As red-clad fans filtered out, the strains of their songs still hanging enticingly over the stadium, the BMO Field lights beamed down on Greg Vanney and Patrick Vieira separately. Opposing coaches, opposing strategies, opposing results.
Vanney had reason to celebrate, to bathe in the occasion if only for a moment. His masterstroke tactical battle plans helped Toronto FC win the day 2-0 over Vieira’s NYCFC, which looked naive and overmatched on the road. The moment illuminated the overwhelming fact that coaching in the MLS postseason is full of perils. To do it well is an art form, a painting full of a thousand small decisions that can add up to a misshapen landscape or a masterpiece that withstands the passage of time.
Here are the top five examples of coaching decisions that’ve shaped games and series so far in the Audi 2016 MLS Cup Playoffs. From foibles to successes, we’ve seen a bit of everything already. And don’t let anyone tell you coaching itself can’t redirect a team’s fortunes.
It’s already happened.
5. Oscar Pareja’s Mauro Diaz replacement plan falters
Even if given half the season, FC Dallas coach Oscar Pareja couldn’t replace Mauro Diaz. In lieu of simply finding another player, the plan was always going to involve an elaborate series of smoke and mirrors. FC Dallas has quality, and it has depth, but it has no true stunt double for Diaz. And that’d go for any team in the league. No. 10s like Diaz don’t simply hang off vines.
Diaz was lost with an Achilles injury two games from the postseason (against the Sounders), leaving FCD and Pareja with a frankly ridiculous quandary for the postseason. Yes, the club is the top overall seed. And yes, FCD will host an MLS Cup if they get that far. But how do you cope without your attacking talisman?
Pareja gave us his answer against Seattle in their first Western Conference Semifinal leg on the road Sunday. And it was not a resounding one.
Pareja had options, maybe the most enticing of which was to shoehorn Mauro Rosales into a creative role underneath the front line. It wasn’t ideal, but nothing was. Instead, Pareja opted to play five defenders, pushed Kellyn Acosta into a nominal No. 10 role (very, very nominal) and basically rolled with three total attacking players in hopes they could nip a draw.
They lost 3-0 instead, were overrun in a flash and are now on the brink of elimination. Acosta couldn’t link the lines, the defense was stretched in all the wrong places and even their quick-strike capacity looked dimmed. Consider that an experiment for the trash heap.
4. Mauro Biello wins the Mancosu sweepstakes
Entering the postseason, the Montreal Impact looked like a runner on crutches simply trying to cross the finish line in one piece. They were fresh off a Didier Drogba controversy that featured a star Designated Player refusing to play after being omitted from a starting lineup, and they’d lost their final regular season game 3-0 to a New England team that had been virtually eliminated the week before.
All Montreal did was go on the road to smash D.C. United 4-2 and then nip the No. 1 Eastern Conference seed New York Red Bulls 1-0 at home on Sunday.
Don’t sleep on the masterwork Mauro Biello’s penned over the last two weeks to get Montreal to the brink of the Eastern Conference Championship with at least a draw on the road. That’s no easy task, but you would not put it past the wily coach, and in hindsight his decision to roll without Drogba, even when he was healthy, completely changed Montreal’s postseason.
Since striker Matteo Mancosu arrived from Bologna on loan at midseason, he’s slowly been working his way into Biello’s good graces. But even then, Biello’s much-publicized decision to start the Italian over Drogba in the penultimate game of the regular season (a 2-2 draw vs. TFC) sent shockwaves through the league. Can you really afford to bench a legend like Drogba for a relative unknown?
The answer came back a resounding yes. With Drogba on the shelf in favor on Mancosu, first due to a coach’s decision and then to a balky back, Mancosu has three goals in Montreal’s two postseason games. That includes the only tally in the win over the Red Bulls, a beautiful rasping strike that sent the Impact to New York with all the momentum they could muster. All hail Biello.
3. Bruce Arena rolls the dice (and wins) with Alan Gordon
Look at this move on paper and tell me what you see.
The LA Galaxy were more or less faced with a must-win in their initial leg against the Colorado Rapids at home. The Rapids have been literally unbeatable at altitude at home this year, so even a draw at the StubHub Center would’ve left the Galaxy in a precarious place. Which meant LA needing to go for it in the final third. Which meant, at least practically, starting maybe the best Designated Player in MLS history up top.
But Bruce Arena’s ways are mysterious and unknowable and almost invariably a step ahead of everyone else. So on paper, the fact that Arena opted to bench Robbie Keane for Alan Gordon as the primary striker in a playoff game? Well, you trusted it but you also kind of didn’t.
Gordon happened to turn in arguably his best shift of the season and the Galaxy won 1-0.
The brilliance in the maneuver was embedded in something we’ve known about both men for a long time. Keane tends to drop in while Gordon, at 35, is more of a target striker than ever. The Galaxy needed that brusque presence in the box against such a defensively buttoned-up side, and the gambit worked beautifully.
Gordon only had three incomplete passes all afternoon, and when Keane came on in the 82nd minute it was for Giovani Dos Santos, not Gordon. The old man’s still got it. And so does Arena.
2. Greg Vanney’s three-man defense
The aforementioned Vanney has probably been the coach of the postseason so far. He’s done so many little things right and pushed so many of the correct buttons that you can’t help but sit back and marvel. In comparison, Vieira had the look of a coach participating in his first postseason (which he is) coaching up an entire starting lineup playing in its first postseason (which it is).
Vanney alternated between having four and five defenders on the field with limited success earlier in the year. But his ultimate decision to click into a system with three dedicated central defenders late in the season with Steven Beitashour and Justin Morrow ripping down the flanks as two-way wingbacks to vex defensive width has made a massive amount of difference in TFC’s fate.
The beauty of a three-man back line is in its ability to allow you to swamp just about any zone of the field with numbers at any given time. The problem is that it requires a very specific set of skill players to run competently: three technically able ball-playing center backs, two defensive-minded wingers, at least two box-to-box type central midfielders and a striker willing to pull back into the framework to collect possession. You can run a static No. 10 in a 3-5-2, but it doesn’t usually work that way.
Vanney astutely realized not long ago that he had all these pieces. Not only did it unlock two of TFC’s best performances of the season in its first two postseason games – TFC had never won one before this year – but it also breathed new life into Michael Bradley.
Bradley’s been good for the duration in Toronto, but he’s looked unbelievable over the past month, and especially over the past two weeks. He was a defensive workhorse against NYCFC, killing attack after attack and pushing up to meet with the dropping Jozy Altidore, who’s also in a renaissance period in this setup. Vanney didn’t just out-coach Vieira. He also moved into TFC lore as its first coach to win back-to-back playoff games.
1. Brian Schmetzer’s attacking line shift
It’s been a long slog through the muck for Nelson Valdez in Seattle this season. Entering the postseason, Valdez had failed to score in 900 MLS minutes. And it certainly wasn’t for lack of effort. Valdez has been a lung-burning hustle player in Seattle from the jump, but he somehow found posts and goalkeepers’ arms where others found netting.
Valdez, though, left Seattle interim coach Brian Schmetzer in something of a selection quandary after he scored off the bench to get the Sounders past Sporting Kansas City and into the Western Conference Semifinals against FC Dallas. No. 1-seeded FC Dallas, to be exact.
What Schmezter did surprised just about everyone. And it worked better than anyone could have anticipated.
Schmezter basically stuffed the front four of his attacking line in a bag and jumbled them on the eve of the biggest match of the game. He kept his 4-2-3-1 more or less intact, but in lieu of starting the in-form Jordan Morris up top, he swapped in Valdez and splayed Morris and Erik Friberg wide as bookends between Nicolas Lodeiro, the leader of the creative hive. It was the first time this lineup played in this particular way all season.
It worked like a charm. FC Dallas lacked Diaz to find the gaps and Morris provided the width the Sounders patently lacked. Valdez, meanwhile, scored his second goal in two games before running out of gas in the 56th minute (his last start came back on August 24). It was a bold move, and it gave management plenty to ponder as they wonder what to do about their head coaching position this offseason. Schmetzer’s certainly making one heck of a case to keep it.
