Galaxy Can Clinch Home-Field Advantage
Although it’s not yet three years old, Major League Soccer offers just as little job security for coaches as any other professional league.
In fact, in the waning weeks of the league’s third season, only three of its original coaches still are in place--Dave Dir in Dallas, Bruce Arena in Washington and Ron Newman in Kansas City.
And there is no guarantee they will be there next season.
When the Burn lost, 3-0, to the Galaxy on Wednesday night at the Rose Bowl, its record dropped to 13-15 and left the team in danger of missing the playoffs. Dir’s job might hang by that thread.
If Arena is named U.S. national team coach next month as expected, that would force him to leave D.C. United.
And unless the Kansas City Wizards, also struggling to reach the playoffs, fail to do something about their league-worst 7,804 average attendance, owner/operator Lamar Hunt might well consider moving them to another market.
That would leave the future of Newman, U.S. soccer’s winningest coach and a Hall of Fame member, up in the air.
All of which is a lengthy way of pointing out that the Galaxy tonight plays a Miami Fusion team that is in its first season but already features its second coach.
Miami--which plays in Fort Lauderdale’s Lockhart Stadium because of a preseason squabble with the Orange Bowl--was 8-12 and rapidly fading when it fired Carlos Cordoba in July. Ivo Wortmann took over and the Fusion has since gone 5-2 and appears likely to finish fourth in the Eastern Conference and thus make the playoffs.
Meanwhile, the feud between Wortmann and midfield playmaker Carlos Valderrama appears to have been patched up, or at least put on hold. The pair had fallen out after the Colombian star refused to attend practice, citing philosophical differences with Wortmann.
Valderrama, fined $10,000 by the league, came close to being traded to the New England Revolution, but his wife balked at leaving Florida and the trade never materialized.
As one of the bigger names in MLS, Valderrama calls a lot of the shots. He reportedly has a 10-year contract with the league that includes a front-office position with MLS after he stops playing.
In the meantime, he continues to be the impetus for Miami’s revival.
In a 3-2 victory over New England on Sunday, Valderrama’s passes led to all three Fusion goals--each by fellow Colombian Diego Serna.
Tonight’s game will be the next-to-last regular-season road game for the Galaxy. It is two points shy of clinching first place in the conference and, with it, home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.
That has been Coach Octavio Zambrano’s main motivational point ever since Los Angeles secured a playoff spot.
After losing to the Columbus Crew on Saturday, 3-0, the Galaxy bounced back to defeat Dallas by the same score.
“I’m happy to see that we have rebounded after the loss to Columbus,” Zambrano said after Wednesday night’s game. “A good team is one that has the ability to assess a loss, see what went wrong, and make adjustments.”
A good team is also one that, like Columbus, can go into another team’s stadium and shut it down. In the Crew’s victory at the Rose Bowl last Saturday, Columbus Coach Tom Fitzgerald might have provided a blueprint for teams that want to upset the Galaxy in the playoffs.
“We spent a lot of time on our game preparation because we knew L.A. was going to be a very difficult opponent,” Fitzgerald said. “They’ve scored a lot more goals than anybody else in the league [an MLS-record 79 so far].
“The key was our game plan. A lot of teams think they can chase L.A. around and high-pressure them. They’re too quick for that.
“We decided we were going to sit back and let them come to us. They kept pumping a lot of balls into our defense, and we kept winning them and then countering.
“To shut out a team like this is a big accomplishment.”
But it takes more than defense, as Fitzgerald acknowledged.
“We came out with a lot of different [attacking] options and we didn’t have to rely on just one source for goals,” he said. “That’s always a key to beating a very good team like L.A.”
If it finishes first in the Western Conference, the Galaxy would play the conference’s fourth-place finisher in a best-of-three first-round playoff series.
Chances are, that would be Dallas or Kansas City.
The Burn currently holds fourth place with 31 points to the Wizards’ 29. Each team has four games remaining. They play each other in Kansas City on Sept. 20.
