Philadelphia’s Peter Nowak refuses to tolerate mediocrity on the field
If the players on Major League Soccer’s newest team, the Philadelphia Union, didn’t realize it before, they do now.
Coach Peter Nowak, they discovered this past week, means business.
The former Polish national team captain, who won an MLS cup as a player for the Chicago Fire in 1998 and another as coach of D.C. United in 2004 and then coached the U.S. team at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, will not stand for anyone who mails it in.
Half-hearted performances will result in a full-blooded response from Nowak, as the Union players found out to their cost Wednesday night.
After they had played poorly and been beaten, 2-1, by the New York Red Bulls and thus eliminated from the U.S. Open Cup at the first hurdle, Nowak had them running laps at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N. J.
“I just won’t tolerate half,” Nowak explained later. “If you don’t enjoy playing on the field, you will enjoy running. And if you don’t run during the game, you could run after the game.
“That’s how it is, and that’s how it’s going to be.”
As a result, it promised to be either a tired Union team that headed to the Home Depot Center on Saturday night to play the unbeaten Galaxy or a team with new-found resolve.
Nowak, obviously, hoped it would be the latter.
Philadelphia has not exactly come out of the chute running, but it has not been embarrassed, either. It might be 1-4 in the first five games of its existence (Open Cup included), but three of its four losses have been by a single goal and the other was by only two goals.
Nowak could not have expected much better from an expansion team, but he does expect total commitment.
“I believe in hard work,” he said when he was named Philadelphia’s coach a year ago. “Teams I have coached in the past know this, and that’s what I intend to do with this team. They will know what to expect.”
The Union’s blue-collar approach starts with Nowak.
“This is a physical game all over the world, and we plan to be a competitive team,” he said after the team’s 2-0 inaugural-game loss at Seattle.
“All I can tell our guys is to go out and play with 100% effort every second of every match. If we do that, the rest will take care of itself and the results will come.
“Philadelphia is a hard-nosed city and expects its teams to play with that same attitude.... We don’t play physical just for the sake of playing physical, though. That type of play is the byproduct of working hard and, as I’ve said many times, it’s the only way that’s acceptable for our club.
“If you’re not ready to play that way, you won’t be playing for us. If the rest of the league isn’t ready for that, I’m confident we’ll prove it’s an approach that works over the course of a season.”
Philadelphia’s first tottering steps into the MLS world have not been altogether certain, but one former Galaxy player now with the Union thinks the team is on the right track.
“I think if you look at every game in the league so far, we’ve improved,” defender Danny Califf said on the team’s website this week. “And so just getting to know each other and understanding tendencies and buying into the system are what we need to keep on doing.”
Califf, certainly, hasn’t been mailing it in.
Sporting Beckham-like tattoos on both arms and an outrageous Mohawk hairdo, Califf was yellow-carded for a foul less than one minute into Philadelphia’s competitive existence, in the loss at Seattle, and then was red-carded in a 2-1 loss at Toronto.
His response was to get rid of the hairdo and get back to work, which is exactly what Nowak wants.
