Nicol’s Liverpool Style Is Stalling in the MLS

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Memo to the MLS brass: Please, guys, just make sure we don’t ever get Steve Nicol’s New England Revolution in another MLS Cup final. Three times they’ve been there — in 2002, last year, and again last Sunday — and each time the final has been a stinker.

We are asked to believe this is all a coincidence? Each time it’s been 0–0 at 90 minutes; each time it’s lurched into overtime. Twice the Revs lost 0–1 at that point. On Sunday they did manage, at last, to score a goal (it had taken them 346 minutes of MLS Cup play) — only to see it cancelled out immediately as the Houston Dynamo leveled the score straight from the restart.

And so this dreary final staggered on to the soccer obscenity that is known as the penalty-kick shootout, a tie-breaker that almost everyone hates. Houston won it 4–3, so they’re the new MLS champions. No one deserves to lose a shootout, but someone has to. This time it was the Revs. Three losses in three MLS Cup appearances.

So be it. Sure, Nicol’s teams do a lot of attacking and they score goals during the regular season — but they have a habit of going into an uptight, paralytic non-scoring trance when the big one comes around.

Is that the coach’s influence? That would seem a reasonable way of looking at things. Nicol is hardly one of your modern, overly-technical coaches, and none the worse for that. He believes in simple basics. Contemplating the fact that his team (like all other MLS teams) has a Babel-tower of nationalities, he says: “They talk the one language of soccer. The common denominator is the game. The best way to communicate is by passing the ball well … they can all try to keep possession of the ball.”

Fine, just fine, who is going to argue with that? Yet between Nicol’s thoughts on the game and the practice of the team he puts on the field there exists something of a gap.

Nicol is a down-to-earth Scot, and his dominating experience of soccer was acquired at the very top level, playing for Liverpool in the 1980s. That was Brit soccer at its grittiest. It was very successful too — Liverpool was the outstanding British team of the decade, but not exactly a barrel of fun to watch.

That workmanlike, no-frills attitude persists in Nicol’s approach to the game. He clearly sees MLS as playing a form of British soccer — and in that he is far from wrong. So his team is built on the basic Brit qualities of hard running and hard tackling and grit and effort — plus the special values that Liverpool added, those of ball control and possession.

All of that ought to add up to a winning team, and a team that is pleasing to watch. But the Revs have failed to be — consistently — either of those things.

It comes down to this: Nicol has produced a Revs team where the emphasis is on muscle, hustle, and bustle; a team totally lacking in wile, guile, and style.

Take a look at his core midfielders in Sunday’s game: Shalrie Joseph, Andy Dorman, Joey Franchino, Daniel Hernandez, never-day-die runners and grafters, but when all is said and done, predictable players. Clint Dempsey can add a touch of unusual skill, but even his talent relies to a considerable extent on his physical effort; anyway, an injury kept him on the bench.

As Sunday’s game progressed, the score wedged firmly in its 0–0 notch, Nicol made his subs. Off came Franchino, on came Khano Smith, but this was more of the same physical stuff, with a bit more speed from Smith. Dempsey came on at 62 minutes, but his lack of fitness meant he had little effect.

At this point it was surely clear to everyone that Nicol’s brave words about passing and ball possession had lost all meaning. The Revs were passing poorly and were simply not able to retain possession. As Houston was doing no better, the result was a fragmented, ugly game, a mostly midfield mess of physical commitment, unskilled tackling, clumsy collisions, and inaccurate passing.

Exactly, as it happens, the sort of game that MLS fans have had to put up with on both previous occasions when the Revs appeared in the final.

With 30 minutes left in the game, Nicol still had one substitution to make. He waited over 50 minutes, until the game was 22 minutes into the 30-minute overtime period, and then brought on … Jeff Larentowicz. Again, no change whatever. Larentowicz is an honest, ordinary player, merely fresh legs to boost the physical game.

It needn’t have been that way. On the bench, Nicol had the Uruguayan Jose Cancela, a midfielder of a totally different type — a playmaker, a trickster with the ball — and above all, a player who could bring what the Revs midfield was totally lacking: a soccer brain.

But Nicol, ever faithful to his sturdy Brit convictions that hard work wins games, ignored Cancela as he has done for most of this season. It seems odd, for Cancela saved the Revs’ playoffs last season when they were in trouble against the MetroStars. This season, when the Revs needed a win over Columbus to ensure home-field advantage in the playoffs, it was Cancela, with a quickly and craftily taken free kick, who set up the winning goal.

But Cancela stayed on the bench alongside another Hispanic player, Mexico’s Jose Manuel Abundis. Exactly why Nicol even has them on his roster is something of a mystery to me. Clearly, they are never going to feature in a starting 11. They just do not fit into the Liverpool mold.

Looking again at Nicol’s words about the “one language of soccer,” it is clear that, far from representing a global view of soccer, they reflect nothing more than Nicol’s extremely narrow Liverpool experience. His soccer language is spoken with an ineradicable British accent. The subtleties of the Latin game, which come much closer to liberating the true beauty of soccer than anything Liverpool was ever able to achieve, are simply a foreign language to Nicol.

Whether that is an attitude that should be acceptable in this country with its huge Hispanic soccer-involved population strikes me as being a serious matter for both MLS and the Revs to ponder.

pgardner@nysun.com


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use