The MetroStars’ new coach, Mo Johnston, says it’s all going to be different from now on – which can only mean the team is going to be worth watching, and will actually win something. Maybe so, but he has to know that we’ve heard this before. Have we ever – Johnston is the eighth coach in the MetroStars’ 10-year history, and each new arrival has arrived bearing promises of a brighter future.

We’ve had 10 seasons of those various futures – 10 utterly futile years during which the MetroStars have gone from bad to pathetically bad to hopelessly, boringly bad. Regrettably, they have never managed to emulate the old Mets and become amusingly, attractively bad.

There has been no Casey Stengel to mangle the language, to present ineptitude as an almost desirable alternative to winning,to wonder aloud “Can’t anybody here play this game?”, to keep us smiling while the team goes on losing.

Losing was something the MetroStars came to master. Not only games, but fans as well. For the first game at Giants Stadium, in May 1996, the crowd was 38,621. Four months later, the final home game of the season drew 14,416.

The MetroStars were soon anagrammed into the RotMasters, the anything-but-amazin’ Rots.The warning of a dire future for the Rots was there from the start. That 1996 team featured the Italian Roberto Donadoni, a genuine world-class star. So how come he looked so ordinary in a Rots’ shirt? The three American stars – Tab Ramos, Tony Meola, and Peter Vermes – looked no better and seemed to take great pleasure in constantly quibbling and complaining about the team and the way it was run. GM Charlie Stillitano found the trio of American egos impossible to deal with, dubbing them the Three Tenors.

Then it turned out that the guy listed in the media guide as Director of Team Administration,31-year-old Chris Unger, was better than some of the pros; he played 16 games for the Rots. Coach Eddie Firmani resigned half way through the season. In came Carlos Queiroz, who had led Portugal to two world youth championships. Nothing changed.When the 1997 season got under way, Queiroz was gone, replaced by Carlos Alberto Parreira, and you couldn’t get any more stellar than that, for Parreira had led Brazil to World Cup glory in 1994.

But the Rots remained the Rots. Parreira, on a two-year contract, walked out after one year to coach Saudi Arabia. While the coaches came and went, so too did many more players, most of them making no impression at all. One who was there for three seasons and did make an impression of sorts was defender Rhett Harty. With his shaven head and decidedly rustic approach to defensive play, he could have been the Rots’ Marv Throneberry.

But humor was not on the Rots’ menu. Later, in 2000, Harty was one of a group of players who went to court, claiming that the single-entity structure of MLS was a monopoly that prevented players from earning more money. It came out that Harty had been paid $40,000 in 1997, which, he complained, was criminal. There were different – no doubt opposite – reasons for agreeing with him.

Parreira was replaced by Alfonso Mondelo, who somehow got the Rots into the 1998 playoffs with a record of 15-17. His reward was to be immediately fired, replaced by Bora Milutinovic – a Serb with an impressive World Cup coaching record – who promptly led his new team to two losses and a rapid exit from the championship. No matter, Bora was rewarded with a contract for the 1999 season.

A disaster. The Rots finished with a league-worst 7-25 record. Exit Bora, enter Octavio Zambrano, who did moderately well for two years but produced a record of 11-15-2 in his third year and got himself fired. Bob Bradley, the team’s first American-born coach, followed in 2003. Princeton-graduate Bradley, a serious, even dour man ensured there would be no Met-like frivolity during his three-year reign. There were to be no trophies either.

A lighter, friendlier face for the Rots seemed possible when, half way through the 2005 season, Alexi Lalas was hired as GM in a move “to win the fans back.” As the Rots were then playing before crowds as low as 7,500, it seemed a sensible approach.

A voluble character in his playing days, no one ever accused Lalas of not having a sense of humor. He came in, smiling as ever, talked of creating a super club, and then, as the playoffs approached, fired Bradley.

Assistant coach Johnston took over and it was deja vu time. Johnson failed to get the Rots past the first round of the playoffs, and was rewarded by being confirmed as head coach – exactly what had happened in 1998 with Milutinovic.

Johnston, whose face wears a permanent but very slight grin, has come on as any new coach will – a hard man who will take no nonsense, vowing to get rid of any player “who doesn’t want to play for me.”

The roster turnover has already begun. Defender Jeff Agoos has retired, Chris Leitch, Ryan Suarez, and Eric Quill are gone, as is Sergio Galvan Rey (an Argentine who scored a ton of goals playing in Colombia but lost his scoring touch as soon as he joined the Rots).

But the key thing to know about Johnston is that he is a Scot, and you can be certain that a British coach will, sooner rather than later, import British players. True to form, Johnston has wasted no time, racing off to Scotland to rope in 25-year-old Peter Canero as his first major signing.

Canero – a name, it is safe to say, that will not be widely known among those Rot fans that the club is seeking to win back – is, according to Johnston, a midfielder “who gets up and down the field” and “works hard for his team” and who will “pop up with the odd goal.” Johnston also mentioned that Canero came cheap. “He doesn’t cost us much on the salary cap, which I’m delighted about.”

Straightforward and parsimonious words to describe a workmanlike player, certainly not words to suggest anything exciting about Canero’s play. Actually, Johnston has said nothing at all about his new team being skillful or exciting or attractive,just that it will be “a different team. Running. Running hard.”

Plenty of running then, but, so far, there’s been no evidence of the much-needed humor in Johnston’s approach. Then again, maybe there has. Last Tuesday, Johnston told the Herald News: “We want players who are on their way up, not on their way out.”Two days later the Rots signed the Columbus Crew’s 35-year-old veteran Chris Henderson. Sure he’s still on the way up – his partner in the Rots’ attack will be the Frenchman Youri Djorkaeff, who’s 37.