Colorful Coach Has Fusion on the Move

Sometime today, while shuffling through the house of cards that is the Miami Fusion, the Galaxy is certain to stumble across the joker.

That would be Ray Hudson, the Fusion’s one-time television color analyst and now its coach.

Because, chances are, the 45-year-old Hudson will have as much impact on the outcome of this afternoon’s Fusion-Galaxy game at Fort Lauderdale’s Lockhart Stadium as any of his players.

Since taking over a dead-in-the-water team on May 8, Hudson has pumped new life into the Major League Soccer side through the sheer force of his personality.

Miami was 1-3-4 and going nowhere when it dismissed former coach Ivo Wortmann. The tension around the last-place club was thick and infighting was the norm, rather than the exception.

Not anymore.

There still is a lot of work to do--deciding, for example, whether oft-injured Eric Wynalda will ever play again, or whether Roy Lassiter will be traded to the Tampa Bay Mutiny--but now there are smiles where once only frowns prevailed.

Under Hudson’s prompting, the team has turned it around on the field, going 6-5-0 with him as coach, and is only seven points out of the lead in the tight Eastern Division race.

It’s not due to the Xs and Os Hudson chalks up on the blackboard. He’s the first to admit that he’s not that sort of coach.

Rather, it’s his ability to fire up the team with the right words, which Hudson never seems to lack.

“I’m happier than a dog with two tails!” he said when he was hired.

He won his first three games and the search for a permanent successor ended.

When he was doing color analysis on Fusion games for the Sunshine Network--yes, there were the predictable “Ray of Sunshine” remarks--Hudson didn’t pull his punches. If Miami played badly, he said so.

That hasn’t changed, although Hudson, who came to the U.S. from his native England in the 1970s to play for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers of the old North American Soccer League, chooses his moments.

The language, especially in Hudson’s thick Newcastle accent, is always colorful.

“Statistics is the devil’s arithmetic,” he told a radio interviewer at one point, when numbers rather than performance became the topic of conversation.

Nor is Hudson afraid to shake up the team. Under-performing on the field is the worst sin in his soccer world, where playing, he believes, should not only be a joy but a privilege.

“Sometimes players are like a pen,” he said. “If they don’t work, shake them. And if they still don’t work, you get rid of them.”

After a particularly satisfying 4-2 victory over the Chicago Fire in early June, Hudson was in fine form.

“You can put five Michael Jordans together and you don’t have a championship team,” he said. “It doesn’t always work that way. My biggest challenge is to try finding the chemistry and the combination . . . of players [from the roster] we have.”

Even defeat doesn’t slow him.

When cross-state rival Tampa Bay beat the Fusion in late June, 3-2, all Hudson had to say was, “Crackin’ game, wasn’t it?”

Well, that wasn’t really all, but then it never is.

On Tuesday, after Miami had come back to beat the New England Revolution, 2-1, Hudson explained how he had turned the team around.

“After having a stick of dynamite placed up their backsides at halftime, they came out and really backed me up,” he said. “They won the game for themselves and I’m delighted . . . because I think we deserve the win.”