Revolution at Toronto FC, 10.22.11: Steve Nicol’s Last Game

Steve Nicol is no longer coach of the New England Revolution. He coached the same team for ten years, an MLS record. He leaves New England having won four conference championships, though he didn’t win an MLS title. Fans of both American football and soccer will have already placed Nicol in a cosmically jinxed club that includes avuncular erstwhile NFL coaches Marv Levy (Buffalo Bills) and Bud Grant (Minnesota Vikings), both of whom hold 0-4 Super Bowl records. Only a truly cold-hearted person would fail to feel sympathy for these guys, who ought to form a support group. Had a ball here or there bounced another way, each would have coached a championship team and their legacies would be almost infinitely more satisfying to both them and their respective teams’ fans.

It should be noted that Nicol’s 2007 New England team won the U.S. Open Cup, and his 2008 team won the SuperLiga title. The SuperLiga competition, which consisted of four teams from MLS and four from Mexico’s first division, is gone now, and few in the soccer/fútbol world will mourn its passing. I, however, heartily enjoyed those hard-nosed Primera División v. MLS matches, and can remember at least one Revolution SuperLiga match ending in a fistfight, complete with a Mexico league team trainer coming off the sideline to throw some haymakers. It’s appropriate that one of Nicol’s teams—known more for their grit than their grace—is the only MLS team to win a SuperLiga title during that competition’s brief four-year run.

There are many soccer authorities more qualified than I am to render judgment on Nicol’s tenure with the Revolution. One such authority, whom I’ve mentioned in a few of these posts and who happens to be a teetotaler, texted me the following message on the day Nicol was released: “I think I’m going to drink 2nite. Nicol is done.” While it will take a lot more than Nicol’s departure to truly drive my friend to drink, he has long disdained Nicol’s teams’ style of play, finding it infuriatingly drab, if occasionally effective.

My friend may be right about Nicol’s lack of coaching prowess, but I wonder to what degree Nicol simply coached up or down to his players’ abilities. This season, for instance, his roster changed almost continuously, with new players coming in (like Benny Feilhaber, Rajko Lekic, and Milton Caraglio) and other players going out (like Didier Domi, Ousmane Dabo, and Marko Perovic). It is true that Nicol failed to overcome these challenges. His team ended the season at the bottom of the standings and won only 5 games in 34 attempts.

That said, how many other coaches would have fared better? In soccer perhaps more than any other sport, a coach can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. We shouldn’t forget that Nicol enjoyed success with players like Clint Dempsey and Taylor Twellman under his tutelage. As for this year, New England’s set pieces were usually dangerous and often unfolded as carefully orchestrated “training ground” sequences, surely to the credit of Nicol and his staff. You have to play with what you have, and I can’t point to many areas where I would have made decisions other than those made by Nicol. I probably would have played Chris Tierney exclusively at left back, and asked him and Kevin Alston to make at least five attacking runs per half, but other than that, Nicol’s player-related decisions struck me as mostly logical.

Along with dictating a style of play—whether it involves booting long balls to the flag and crossing them, tiki-taka-style short passing and possession, or something in between—and choosing what players to use and where to use them, another aspect of coaching is what is often called building a culture or mindset of winning. Nicol’s early record proves that he could establish that kind of winning culture. But that culture seemed to crack and crumble during the last two seasons. Given the team’s recent slump, Nicol’s departure makes sense. And for once I believe that both a coach and upper management told the truth when each side reported that the parting was amicable and mutual.

It might be worth noting here that the soccer coach who is probably most associated with creating a culture of winning—Nicol acquaintance and fellow Scotsman Sir Alex Ferguson—coached Manchester United in a 6-1 home loss to Manchester City the day after Nicol was let go. I mention this to again stress the overwhelming importance of player talent to winning soccer games. Manchester City currently has a crazily talented roster, and they’re winning. Arsenal, by contrast, has lost Cesc Fàbregas and has been forced to start a player on the back line this season that many life long Gunners fans had never even heard of, and they’re losing. In other words, the two teams’ respective fortunes haven’t changed because Roberto Mancini is a mad genius and Arsène Wenger has suddenly forgotten how to coach. They’ve changed because of the players on the field.

In American football, a great coach like Bill Belichick really can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, overcoming player-talent limitations by employing complicated strategies (virtually every American football play is a mind-bendingly complex “training ground” sequence or set piece), synchronized precision, and brute force. Soccer has both too many and too few limitations for a coach to have that kind of impact. Individual creativity and technical skill take the place of the synchronized precision and brute force of American football. A soccer coach is helpless to instill individual creativity, and you can’t physically beat another soccer team into submission, nor can you win by a too-heavy reliance on choreographed set pieces.

But to return to Nicol: I for one will miss his red-faced British passion, so often in evidence on the sideline as he disputed a call or fumed over a defensive lapse. I’ll miss his naked loyalty to his players and his curt valedictory “cheers” after his first-half sideline interviews with Brad Feldman and Jay Heaps. Nicol had a near-perfect affect for a Boston-area coach, maybe even more suitable than Belichick’s—Nicol looks intelligent but unpretentious, and hard-nosed. I haven’t the faintest notion of who might be interested in hiring him, but I can see Nicol’s bring-your-lunch-pail-to-work personality fitting in well in a town like Chicago, and I understand the Fire may be looking for a coach.

And what of Nicol’s last game as coach of the Revolution? It was a predictably flaccid end to this lifeless season, a 2-2 draw in Toronto under chilly, gray skies, a game marred by defensive breakdowns and a lack of technical quality on both sides. Alston did play well for the Revolution’s back line and was probably New England’s man of the match, which is appropriate given that Nicol himself was primarily a right back during his playing days. Alston played solid defense and made numerous attacking runs throughout the match, some of them effective. Monsef Zerka also had his moments against Toronto. In the 40^th minute, he scored a nice header off a corner kick from Benny Feilhaber, though he was poorly marked on the play.

The Revolution actually went up 2-1 in the 46^th minute on a Milton Caraglio goal, courtesy of another Feilhaber assist. But of course they couldn’t hold the lead, and were in fact fortunate to get the tie, as Toronto was still on the front foot after pulling level in the 83^rd minute. In the 89^th, Zerka, Feilhaber, and Caraglio were all in the final third with the ball, seemingly poised to create a game-winning chance, but no. They were all too obviously spent.

Enough about the Toronto game. I hope Nicol is able to forget it, and most of this season, when he looks back on his long and mostly successful coaching career in New England.