This is the third in a series of 20 short columns focused on the things I'm thinking about as we approach the 20th season of Major League Soccer. I'm going to dig into mostly non-obvious questions here – the tertiary stuff that can become bigger over time – rather than the giant storylines (e.g., How do the Red Bulls replace Henry? What if Ozzie's injury lingers? Is this THE year for TFC?).
You can find previous installments in my story archive HERE. For this latest column, we go Massive...
Tony Tchani was taken No. 2 overall in the 2010 SuperDraft by the New York Red Bulls, who kinda sorta accidentally crushed it that day. They got Tchani, followed it up by grabbing Tim Ream at No. 18, and went on to finish first in the Eastern Conference – an unexpected event coming off a miserable 2009 season.
Ream went on to another solid year in 2011 and an eventual big-money transfer to Bolton Wanderers, while Tchani went on to become trade bait. RBNY moved him to Toronto FC in early 2011, and then the Reds, at that time coached by Aron Winter, traded him to Columbus for a big sack of not much after just a dozen games.
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Then Tchani got injured. Then he got healthy. But he couldn't break into the Columbus lineup for about two years. Then Gregg Berhalter came to Columbus.
And then things changed.
Tchani didn't morph from "super-talented question-mark" to "dominant box-to-box midfielder" as soon as Berhalter set up an office in Crew Stadium, nor did it happen exactly when Tchani and Wil Trapp started performing in the same central midfield together. There was no singular "a-ha!" moment.
Instead, it was a slow, pragmatic and persistent application of instruction and system. Tchani had the skills to fit perfectly next to Trapp, and vice versa:
Berhalter did the right thing by surrounding those two guys with clever, speedy wide players (Ethan Finlay, Justin Meram, Waylon Francis) and tasking them all with supporting Federico Higuain, the little genius of an enganche.
It worked. If they all do the exact same thing as last year, and Kei Kamara gets 10 goals from the No. 9 spot, Crew SC will be one of the top two teams in the Eastern Conferece. Tchani literally does not have to improve for that to happen.
But Tchani will improve. For two months near the end of last year, he looked like the best No. 8 in the league – right up until Jermaine Jones chewed him up and spit him out in the playoffs.
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The Revs ran over Columbus in their postseason series, and nobody was more culpable for that tactical pummelling than Tchani. The deeper Jones dropped, the farther upfield Tchani roamed. The farther he roamed, the bigger the disconnect between the central midfield and central defense. The bigger that disconnect, the more dangerous Lee Nguyen becomes, and I'm going to stop this train of thought here before everybody in Ohio feels the need to pour him- or herself a stiff drink.
Tchani is excellent when Crew SC are pushing the game from out in front, but last year he was surprisingly reckless when they were chasing it. If he's going to raise his profile from "influential MLS midfielder" to "Michael Bradley understudy for the USMNT," that's something he's got to work on. Being smart no matter the game state is a requirement at the international level – and, as was made painfully clear by Jones, in the MLS postseason.
