I could swear I remember two Brits coaching the Quakes and the Quakes orange clone at some point and winning multiple MLS Cups and Supporters Shields
When I first read this, I thought it said cone and you were referring to Danny Califf, who was compared to an orange traffic cone all the time on the USMNT boards.
I think that Jesse and Mikael are both very sincere human beings. I'm sure that they tried their level best to put together a good team. The fact that they blew it doesn't make them idiots or bad people. The problem with making a mistake or three in preseason is that it becomes magnified when you realize that you are stuck with your error for the whole season. Back in '09, we picked up Pablo Campos and Cam Weaver in the preseason. It was the right idea, but neither of them were really good enough. So this season, we picked up three guys to play left back: Qwiberg, Marie, and Partida. None of them are good enough to start in MLS. Partida might be, given another season or two of growth. Narrow chance that Marie comes good in the medium term. Qwiberg isn't going to cut it though. And this season, we picked up Magnus, who clearly isn't good enough. But you're recall that we signed Henok Goitom a couple of seasons back. He actually looks like he can play in MLS. You'd want to play him as an attacking center mid, but he might do OK there, at least he looked OK back in 2016. So thinking that Magnus might be good enough wasn't stupid, it was just wrong. Now, the fact that Stahre kept making the same mistakes over and over, that's stupid, I'll grant you that. But lack of competence doesn't make Mikael or Jesse terrible human beings, it's just that they haven't done well. Now I think, I hope, I want to believe that Jesse has learned from his mistakes and that he can pull this club out of the fire. If he doesn't, we're goiing to start over at square one, which would suck big time. Go Quakes!! - Mark
And this is what I've criticized him for the majority of the time. Ultimately, Stahre didn't sign the players and has to work with what he has, but it was clear that he never even got close to grasping how MLS teams played, nor did he ever express in words that he had the slightest clue about how soccer works in general. I'm going to call the guy stupid for that in the context of his job, which is all I know about him as a human being. This isn't a forum dedicated to their persona lives, after all. Fioranelli admitting that he underestimated the level of talent in MLS frankly doesn't make him look like he has a clue about his job, either. You'd think a guy trying to get a job in a league would have learned something about that league prior to taking the job, or at the very least, would have learned something about the level of play in that league during the season that he was already in charge of the team for. Stahre had never coached in the league before and wasn't cut out for it. Fine. Fioranelli already had a year under his belt as GM and still has no idea how good the players in the league are. That does not give me any hope that he can improve the team.
Discussion we're having at the studio right now: Did Domé do a worse job this year than Mikael Stahre? Stahre took a bad team and made it worse, sure. But Domé broke something completely beautiful just because he could. #MLSCupPlayoffs— Matthew Doyle (@MattDoyle76) November 12, 2018
Thanks for ruining my Monday morning by reminding me that we had Mikael Stahre jk. I wonder how his career will go in the future
that's an interesting tweet from Matt Doyle. NYCFC's results do seem to prove that an ineffective coach (maybe even maliciously ineffective?) can make things a lot worse. I guess it must be really hard for even pro players to rise above that.
Maliciously? Ineffective? NYCFC advanced as far as this season as they ever have previously. If the coach was intentionally torpedoing the team, he did a half-ass job.
I recall it being in vogue a number of years ago to think that coaching was overvalued in regards to soccer. Of course, data sets typically focused on teams that could afford the best players on earth, in which case, yes, the impact of coaching would likely be reduced. In MLS, I think it's always been the case that coaching matters, and it matters a lot. While we'll never know how previous Quakes teams might have performed under better coaches, I think there plenty of clear track records of coaches whose performances have hurt teams in ways that seem fundamentally rooted in the coaching itself rather than the players being coached.
We know that the 2018 Quakes were worse without Stahre. So, plainly he was not the only thing that ailed the team.
They got worse results, perhaps, but it was a handful of games at the very end of an awful season when the players had very little life left in them. Stahre set the stage for how miserable things went, so I don't think it's fair to say they were worse without him. It's very, very likely they would have gotten the same results as Ralston in those games as Stahre. That said, I'm glad Ralston is gone, and yes, the team has many areas in which to improve. Stahre was not the singular reason for how bad they were in 2018.
Agreed. I was referencing the relative results. Stahre was part of the problem but far from the totality of the problem, in my mind.
I haven’t watched NYCFC. But ExtraTimeRadio has been tearing Dome Torrent apart for weeks. NYCFC’s wins were mostly all accumulated under Viera, and under Torrente the team played worse and worse. It sounded like an ego thing; ETR said the same kind of things about him that people have said after Klinsmann left USMNT, playing guys out of position, etc. Then, after NYCFC lost to Atlanta on Sunday, Torrent apparently lost it when some reporter asked a somewhat sarcastic question. So I’m thinking maliciousness may have been involved in Torrent’s treatment of players. Why else would players stop playing...
I pulled this out of another thread but I did want to comment on it. I think it belongs here. I've watched lots of soccer, played lots of soccer and coached lots of soccer. I realize that doesn't make me some kind of expert, but I know the game very well. From the first game Stahre coached I could tell he wasn't going to be successful in MLS. I was one of the first posters calling for him to be fired (and I was supportive of Chris Leitch as coach. I felt he was undergoing a learning curve and could improve. He at least figured out that success in MLS came from going after wins at the risk of losing instead of settling for ties. He understood how to game the points system.) When it came to coaching pro soccer in MLS, Stahre was an idiot. It wasn't a learning curve thing. He wasn't going to get better. Here are only 3 examples of what I mean. There were many more. 1. Post game meetings in the center of the field. Very bush league thing to do. Why would you think it's a good idea to subject your players to hearing angry and frustrated fans yell at you as they exit the game? Did he think that embarrashing his players would toughen them up? Force them to play with more pride? The only thing he could have done worse was make them run lines or do push ups after the game. 2. How many times did we see players subbed out of a game and head STRAIGHT to the locker room to bypass the bench area? Honestly, I've never witnessed a team that did it more often. Did that happen even once to Steve Ralston? It was clear that the subbed player was being disrepectful to Stahre and unhappy to be subbed out. I'm sure Godoy did it more than once. It was very hard to believe the talk that the team was united behind Stahre when the body language looked like that. 3. Alashe's last minutes in a Quake's uniform. What a clusterf**k that was. Whatever the true story, it was comedy theater for opposing MLS fans and clearly POOR game management by Stahre. Alashe was one of the few players in that game that was playing hard for the team and showing grit. The fact that Alashe was not informed at half time that he would be removed and was caught by surprise was just another example of Stahre's incompentency.
I feel like this thread would be more appropriately titled "Also the Official Jesse Fioranelli thread" or maybe "And Another Unforgivable Thing Re: Jesse Fioranelli."
Tom Neal told me not to discount my opinion. You've got more experience under your belt than I do. Don't sell yourself short. You know the game. (One of the great things about soccer is how easy it is to understand.) Yup! All of these things, and his tendency to do the same things over and over when they weren't working. So now we need to watch Almeyda and see how he does. I bet he doesn't do any of this crapola. But we also need to see that he and his staff get more out of the guys that we have. Encouragement, support, positive attitudes and efforts. I suspect, but can't prove, that Stahre's practices focused a fair bit on mistake avoidance. But that's just a guess. Go Quakes!! - Mark
The thing that immediately popped in my mind after witnessing the first home game and seeing Stahre have a post game meeting in the center of the field was “if this guy coaches like this in a public setting, what kind of things is he doing at practices and team meetings?” I instantly recalled the stories of Jurgen Klinsmann with the USMNT where he’d do things like bring in a guy to rip phone books in half with his bare hands. I imagined right there that Stahre’s tactics would work about as well as Klinsmann’s did. Players thinking “is this guy for real with this pop psychology bulls**t?” Stahre was thinking he was reinventing soccer coaching but he was so far out of bounds it was ridiculous. It wasn’t very surprising to see disrespect from players later on in the season. The same kind of thing happened to Klinsmann as well.