As Steve Nicol, the Scot who coaches the New England Revolution, might have put it, this was deja bloody vu – with a vengeance. On Sunday, just as in 2002, his Revs were beaten 1-0 in overtime in the MLS Cup final by the Los Angeles Galaxy. To add an esoteric touch, both winning goals were scored by Guatemalans – Carlos Ruiz in 2002,and Guillermo “Pando” Ramirez this time.

There was another significant similarity between the two games, one that Nicol may choose not to dwell on, but one that the MLS brass should study closely: in both games the Revs played ugly, sterile soccer.

That is hardly what MLS would be looking for in its marquee event. But the Revs, in their two appearances in the MLS cup, have played a total of 233 minutes of drab soccer without scoring a goal. Very odd, especially when you consider that star forward Taylor Twellman, who played in both games, was the league’s regular-season top scorer this year with 17 goals, and was the no. 2 scorer in 2002 with 23 goals.

As a team, the 2005 Revs finished second in total scoring with 55 goals. But cup-final conditions evidently do not suit the Revs. On Sunday, their midfield had a constipated look to it, unable to get things moving, unable to pass the ball smoothly, unable to provide any sort of respectable service to Twellman.

Some of this malfunctioning can be put down to intelligent opposition from the Galaxy, whose midfielders were quick to hurry and unsettle the Revs. But the Galaxy was able to do all of that without losing sight of its main objective: to move forward and create goal scoring opportunities.

The Revs found the two roles incompatible. They concentrated on stopping the Galaxy, with the result that their own attacking play was a feeble affair. Theoretically, the Revs should have had a midfield advantage, as they deployed five players in that area to the Galaxy’s four.

But tactical dispositions never tell the whole story. The quality of the midfielders was important here. The Revs’ midfield style was set by Daniel Hernandez and Shalrie Joseph, hard workers and hard-tackling ball-winners with far more destructive than creative talent. Both players earned yellow card cautions in the first half, as did the Revs’ rugged captain, Joe Franchino.

But the Galaxy’s midfield quartet of Cobi Jones, captain Peter Vagenas, Ned Grabavoy, and the Brazilian Paulo Nagamura, working just as hard as the Revs’ five, displayed a higher level of creative skill.

Nagamura and especially the 35-year-old Jones, a Day One veteran of the league who has spent his entire MLS career with the Galaxy, combined defensive and attacking roles in a way that was beyond the Revs’ midfielders.

In a scrappy game that featured 51 fouls and 10 yellow cards, the Galaxy was able to impose its superior skill, win the midfield war of attrition, and take the trophy. But it sure wasn’t pretty.

Before MLS Cup, commissioner Don Garber chatted with fans and told them that “most importantly – and I really mean most importantly – we need to break through to all those people in this country who don’t believe in the sport of soccer.” That aim included, he said, “the elimination of all the soccer bashing by influential people that still exists in this country.”

Two days later, MLS presented the highlight of its season, a nationally televised game that gave us precisely the sort of soccer that the sport’s critics love to pan: just one goal in 120 minutes, very little goalmouth action, and plenty of midfield drudgery.

Unquestionably, a serious embarrassment for MLS – made worse by the fact that MLS itself holds a large share of responsibility for the debacle.

It is within the league’s powers to exercise a much stronger leadership role in the matter of coaching appointments and player signings. Under the league’s single entity structure, all player signings have to be approved by MLS, which pays the players directly. But MLS has chosen to exercise no influence whatever in these matters. It could, should it so wish, hint and coax and arm-twist its clubs into signing more creative players and more adventurous coaches. But it has turned its back on that approach.

As a result, the owners and general managers – the majority of whom are without any deep knowledge of the sport – have played it safe and made cautious, conventional, coaching appointments. By conventional, I mean this: the traditions of American soccer have, up till now, been largely borrowed from Europe. MLS coaches reflect that tradition, even though it is clearly outdated. The increasing importance of the Hispanic game is not reflected at MLS coaching levels – only one coach out of 12, Fernando Clavijo of the Colorado Rapids, is Hispanic.

This inevitably means that MLS teams favor a European style, with an emphasis on fitness and tactics. The artistry of the Latin American game is not something that is held in high esteem by MLS coaches.

It is all very well for Garber to talk – as he does repeatedly and quite convincingly – of the need to develop young Hispanic players in this country, but in reality, he presides over a league with a group of coaches for whom that is not a major concern.

Exhibit A is Steve Nicol. His priority – the priority of any coach – is to win. He can best do that by playing the soccer he knows and understands – in his case, British-style soccer. To achieve that, he needs British-style players. And that is largely what he has. The likely results of assembling such a team were, alas, to be seen in Sunday’s MLS Cup.

That turgid game was an appropriate final for what was ultimately the dullest of MLS’s 10 seasons. It sent an unmistakable if painful message to Garber and his owners: MLS needs greater diversity among its coaches. It needs lively coaches who will bring in lively players who can play entertaining soccer.

We surely know by now that the clubs are unlikely to change anything. It is up to the league to play a much more interventionist role in coaching appointments and player signings.

pgardner@nysun.com