Jill Ellis

People keep saying that she wins in spite of her coaching. But she keeps doing it over and over in most big matches.

To me that means she is doing things right. She "might" be able to do better with what she has but it is very hard to argue with her results. And it is quite clear that she correctly experiments in all the matches and fake tournaments that the US plays to have the USWNT ready for the few big tournaments they actually play.

I think, particularly if the US wins Sunday, she will be shown to be one of the best coaches/managers the US women have ever had.

 

If the USWNT wins on Sunday she will be the worst 2x winning WWC coach in history.

 

If she wins this, then you will never hear me criticize her EVER again.
It's not easy winning a 7-match tournament, and winning 2 would be a wonderful legacy. An almost insurmountable one to surpass for any successor coach.

I will say this, though. If she does win, it might not be a bad idea to retire on top.
Although, she'll likely stay on till Tokyo.

 

She’ll be no different than a coach like Phil Jackson of the NBA. Constantly had teams made up of superstars like Jordan, Pippen, Kobe and Shaq and has buckets of championships. But without those superstars, do we truly know how good of coach they are?

 

How many coaches win championships without superstars though?

Not many. The exceptions that prove the rule. And whilst those coaches rightfully deserved to be admired you’d be discounting most of history’s best regarded coaches if that was considered a strong diminishing factor. Since you chose to use the NBA as your example which of the very best all time coaches weren’t spoiled with superstars? Auerbach, Popovich, Riley, etc?

 

I guess where I was going with that was most other coaches have other bodies of work, or coached teams with lesser talent and we saw more of their true coaching abilities... Like Pop for instance, yeah, he’s had good talent around him, but the guy is also just one hell of a coach.

 

The newest Equalizer article seems made for this thread: https://equalizersoccer.com/2019/07/05/jill-ellis-uswnt-good-coach-womens-world-cup-final/

Last paragraph of the article: "None of this is to suggest that Jill Ellis is perfect, or that many of the critiques levied against her are not valid. But maybe—just maybe—the coach of this U.S. team actually knows what she’s doing."

I will say that I don't always agree with her tactical choices, but she's made some good ones this WC. I also think she must be an incredible player manager to handle some of the stars that are on the team.

 

"Ellis, I'm gonna take back some of the things I've said about you. You... you've earned it." [*hands Ellis a candy bar*]

https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/6a7b568d-7883-46ab-8812-385ebabdde51

 

Results matter. She outcoached every opponent including the (pre-tourney) favorite host nation.

She had a good team, but they weren't heads and shoulders better players than everyone else. They were better prepared, and they were put in positions to win. The knock that her assistants do the heavy lifting is nonsense. Great leaders seek out and weaponize smart people to build a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. Jill Ellis has now proven herself among the BEST to ever wear a whistle.

 

The only women's coach to go back-to-back in the WWC, and the second ever to coach back-to-back WC champions. One male coach has done it: Vittorio Pozzo with Italy in 1934 and 1938.

Ellis got A LOT right in this tournament, and is a much better coach than she gets credit for (even if we don't always agree ).

 

This year's result sort of reminds me of the old Bum Phillips line about Don Shula-- "He's the best. He can bring in his'n and beat your'n, then turn right around and take your'n and beat his'n."

Well, Ellis inherited a roster and stripped away excess and won a world cup with it with defense, though that's not her preferred approach. Then she retrained it and tweaked it for offense and came back and won it the other way too. It is getting pretty hard to argue with her body of work, whatever disappointment there is about her results at UCLA.

In this tournament her anticipation has been good, her in game tactics have been good, her management of minutes has been excellent, her roster construction has proven wise-- was Krieger a great last minute addition, or what? I'm a little puzzled by how little use was gotten out of Horan, but it sort of seemed like she maybe peaked too early, and like she maybe had a bit of a flat tire, too, But then that rather bodes well for Olympics or next cycle. They haven't really seen prime Horan yet.

And as far as the superstar claim, I'm not sure how much of superstardom is talent and how much is coaching? Jackson had huge talent in LA, and he had Jordan and Pippen in Chicago-- but he didn't have much else in Chicago. He recognized what Paxson and then Kerr were good for, and he scotch taped three mediocre centers into a reasonable approximation of one good one and got good seasons out of other retreads. And remember, he got the job because he kept winning the CBA championship with highly transient rosters-- and none of thosee transients was Jordan or Pippen...

I think a superstar is a talented player who has good luck in coaches.

 

There is a story about Capablanca (a chess grand master from the early to middle 1900s) that is probably apocryphal but says that when he playing in a fairly small chess tournament when he was about 18 there was a match where he "won" the match with still a large number of pieces remaining when his opponent resigned. He is said to have examined the board for a few seconds and said, "Why do you resign? I could win from that position with your pieces." That made the opponent angry and bet Capablanca $100.00 (a LOT of money for a poor Cuban boy back then) that he could not do it. Capablanca took the bet and turned the board around and 16 moves later the opponent resigned again.
BTW: This is unimportant to most everyone but I share a birthday with Capablanca. (The day and month but NOT the year of course)
There is also the story that when he was older he lost a match early in a tournament and jumped onto the table all red faced, kicked the pieces off the table and screamed "How can this idiot beat me?"

I'm not saying that Ellis is in coaching at that level but she has taken a huge step toward silencing her critics. Of course there will still be some that will never admit that she is any good at all for reasons like she did not play some favorite player or system they favor.

 

#1 sounds familiar.

#2 is Aron Nimzowitsch, who did jump upon a table vs. Friedrich Sämisch. As Sämisch later recounted to Hans Kmoch, Nimzowitsch sprach thus: "gegen diesen Idioten muss ich verlieren?" (How can I lose to this idiot?)

Capablanca was far too stoic and gentlemanly to react like that. Some Capa stories:

a) He deduced (most) of the rules of chess by himself, at the age of four, by watching (IIRC) his father and uncle playing for fun. That is, he knew how the pieces moved, their relative values, and roughly how to use them. His father moved a knight from a white square to a white square, he laughed and called his dad a cheat, pointed out his error, and soon thereafter they all discovered that he could beat them both in endgames. (He probably didn't learn the en passant and castling rules from them, due to insufficient sample size.)

b) He never studied openings (much), and didn't memorize hundreds of them to 20 moves deep. (Today, that's like a soccer player who doesn't use weights in training or ice in recovery -- a total anachronism, no longer viable.)

c) He was employed for decades by the Cuban Foreign Office, who used him as a roving ambassador. Basically, he posted himself to whichever city held the next big tournament It worked very well for both sides: he got to travel and had enough to eat (and to dress like a gentleman), and Cuba got endless good PR because everybody loved Capa wherever he went.

d) Frank Marshall (USA) worked out his Marshall Attack in the Ruy Lopez, held it secret for several years (10 or 19, sources differ) waiting for a fish worth catching, and finally sprang it on Capablanca in New York 1918, but Capa saw through the complications over-the-board, and won. Later, Capablanca wrote about this game: I considered the position then and decided that I was, in honor, bound, so to speak, to take the Pawn and accept the challenge, as my knowledge and judgment told me that my position should then be defensible. Today, Marshall Attack remains viable, is a known weapon, and has a solid rep as a draw for Black (and so White fears it when White needs a win). It's ... memorization-heavy

e) In the 1918 Schelchter-Lasker World Championship match, game 9, Schlecter chose Sicilian, Lasker-Pelikan, but after 5..e5 retreated 6.Nb3 -- hence this is the Schlechter Variation, deemed drawish. Capablanca, in the tournament book, wrote: 6.Ndb5, I believe was the right answer. Black would then have to play 6...d6, ... A few decades later, Sveshnikov (and his buddy Timoshchenko) took up this comment, studied it in detail over some months, and worked out the theory through 7.Bg5 a6 8.Na3 b5, with main branches to move 10 or 12, which is now known as Sicilian Sveshnikov. It, too, remains viable, and has been played in recent WCh matches, with top grandmasters (GMs) equally happy to play it as White, or defend it with Black.

f) Capa once walked past an evening post-mortem, where several top players (equivalent to today's GMs) were arguing over a simplified endgame. They couldn't resist asking him for his opinion. After one glance, Capa swept all the pieces off the board, paradropped them back on the board in one corner, and said "This is White's ideal configuration. Get there." That's the way his mind worked, and it worked for decades until his hypertension got him.

Some human brains are just wired from birth. Mozart did music, Capablanca did chess. I reserve judgment on Ellis until I hear what she was doing at six years old

 

I will never agree with all the decisions that Ellis makes. However, it's really hard to argue with the fact that she's now won back to back WWC. So I'll say it. Jill Ellis is a good coach.

 

You clearly know a lot more about the history of chess than I do.
I bow to your superior knowledge.

After it became clear that I could work hard and become "good" at chess but no matter how hard I worked "great" was beyond my abilities I decided that I would just play for fun and to help keep my brain sharp. That decision meant that I stopped reading and studying everything I could about chess and that means that all my memories about chess are very old and rarely get reinforced.

I have told my granddaughters that if they want to become great (the younger is clearly able if she wants) they will need to study it as hard as anything else they study at. The decision is up to them and I will only provide a little guidance if asked.

BTW: Have you tried "Go?" I find it every bit as challenging as chess and often even more so because the "rules" are simpler but the application is more complicated. In that way it is a lot like soccer:
“Soccer is simple, but it is difficult to play simple.” – Johan Cruyff
“The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn’t move, kick it until it does.” – Phillip Abraham “Phil” Woosnam
“The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, and everything else is just theory.” – Josef “Sepp” Herberger

I like Go a lot BUT I cannot beat my granddaughters at it anymore either.

 

My opinion still stands.

Worst and first.

 

I would tend to agree here.

The original post asked what we think her legacy is. Her Legacy will be she got the job done. Back to back WC titles, regardless of the players she used, didn’t use, tactics...doesn’t matter.

Now, as an overall “coach”, who knows. We’ll probably never know. Honestly, until the US were to hit rock bottom or take a massive step backward, any coach that comes in here basically just has to “keep the course”. Be “a bus driver” to the very skilled and well developed women’s players we have. And that’s not a knock on any coach, it’s just the reality of the program we have. I will say though, over the next 5 years, with the woman’s game getting stronger, more of a spotlight may be on whoever is coaching....more than maybe ever has been.

 

My opinion of Ellis has steadily improved over the last couple years, even before this WWC. She has reached the pinnacle of this sport twice. And I fail to see any coach of any other top 10 or 15 team in the last cycle that has outperformed her, even relative to expectations.

 

Her contract is up this month. There’s obviously no way they will let her go. Winning back to back makes it worthwhile, but definitely a role that wears on you. Wondering if she’ll stay on.

 

What people don’t get is that this is all a bit for them now. Especially, now they won the tournament. They know they can do whatever they want. And honestly, it’s really smart of them. Their whole point all along has been, they want fairness. And most of the people who counteract that point, say they aren’t prevalent enough to have fairness... (yes, I know there’s a men’s vs woman’s financial piece in there also, but just in terms of soccer relevancy compared to men). Well guess what folks, all the things they do on purpose, that get a reaction from people, shows exactly how important/relative they have become.

 

At this level, with the best of the best, it's often about managing egos and personality as much as it is about tactical systems and player selections.

Jose Marino is the prime counter example. The guy wins with great teams when he gets them to play together, but when he can't manage the personalities he flames out.

Ellis should be renowned as the greatest coach in US Soccer history based on her results and ability to gel teams with these sorts of personalities.

Edit: I didn't read far enough down, other people made this point before me.

 

FYP.

Hadn't really thought about it, but you do have to give her a lot of credit for this. Not an easy thing to do. Keeping them focused with all the crap that was going on.

Personally I'd give her the Olympics but then it's time for a change. Coaches that hang on too long, tend to end up with favorites that shouldn't be there.

Also at some point you'd think she'd want a new challenge.