You follow Portugal more than I do (which isn't any more than other nations outside of Russia and Germany) and the criticisms against his preference for the defense first approach have been around for ages. By all accounts, he is a better assistant than the main man in charge ... but Portugal's last coach was a defense-first time also. Maybe Portugal needs a different Brazilian, someone with a bit of a flair.
Scolari was defensive minded, but he was Ruud Gullit at the Galaxy compared to Queiroz. But the problem partially lies with a "brain trust" that keeps trying to find Brazilians who have "European footballing characteristics". That is, if they went to the Brazilian well this time, they would land a Dunga.
So you got Paolo Bento, who did pretty well with Sporting but still got fired there. Time will tell on how good the guy wil turn out to be.
Yeah, but things come down to technicalities. Both Williams and Johnson pretty much did all of their youth development in the United States, and chose other national teams for personal reasons. So you only have one yank on the list, but 3 yank developed players.
Will Johnson spent several years in Europe (in fact, he was also on the books at Heerenveen when Mike Bradley was there but Will was loaned out to a lower tier club for a while). Andy Willimas is a Canadian by birth, who first turned pro in Jamaica.
Also, from the Portuguese-Americans (in-laws) i watched the game with, we roundly agreed that Portugal would have had much less success had their goalie not been LIGHTS OUT brilliant. Plus they were shut out in 3 of 4 games, and had some real masterpeices against Malta and other minnows under Quierez.
Hard to compare coaches straight up like this. Warzycha is working with lots of peices put in place by Sigi Schmid (American) Backe had a 2 picks in the 1st round (Tchani, Da Luz) and 2nd pick in 2rd round (18th overall, Ream), along with arguebly the best skilled forward in the league (Angel). Kinnear has had a hard time replacing Clark and Holden, and lost a lot with an injury to Cameron. De Lobos has the Fire in 11th place (down from 5th last season) and how worse would the situation be without the rise of Sean Johnson? Vasquez has Chivas USA down to 12th (down from 6th last season) Nowak is doing good with his expansion side. Arena and Kreis are #1 and 2 in the table, and have built their teams over a few seasons. I don't think you can just analyze them from their records in one season. Do you think NY Red Bulls would have fired Arena had they seen what he did in LA? Onalfo won it all with KC didn't he? Then died a terrible death in DC... NT is a different animal than MLS, and coaches have to have a real track record of success of building something, NT is definitely more than just pick the 11 best players and tactize them to a winner.
Though born in Canada to English parents, Will Johnson grew up in Naperville, IL and played most of his formative youth soccer for Sockers F.C. going to the Blackburn Rovers at 18 (IIRC) and then Herrenveen, which was made easy since he carried both English and Canadian passports. In other words, he is effectively a product of the USA youth system.