Americans Prepare for Cup In Comfortable Obscurity

U.S. national team coach Bruce Arena enjoys the sort of job security that must turn his colleagues among the world’s top soccer nations the darkest shade of green. Appointed in 1998, he is the longest-serving of the 32 World Cup coaches. Only England’s Swedish coach Sven Goran Eriksson, who was appointed in 2001, comes close.There is another reason for Eriksson and his peers to be jealous of Arena. Not just security, but tranquility. Eriksson has been the object of intense criticism and invasive press attention ever since he took the England job, his name rarely out of the headlines, his private life considered fair game for the English tabloids.The man has become a target for the press, and Eriksson’s days are now numbered. He will quit in July, immediately after the World Cup, and his replacement has already been named: Steve McClaren, currently the coach at premier league club Middlesbrough.The trigger for Eriksson’s departure came earlier this year when he gave an embarrassingly naive interview with a wealthy Arab interested in investing millions in English soccer. The wealthy Arab was, in reality, a reporter for a London newspaper, which duly published Eriksson’s remarks, including comments on the abilities of a number of his England players.The contrast between the turmoil surrounding Eriksson and the serenity with which Arena can pursue his work is staggering. That any American newspaper would constantly feature Arena’s name in its headlines – never mind go to the expense of setting up a scam interview – is unthinkable. Indeed, throughout his 27-year coaching career with the University of Virginia, D.C. United of the MLS, and the American national squad, Arena has never even had to face a hostile press conference.But then – why would he? He has hardly known failure. After five Division I colleges titles with Virginia and two MLS championships with D.C. United, Arena has qualified America for two World Cups and led the team to a quarterfinal place in 2002.There was a time, early in Arena’s career as national coach, when he made it all too clear that he regarded press sessions as a waste of time. He always knew more, usually much more, than the journalists he dealt with, a superiority that he had trouble disguising, and that came across as arrogance.We don’t have an arrogant Arena any more. We have a supremely confident Arena, one who learned quickly how to suffer fools gladly, how to be serious without being threatening, how to be humorous without being sarcastic and without losing the seriousness.Every so often, there comes an apparently careless moment of outspokenness – as last year, when he criticized the MLS for scheduling too many meaningless games. Feathers were ruffled and Arena promptly issued a masterful apology, which praised everyone who had felt slighted but left his original criticism very much intact.This being soccer, Arena does not get a lot of television time. His latest appearance was last week, when ESPN decided to devote a few minutes at 6:45 p.m. to Arena’s announcement of his World Cup squad. Hurried and ill at ease, Arena dashed through the list of 23 names and was dismissed. Hardly a significant moment for ESPN, but for soccer it was further proof that Arena, though not yet a TV star, is in total command of the mechanics of running the national team.How so? Because the announcement of the 23 players came nearly two weeks before FIFA’s May 15 deadline. Such is the certainty of Arena’s touch, that he felt perfectly at ease making the early announcement, the first of the 32 World Cup coaches to settle on his roster.Again, Arena has benefited from the lack of pressure – some would say lack of interest. After he fielded what was basically a second-string American team that got wiped out 4-1 by Germany in March, Arena blithely admitted it was a mistake to schedule the game. No withering criticism followed, no one called for his head to roll. The road to Germany ’06 has been a pretty smooth one. There has been no drawn out bickering over rival candidates for the World Cup team, such as the Germans staged in arguing over the relative merits of goalkeepers Jens Lehmann and Oliver Kahn. There were no demonstrations over the dropping of a favored player, as happened in Mexico when coach Ricardo La Volpe left Cuauhtemoc Blanco off his preliminary list.Arena did spring a couple of surprises: defender Greg Berhalter didn’t make it, the younger Jimmy Conrad did; more controversially, Brian Ching was preferred up front to Taylor Twellman. A polite banner reading “Why Not Taylor?” at Saturday’s New England Revs’ home game was about as torrid as the criticism got.And nobody got too upset when Arena’s rush to publish went awry within 24 hours when wingback Frankie Hej duk was found to be injured and had to be replaced by Chris Albright.Nor was there an uproar when Arena ruled that the Americans’ base in Germany would be the Park Hyatt Hotel on the busiest shopping street in downtown Hamburg. Considering that the American team is thought to be one of the tournament’s biggest potential terrorism targets, this cannot have been to the delight of the German security forces. But Arena got his way.One thing Arena’s team does have in common with virtually all the World Cup teams is that the majority of its players play their club soccer in Europe. This is the overwhelming truth of the world game in 2006. Of the 32 World Cup qualifiers, only Saudi Arabia is likely to bring a squad whose players are all with domestic clubs. Ivory Coast is at the other extreme, where all of its likely picks play in Europe.Brazil and Argentina will probably not have more than four home-based players between them. Brazil coach Carlos Alberto Parreira has not yet announced his full squad, but he has stated that the team taking the field for its opening game against Croatia will be the same as that which played in the last qualifying game – which means 11 Europe-based starters. It will probably be the same for Australia, which has more than 30 of its best players with European clubs.But America, Arena’s America that is, has avoided the extremes. Thirteen – maybe that should be “only 13” – of the American squad play in Europe. For the Americans’ first game on June 12, against Ghana, a likely 4-4-2 starting team would be: Kasey Keller; Steve Cherundolo, Eddie Pope, Oguchi Onyewu, Eddie Lewis; Pablo Mastroeni, Landon Donovan, Claudio Reyna, DaMarcus Beasley; Brian McBride, and Josh Wolff.That would mean five domestic MLS players plus seven Euros, a balance of sorts that seems to reflect Arena’s remarkable ability to do things a little differently from everyone else. So far it has worked like a charm.pgardner@nysun.com

Americans Prepare for Cup In Comfortable Obscurity

Americans Prepare for Cup In Comfortable Obscurity

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