Dylan Hernandez Dylan Hernandez can be
reached at [email protected].
I went to last Sunday’s UCLA men’s soccer game ready
to sink my teeth into Bruin coach Todd Saldaña.
“The gloves are coming off,” I told a friend.
“These guys are debauching the sport and even though I
don’t really care, I have a column to write, so I’m
going to rip them.”
Well, Saldaña never gave me the opportunity. I had to
delete everything I had pre-written on my Toshiba laptop.
The Bruins didn’t play their best of games. They barely
squeezed by lowly St. Mary’s, which went into the game with a
2-6 record.
Nonetheless, it was a good show.
UCLA, to my surprise, played an aesthetically pleasing soccer
game, something which has become increasingly rare ““ even at
the sport’s highest levels ““ ever since the
cocaine-quickened retirement of Argentine Diego Maradona.
Since Saldaña was a Sigi Schmidt protegé, I thought
I’d be treated to another exhibition of the unimaginative
football that had become popular around the world over the last two
decades.
A few weeks ago, I watched Schmidt, who won three national
championships while at the helm of UCLA from 1980-98, coach the Los
Angeles Galaxy to a playoff win over the Tampa Bay Mutiny.
By large, the Galaxy attack was predictable and cautious, as had
been the Bruins’ when Schmidt was in Westwood.
 ANNA AVIK/Daily Bruin Shaun Tsakiris
helped spark the UCLA men’s soccer team against St. Mary’s Sunday.
For most of the game, the Galaxy shot the ball down the sidelines
and chased it into the corners, where they would usually get stuck.
Fearing a counterattack up the gut, Los Angeles refused to play
through the middle.
Play seemed redundant. I got bored quickly and spent much of the
remainder of the contest scanning the stands for good-looking
girls.
Saldaña’s team, though, wasn’t so bland.
Although sloppy and disorganized at first, the Bruins settled
down once the center of their team, midfielder Shaun Tsakiris,
entered the game in the second half.
They moved the ball around the field well, not always making the
obvious pass. They slowed it down when they had to and quickened
the pace when it favored them, showing they had brains. They took
chances on the attack and even though they got burned a few times,
it made the game interesting.
With the exception of Tsakiris, no one on the field displayed
exceptional skill, but at least everyone had the right idea.
The height of creative soccer, it is generally agreed, came
around 1970, when the emphasis of the game was still to outbomb the
opponent. Defense was almost non-existent and as a result, the game
was much more open than it is now. Players, not as conscious of an
opponent’s counterattack, weren’t afraid to be creative
in the center of the pitch. After all, if they were scored on, all
they had to do was get the goal back.
As the game evolved over the years, an added emphasis was put on
defense. Less skillfull teams began limiting their attack to quick
counters or to those down the sidelines, where errors weren’t
as costly.
In the ’80s, Maradona, the greatest player in the history
of the game, revived imagination in soccer.
That only lasted so long. Argentina’s national team, which
did a good job of surrounding Maradona through the 1986 World Cup
(which it won), fell apart in the following years. Furthermore,
Maradona was slowed by injuries and drug use.
By the 1990 World Cup, Argentina, which along with Brazil had
been the only country playing watchable soccer, joined the rest of
the world in playing chess-match-like games.
Noberto Longo, the color commentator for Spanish T.V. station
Telemundo, was disgusted.
“There are people who like this kind of soccer,”
Longo said during the broadcast of the Argentina-Yugoslavia World
Cup game. “It seems intelligent to them. They think that the
results are more important than the show.
“That’s fine. Everyone has a right to an
opinion.”
Then, speaking on behalf of himself and play-by-play man Andres
Cantor, he added, “But personally, we don’t like it. We
like soccer as show, as art, as a skill.”
In Cantor’s 1996 book on soccer, “Goooal!,”
Maradona said the following in an interview concerning the modern
state of soccer:
“Today, the central issue to everyone who thinks they know
something about soccer is physical training. “˜It’s a
physical game,’ they say.
“But when are we going to touch the ball in this physical
game? … All right, I agree one has be be in good shape, but
let’s not let it surpass ball-handling skills and
imagination! Because if everyone who gets the ball is going to go
100 meters in nine seconds, let’s forget about this game,
which is great for a reason.”
As a fan of the sport, I like what Saldaña’s team is
doing He’s letting his players play soccer, instead of
conducting track meets on grass.
It’s a step in the right direction.
Too often, I’ve seen young kids discouraged from playing
the ball through the middle. They’re taught to make the safe
play from the time they’re six or seven.
And that’s what killed the game.