What the US Mens National Team needs is enough fearless and talented players and coaches that we can win on our own before we could ever hope for getting such a positive result out of another foreign coach. Until that day, all but the most humble and self-effacing of foreign coaches would naturally add the complex history of foreigners on American soccer to the mental equation of coach/star player interaction.

Maybe some players would see the coach as another in a long series of know-it-all European coaches, who in their opinion didn't know any more than their club/college coaches. Most of us can get Fox Soccer Channel nowadays, and for some additional lucky ones there is also GolTV. If you also speak Spanish there are a variety of additional options including cable sports channels ESPN Deportes and Fox Sports Español, plus broadcast networks Univision, Telemundo, etc., to see for yourself exactly what sophisticated qualities the top-ranked managers in the world bring to the game.

That means we can compare them now side-by-side with our coaches. Do you think José Morinho would have done necessarily much better than Bob Bradley did with the 2004-5 MetroStars?

When I was growing up we had a tendency to at first worship anybody with an accent when it came to their potential on the field. Only when I saw a German-exchange student almost trip over the ball during our senior year high school tryouts had I ever seen (or even heard of) an otherwise visibly athletic foreigner who was yet incapable of soccer. I don't think any of us ever forgot that lesson, but we were 16 and 17 before we got to that point in 1986, on the outskirts of Midwestern soccer hot bed, St. Louis, Missouri.

Hopefully today's players are past that stage since their fathers, people my age, frequently played soccer themselves, or were at least otherwise exposed to it, whereas our fathers hadn't been likely at all prior to the brief heyday of the NASL.

That being said, and knowing how much people are paying for amateur youth club coaches (!!!), there's still a setup rife for abuse by those who can exploit the lingering inferiority complex that many Americans have when it comes to our soccer capabilities. It's certainly a big part of why I occasionally have a chip the size of Texas on my shoulder about it ;-)

So this is a long way of saying that I think Sunil Gulati's decision to make Bob Bradley the permanent head coach was a good one. He chose to stick with an American coach except in the most extreme cases, like for example if a solution could have been found to sign Jürgen Klinsmann or someone like him who also has a very solid familiarity with the unique characters of American players.

This is smart for if we're ever going to be successful on the big stage of the men's World Cup Finals, it's going to be by exploiting the uniqueness and creativity inherent among American athletes, and American culture at large, not by replicating a formula for success specific to England or Italy or Brazil, countries with considerably different sporting and popular cultures.

Until the world can see for themselves what an American soccer champion looks like, not the World War II movie stereotype, or whatever is the fashionable current cartoon-y view of us abroad, I don't think they will ever be able to imagine it for themselves, and that goes for most of their coaches as well.

Soccer is a passionate sport, and passion comes from deep within us, so if we don't believe something deeply as possible, not just abstractly, coldly, intellectually, it's kind of hard to feel it and communicate that passion in the same way.

One of the most powerful training techniques I remember using when I played college ball and that I've since found successful otherwise was visualization. Being able to imagine the successful completion of something that by itself seems difficult if not impossible really does help make that success more likely, for it makes what would be unfamiliar at least somewhat more familiar, giving you SOME chance of not freezing up and being totally overwhelmed. But I don't think anything, even visualization, will be able to approximate the feelings that the first 11 American men will have when they step onto the field for their first World Cup Finals Championship game.

But unless they can at least TRY to imagine it; see it as a realizable future, something not necessarily expected, but not surprising on its face, I don't see how the US MNT would ever be able to get there, or do anything other than un-embarrassing when they did arrive.

This makes me wonder whether Gulati's delay in announcing the permanence of Bradley's position as head coach was because as a politician, which the head of the Fed certainly is, he thought he would have much stronger support from the US Soccer community to name Bradley instead of Klinsmann or some other almost always foreign "special one" who was the current flavor of the month alternative, if he waited until both Bradley had a chance to get a couple of wins on his resumé, including one against arch-rivals México (certain to whet our appetites for the Nats' next return to Azteca, wondering whether that will finally be our year?), and the European season was over so he could at least go through the motions of talking to the short list of candidates that has been publicly bandied about: Gérard Houllier, José Pekerman, and Carlos Queiroz.

One quick note on a specific article among all of the notes and analysis linked below (U.S. Soccer Makes A Change, But It's Not Big Enough To Matter) , by Dylan Hernandez in the San Jose Mercury News:

Towards the end of his article

<<[Sunil Gulati:] "If we're talking about a situation where a head coach would like to coach our national team and says, 'I have eight coaches I would like to bring from country X,' that person would not be our national team coach," Gulati said. And so an opportunity for real progress was lost and change was made for the sake of change.>>

But by appointing Peter Nowak as the assistant, and possible successor, to the U-23 MNT coach when Bradley was hired, isn't Gulati allowing him to pick at least one if not all of the Youth National Team coaches? I agree with the gist of Hernandez's argument, that we need to remove some of the softness of our youth national team player pool, and thus eventually we'll have a deeper pool of players who can take a shoulder charge from a Jan Koller or Luca Toni and give a little of "what's what" in return.

A further toughening up mentally might apparently also be achieved with the US's most high-profile prodigy to date, Freddy Adu, who had a notably tempestuous professional relationship with Nowak, his first professional coach at DC United. With one of the primary jobs of a coach at the highest level being coaxing world-class performances out of world-class players, Nowak would have to be able to relate very well with the U-23 player pool, which Adu theoretically would be more a part of before he was able to graduate full time to the senior MNT, and its much greater psychological and emotional rigors, not just the readily apparent physical ones.

All Articles Indexed for the Updated Topic: Is Bob Bradley To Have "Interim" Removed