Last time out we wondered if maybe, just maybe, the way the Vancouver Whitecaps dealt with the manner in which their season ended could have been handled in a more effective manner.
This time out we’ll look at the thing most of us care about a little bit more.
What happens on the field.
In a recent article for The Guardian Jonathan Wilson wondered whether Jose Mourinho’s coaching style had drifted from the pragmatic to the dogmatic.
In other words, playing defensively and picking up a point against other top teams in the Premier League was no longer working in a competition where rivals Manchester City were more often than not picking up three points in the same games.
Pragmatism isn’t pragmatism if it doesn’t actually work.
His kindest critics would argue that Carl Robinson is a pragmatist. That he makes the most of his resources by setting up a team designed to shut down the opposition while simultaneously being able to make hay out of the sunshine of their mistakes.
And the final league table gives that argument a degree of validity.
But what if we lived in a world where the Whitecaps as an organization weren’t content with that kind of approach? What if we lived in world where the coach was told his style of play would always be ineffective when it really mattered and the time had come to adapt the way he sets up his team?
Ironically I think we may already have lived in that world and it was called 2016.
Back then Robinson toyed with the notion of a genuine number ten, played with the idea of only one defensive midfielder and even flirted with the prospect of a deep lying playmaker.
None of them really worked of course and we will have to decide for ourselves whether that failure was down to the players (mostly Pedro Morales) or the coach being unable to set up a team capable of taking the game to an opponent.
To be fair to Robinson the form and fitness of Morales was poor for most of that year but the coach’s failure to fit the most talented player the Whitecaps have had in the MLS era into any kind of system other than bunkering counter attack was telling.
And it’s Robinson’s inability to send out a team willing to attack that remains his greatest weakness as a coach.
And logic says that it has to be inability rather than unwillingness because no coach would fail to attack the decimated Portland Timbers team we saw at BC Place earlier this season would they?
Would they?
And no coach would not want to take advantage of a a decimated Seattle Sounders in the first leg of the playoffs would they?
Would they?
Actually that second one he definitely wouldn’t because he said so after the game.
But the pattern of passivity is now so fixed that it’s become like some kind of Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence in which we are condemned to relive the same incapacity to break down a reasonably competent defence “once more and eternal times more”.
And the most terrifying thing of all, the thing that is the void we must all stare into, isn’t that Carl Robinson doesn’t want his team to play in a more open and appealing fashion.
It’s that if even if he did want it he wouldn’t quite know how to make it happen.
Soccer Shorts (The Director's Cut) 