Until he gets fired

May 18 - 2007

Bob Bradley has been hired. More accurately, he has been let go as the interim coach, and rehired as the permanent coach.  Or maybe the “interim” was dropped.  Or the interim is now indefinite.  I don’t know, but he’s the coach now.

Really, dropping the “interim” from Bob Bradley’s title does little beside spawn a rehashing of his appointment in the first place.  The “we need a Big Name” argument is raging once again, and soccer media personalities are suiting up their tired arguments and heading back out on the pitch.  

Which is all fine and good; the hiring of a national team boss, in a healthy soccer media economy, should usher in a period of bitching.  I will, however, say this: the Juergen worship has to stop.  It’s unseemly…fawning over Germans like that.  The notion that Juergen Klinsman is an experienced, wily international coaching juggernaut is pure fantasy.  The guy took a host team to the semi-finals, and not South Korea or Japan either - it was fricking Germany. 

And the other “candidates,” namely Carlos Queiroz and Gerard Houllier, make Juergen Klinsman look like Franz Beckenbauer.  How a French school teacher and Sir Alex’s lap-dog suddenly become elevated to Epic International Forces of Management, simply for the sake of an argument, is beyond me.  Jeff Carlisle of Soccernet fame trots out these two in his latest column, referring to them as coaches “with international experience who would cause a serious rethink about the way the federation and the U.S. national teams operate.”  Yeah, like how we should start calling snacks “tapas.”

The lack of imagination at work here is appalling.  It’s one thing to criticize Gulati for his decisions, quite another to offer up even crappier options.  So here you go, Jeff Carlisle, a real option you can press for and not sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about:

• Let Bradley coach this team until the last three games of qualifying, then install a World Cup hitman (Hiddink, Beenhakker, Scolari).  Done.

Was that so hard?  For my part, I happen to like Bradley and think he has roughly twice the soccer intellect as his man-boobed mentor Arena.  With such weak support from the federation, however, I can’t really see him surviving until the South African safari.  Still, he is the right man at the right time…that time being now.