lightly. He will probably lose a job, but he will not be unemployed. U.S. Soccer never fires anyone. It simply shuffles the same batch of incompetents around who have been shuffled around for the past 20 years or more.

Just listen to Hank Steinbrecher, the federation’s general secretary:

“We don’t want to replicate what a number of other countries have done, and that’s have a scapegoat, the first guy to go is your coach,” Steinbrecher said. “We’ve made a great investment in Steve Sampson, and somewhere, whether it’s with the national team or not, we don’t want to lose that resource.”

So Sampson will get to keep his spotless blue U.S. Soccer blazer and his comfortable salary. If he accepts the job as director of Project 2010, he might even get a raise. And since Project 2010 has to do with building a competitive team by that year, the players he will have to deal with are now in their early teens. So perhaps they will not talk back the way Alexi Lalas and Tab Ramos and Jeff Agoos and Eric Wynalda and others have done.

It could have been much worse.

Sampson could have been coaching Saudi Arabia or South Korea. They fired Carlos Alberto Parreira and Cha Bum Kun, respectively, within hours of losing their second France 98 games.

By that standard, Sampson should have been put on his horse immediately after the debacle against Iran. Such a move might have signaled that U.S. Soccer is serious about one day wanting to win the World Cup.

Peter Velappan, general secretary of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and a man widely tipped to be taking over as FIFA general secretary when Joseph “Sepp” Blatter assumes the presidency next month, was sympathetic with Parreira and Cha’s plight but understood it completely.

Parreira won the World Cup with Brazil in 1994, but he failed this time. Cha might be South Korea’s all-time best player, but he failed to deliver as a coach.

“The coaches had to take responsibility,” Velappan said. “It is out of sheer frustration that the teams have made them scapegoats.

“Coaching a team in a World Cup is a high-risk job--if you do not win, a price has to be paid. It’s like working for a large conglomerate. If you do not produce the profits, you are out.”

But Sampson isn’t out. He’s in.

Unlike Tunisia’s Henry Kasperczak, who also was fired after two games. He didn’t help his cause, of course, by announcing before Tunisia’s first game that he would be leaving to coach Bastia in the French League once the World Cup was over.

And Sampson certainly has not felt the pressure that Colombia’s Hernan Dario Gomez has faced. Gomez and his family have been the target of death threats since even before the start of France 98. And in Colombia, death threats are taken seriously. So Gomez is out. Friday night’s loss to England was his final game as the team’s coach.

Also taking the honorable course is Japan’s Takeshi Okada.

“I will quit,” Okada said after Japan had lost its third and final game, to Jamaica on Friday. “When a coach fails to achieve what he sets out to do, he has to take decisive action.

“It is entirely my responsibility that we did not win a match that could have been won or take at least a draw from it.”

That was a classy way to bow out. Bulgaria’s Hristo Bonev preferred the stormy approach, blasting his players after they had been overrun, 6-1, by Spain.

“I can’t go on in charge after the way the team has played in this World Cup,” he said. “I have principles. Tonight simply showed the state of our team, and how bad they were. The future of the team and the young players who come in will be up to my successor.”

Perhaps Sampson should have said something along the same lines, but U.S. Soccer lives in a politically correct world where everyone has to be stroked in public and everything has to be seen to be rosy on the outside, even if it is festering on the inside.

Image is everything. Truth takes a back seat to public relations.

Too bad.

And it won’t get any better. Alan Rothenberg, the U.S. Soccer president described by one American columnist Friday as “a political spin-doctoring windbag,” sees his term in office end in August.

The two candidates to replace him, Larry Monaco and Bob Contiguglia, have about as much charisma as a baguette, and are equally soft on the inside. Both will have some say in Sampson’s future, but neither is likely to want what the U.S. really needs--a top-level, take-no-nonsense foreign coach who a) has the respect of players, b) knows how to develop talent and c) understands the demands of the international game.

Most of all he will need to know how to rebuild the shattered remains of the current team. What happens to Lalas, Ramos, Wynalda, Agoos and the rest is going to be fascinating to see.

They spoke out and have been ludicrously threatened with being fined, as if they were schoolboys needing the rap of the ruler across their knuckles. Free speech for all, but if we don’t like what you say, you’ll pay for it.

No wonder the U.S. is seen as a third-world soccer nation.

No wonder Major League Soccer is going to see players hopping on the first Europe-bound boat. Already, the San Jose Clash’s Wynalda, the Galaxy’s Cobi Jones, the Tampa Bay Mutiny’s Frankie Hejduk, Washington D.C. United’s Eddie Pope and the Columbus Crew’s Brian Maisonneuve and Brian McBride have been linked to foreign clubs.

Sampson was not the only coach to have run-ins with his players. Squabbling is part of the process. Top players fighting for playing time is what it is all about. Why muzzle them?

Mexico’s Manuel Lapuente has the correct approach, and the U.S. should learn from it. Coaches and players work together to plan strategy for each opponent.

“We plan the tactics together,” Lapuente said. “We decide it and we do it. This is not an anarchy. It’s democracy in the true sense of the word. During the week, the players can express opinions, suggest tactics. But on match day, I am in charge.”

Fair enough, but even World Cup coaches find that being in charge does not necessarily translate into being in control.

South Africa’s Philippe Troussier was only one of the 32 coaches who found his players wandering off down paths unknown.

“The way I saw my job didn’t correspond to what was going on in the South African squad,” Troussier said. “I wasn’t hired to run a holiday camp.”

He came under withering attacks from players and the media but emerged still willing to return for more.

“Regarding the criticism I have received, if I don’t like it then I’m in the wrong job, aren’t I?,” he said. “We have to put the past behind us and focus on the future.”

Even the coaches who are doing well plan to step aside after the final July 12.

Argentina’s Daniel Passarella is one of them. He won the World Cup as a player in 1978 and might win it as a coach in 1998, but he is leaving, possibly to coach a club team in Spain.

France’s Aime Jacquet also is getting out of the firing line, as are Norway’s Egil Olsen and Romania’s Anghel Iordanescu, who is taking charge of Greece instead.

Mario Zagallo will be gone as Brazil’s coach, even if he wins the World Cup for a fifth time. He is 66, and Jamaica’s coach, Rene Simoes, already has been mentioned as a possible successor. Bookmakers in Britain already are taking bets on how long Glenn Hoddle can stay in the hot seat as England’s coach.

There are other coaches who survive, even thrive, in the inferno of World Cup soccer. Spain’s Javier Clemente is one of them. So many verbal and written swords have been thrust through him that Clemente must feel like a sieve, but he’s still standing.

Spain, one of the tournament favorites, was eliminated in the first round, and Clemente’s head is being sought from Barcelona to Madrid, but he is keeping it for now.

“The press can kill me if they want to--and they no doubt will,” he said. “However, it is not up to them if I stay or if I go, and I am not going to grant them their wish.”

Clemente has the support of his players.

“He’s a coach who went for four years without losing,” veteran defender Miguel Nadal said. “Here, we’ve lost only one game. But nobody can deny his class, and if somebody disputes it, I as a veteran player can testify that he is the best we’ve had.”

Those are words Sampson would have liked to hear.

And perhaps he will in 2010.