Straight from The Belly|| November 5, 2005 @ 12:02 pm || Major League Soccer
Peter Nowak began his last week of the season by taking Freddy Adu down a notch. The Chicago Fire ended Peter Nowak’s last week of the season by taking him down a notch. It was a devastating blow. He should have seen it coming. And it was a testament to his single-minded stubbornness that he didn’t.
I will go my way even if sometimes it’s wrong, or you thinking it’s wrong. I think it’s the right way because we have success and we’re not going to stop and I’ve done it for a long time and I never said it was the bad way to do it. Is it the hard way? Yes.
Yes, Peter, it is the hard way. It’s extremely hard when the better teams in MLS have learned to negate your team’s strengths and punish your team’s weaknesses. When that happens I have no doubt it’s very hard to win games.
Last year DC United was an up and down team until they got Ryan Nelsen back from injury and inserted Christian Gomez into the lineup. Nelsen’s return coincided with the return of Rimando in the net, and Nelsen was able to organize the defense sufficiently well to make up for Rimando’s positional and stylistic faults.
But the truth is the defensive improvements only helped the team marginally. Christian Gomez was the key. Give credit to Nowak. He had a vision for the 2004 team and he built that team to fulfill that vision. The Argentine midfielder was the last piece of the puzzle. DC United went on to sucker-punch their way to the MLS Cup and their fourth league title.
The 2005 team was not the 2004 team, but at the same time it wasn’t all that different on the field. It played the same game; almost all of the essential players returned. The main loss was Ryan Nelsen and that absence was competently (although not masterfully) filled with the emergence of Bobby Boswell. And of course the team lost Eskandarian to injury as well, but that loss alone did not result in the team’s ultimate downfall.
And, yet, it was different, wasn’t it? The 2004 team was new and unexpected. MLS hadn’t seen anything like it. But some teams in other leagues had seen it before and in 2005 Pumas and Catolica taught Major League Soccer how to defeat the defending champions. Perhaps the loss to Dallas in the US Open Cup was the result of the consummate idiocy of an ill-timed red card, but the 4-0 defeat to Chicago that ended DC United’s season was the result of careful study.
Under Peter Nowak DC United doesn’t change its manner of play for anyone. That’s the source both of the team’s successes and its failures. But the failures have become more and more frequent in 2005, and unless Peter Nowak changes his predictable ways they’ll be even more frequent in 2006.
But was Peter Nowak taken down a notch? Will he see it coming next time? Or does he remain steadfast in his conviction that his way is the right way, the only way, the best way because it worked once before?