Frank Yallop will get another job in MLS very soon, we may even see him pop up in D.C. or Toronto before the MLS season ends.
Isn't there an MLS rule in place that you can't coach two teams in the same season? I remember Jeff Cassar got heat for that when he went from Dallas to RSL in the same year. San Jose Earthquakes' Chris Wondolowski: Frank Yallop's departure was the last thing we expected
This post doesn't make sense. 1) How does Frank leaving become an indictment on his style of play? 2) How is this some sign that one must "play on the deck"? This is a results oriented business. Win championships and you'll have a job. Can't make the playoffs and your out. 3) How is Dom's job in any danger whatsoever? And since when have the Dynamo played anything but onthedeck, posession oriented ball over the last year? We've out possesed our opponents in the majority of games. Have more passes and have been the victims of fouls more than giving them than almost anyone in the league. His job is safe and he won't be going anywhere. Neither will any other coach due to "how pretty they play".
Style of play has been repeatedly cited by Paul Bravo and Tim Hinchey in explaining the decision to get rid of Gary Smith and hire Oscar Pareja. Now I think there was actually more going on behind the scenes. I know Smith's decision to essentially punt on the CCL did not sit well with then President Jeff Plush or Paul Bravo and clearly Bravo and Smith did not get along.
Same perspective. In a different light : style matters when every team in the west( except CUSA) and champions league refs will kill you every time if you play hyper aggressive hoof and punt ball every time. SJ has been ugly. Real ugly. Blame all around. That team should have been built around S. Dawkins. He was not THAT expensive. The overall lack of discipline is on the coach. Team has some talent. But ownership acting like a small market team when it is not ( see Oakland a's ) does not work in soccer. Porter, Arena, Sigi, Kreis etc will bury, absolutely bury SJ this year absent radical change. This was the start of that process.
On the Cassar thing, it was a case of actively recruiting him to coach without first having asked his then-current employer for permission to do so. Salt Lake was fined $20k for tampering.
Exactly but hasn't there been a rule in place or changed because of it? I'm sure as we've seen they can make or change rules as they go along and maybe there is no such rule but I believe a coach being fired or quitting one team and assuming another job in the same season is unprecedented.
This argument doesn't really hold water when you consider that SJ "absolutely buried" Arena, Sigi, Kreis during last year's regular season. I think they were 8-0-1 against Gals, Seattly, RSL, and IIRC that included something like 4-0 and 5-0 games against RSL. Yes, Dawkins is good, but he's not superman, capable of turning a 4-0 loss into a 5-0 win; otherwise it's the same team. I think it has more to do with momentum, confidence, and sample size. SJ just got it going last year, and this year not so much. Are they as good as they performed last year? Probably not. Are they as bad as they've been performing this year? Probably not. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
THIS. The team has been borderline unwatchable this season. No cohesiveness, no fluidity, just have the GK kick the ball up the field and hack the guy dumb who is enough to try to head it. And no offensive play thru the middle whatsoever. I don't know if Dawkins would have been the answer (and he was headed back to Spurs no matter how badly the Quakes wanted to keep him--both he and Spurs wanted him back there). But as sad as I am knowing that Yallop's joining me on the unemployment line, I'm convinced it was his time to go.
Also, I think they made an offer for Simon Dawkins and either he or his club refused it. Aside from that, I don't believe Dawkins really wants to be in San Jose but rather the EPL as he has stated all along.
Kaval's been here what, two and a half years now? How long does it take to "know the game"? It's not chess. It's not even NFL football. Kaval's been enthusiastic, communicative, and at every home game this year he's been up and walking around, willing to talk to fans. Plus he's doing as well as can be expected guiding the construction of the new stadium, not his fault we have tightwad ownership.
There is a lot about the game that he probably doesn't know and that you need to learn. Tactics, style of play and most of all which players will fit into whichever system. I doubt he knows that many players home or abroad.
I can't see Yallop ending up in Toronto. Payne is going to stick with Nelsen for a good long while, even if he doesn't succeed. That's just Payne's way. As for DC United, I still don't see Olsen being fired. (I just don't.) I could see Yallop replacing Kasper. This could be wishful thinking. Dark horse for where Yallop ends up ... Columbus.
Last year is meaningless What matters is what teams did in the off season and the personnel this year. Every team out west knows what to do with SJ. They are surprising no one. SJ will be in champions league. No one wanted to get embarrassed and they probably had different views on where to apply the triage. That's all. I will say it until blue in the face. SJ is not a small market. Fans will turn on the team in a heartbeat if they maintain small market mentality. If this coaching change signals an understanding of this then that's a good thing.
Well, you have a new stadium that's probably not going to be ready (as promised) until after the start of the 2014 season and a team playing USL level soccer. I'm thinking their worried about season ticket sales.
Dom is making a killing there. He would be a fool to come to San Jose & work for cheap Lew. I know I wouldn't. On second thought, its a possibility as Colin Miller is only the interim coach of the CMNT....
The Cassar deal was an outlier. Jeff was an ACTIVE, ROSTERED PLAYER with Dallas. So when Kreis - who made a series of really stupid moves during those weeks* - called his old pal and offered him a job, in a very real sense he was acting as an MLS head coach tampering with an active player under contract with another team. (* The worst one was when he waited until the last minute and then tried to cancel a reserve match because he had an Open Cup game coming up or something. Now in those days teams canceled them all the time but it was like 24 hours before the game and MLS refused permission. So Kreis put together a team made up entirely of guest players, including the team's radio play by play guy. The league hit the roof) Dallas was livid. If Cassar had been a coach, they would probably still have hollered foul but the league wouldn't have cared as much. But messing around with another team's players is the ultimate no-no. I believe that it was right after this that MLS called Kreis into New York for a long and serious discussion of league rules.
I was one of the Quakes posters who argued that "standing pat" wasn't going to be good enough this season. But I didn't think it would be a first to worst kind of thing. I thought that they'd slip down to say 3rd or 4th in the west (and who knows, maybe they'll wind up there but doesn't look likely). But the whole "teams figured out how to play them" narrative is just too simplistic IMO. Why couldn't they figure it out during the course of last season? They had months to do it. And sure other teams got better in the offseason, but did they really get that much better, such that 4-0 losses turn into 4-o wins? I think it's a combination of factors, one being the loss of Dawkins, another being a loss of confidence and momentum, another that sometimes you roll a bunch of 7's and sometimes seems like all you can get is snake eyes, and another being that they started the season with lots of players out. Lenhart, Gordon, Beitashour, and I think Bernardez all had offseason surgery, and Chavez missed most of the 1st part of the season. When they started to get the players back, they had a bunch of home games and mostly drew in those games as the players tried to play themselves into form. Then a long stretch of road games, and things were going to get tough, and they fell into bad form. That's where they are now. I have no idea what that last sentence means. I don't think they are significantly more "small market" in their "mentality" than RSL, which has done well many years in a row, so I don't really get the "small market teams will get trounced" narrative. RSL has 2 DP's but SJ has one, and is building a stadium comparable to RSL's. They have a youth academy, etc. They are not one of the most ambitious teams where ambition meets expenditure, but they will be sort of middle of the pack. As for "fans turning on the team in a heartbeat", not really. The fans have weathered the Clash years and even a relocation. The core fan base is battle tested for sure. Getting to the next level is hard for all of the old guard MLS franchises (DC, NE, Chicago, Columbus, Colorado, Dallas, etc.), where the market has become stale and disillusioned through the earlier years of MLS. It is hard to get past that. KC did it with the assistance of a huge public subsidy and some forward-thinking management, but it is not easy to do, especially w/o the benefit of a huge public subsidy. The Quakes new stadium is the best chance for a big bang, so fingers crossed that it will help ratchet the Quakes franchise to a higher level.
It's not his job to know all that in microscopic detail. In fact, if he is staying up until 2 AM every night watching tape, he's not doing his job. As president, he needs to know enough about everything, represent the club to the public, and most importantly make tough decisions. At a time like this when the team is playing like garbage right when it should be doing the opposite in anticipation of a new stadium, Kaval correctly realized both that something drastic had to be done, and the most obvious (and likely correct) choice for "something drastic" was to get rid of Frank.
I won't touch upon whether a president of a soccer club should know everything about the game or not but either way, Frank quit on his own merit and neither Dave Kaval or John Doyle fired him as everyone seems to want to believe.