In Luis's trubune article on Tony Sanneh, 2 ex-fire players were pretty candid concerning their moves away from the team. It does not paint a pretty picture of the Fire's former coach, and it had little to do with formations.
"Dave is a good guy," Sanneh said. "The injury stuff came from other people on the staff that said I was faking it. He listened to other coaches and it caused confusion. You can't not listen to your staff. That's why you have them." I'm not saying that Sannah goes out of his way to praise dave, but a fair reading of the article shows that he is bitter with other people in the organization. In fact, his only real criticism of dave is that he got rid of players that he had disagreements with instead of working things out. From the quote above, it appears the injury stuff (which you may be able to extrapolate to Rolfe and others as well) was mainly about pressure from one of the assistants. Since he doesn't specify a name, I'm not going to assign blame based on a hunch. The other stuff sounds mostly like guppy. I don't know how MLS gets away with allowing a team to control a players rights when he is done with that team, but I doubt that sarachan was in there blocking his move to NY or bad mouthing him to DC. I know I will get trounced for "supporting dave" but that is not what I am doing. I'm simply pointing out that sannah was blasting the organization from fans to doctors to assistants and likely guppy himself . . . in addition to dave. Having said that, I wished we had him in the back line this year, but I wouldn't have paid him what he wanted given his injury history over the past couple of years. I always did think it was unfair of people to attack him personally for being hurt.
Hell, considering the time frame in question, and who some of the staff were and still are, that happens in almost every other thread here on a daily basis. Kinda interesting that according to Tony, Nate considered retiring (according to the article, Nate denies it). Had that been known at the time, many would have suggested he do it. In any event, it's all water under the bridge. The team is better of without Dave. What is kinda funny is Clavijo may not be kept around, and there is always the possibility Colorado may turn to.... LOL.....
Wait, you mean to tell me it was solely because of Dave that we got rid of crap players like Jesse, Nate, Jack, Andy, and Tony? Hell bring Dave back as an assistant and maybe we can get rid of Armas and Guti.
Well, ordinarily we'd all think "Sour grapes from a Fire reject". Except that Chris Rolfe has missed most of the first half of this season due to.... wait for it.... a misdiagnosed injury. Coincidence? In this case, not bloody likely. Just once more reason to be thankful we've seen the last of Sarachan in Toyota Park. And the bit about good players (Marsch, Razov) getting canned because they couldn't put up with Dave's incompenetence after enjoying Bradley's tutelage cannot be proved by anyone who wasn't there but it does have the ring of truth to it. Finally, if I was Nate, I'd deny it too even if it was true because few things are more suicidal in sports for all but the most wildly talented players than looking like a locker room poison and a quitter to boot.