Craig Waibel was asked an innocuous enough question on Wednesday as Major League Soccer kicked off the 2015 MLS Cup Playoffs. Who does he like to emerge in the postseason this year?
“I don’t like anyone that’s still playing soccer, to be honest with you,” he quipped in his weekly appearance on The Bill & OC Show on ESPN 700.
The Real Salt Lake General Manager wasn’t trying to be funny. Or disingenuous. He was just in a position that he wasn’t accustomed to. In his 11 MLS seasons as a player, he never missed the playoffs. In his first year in the coaching ranks in MLS last year, he helped RSL make the postseason.
Now, after all of those successes, he was left to watch from home without a horse in the race for the first time in his professional career.
It’s also a position he doesn’t plan to be in again.
So he is now entering his first off-season at the helm with an open mind and determined focus. Evaluations of himself and the coaching staff have been underway. Everything from practice sessions to starting lineups to substitution patterns is analyzed. Players have been put under the microscope all season. Now the difficult decisions are made as he pencils out the structure for the team in 2016.
“We’ll be as thorough as we can, going through every detail that we can dig up and figure out where we believe it went wrong and then figure out how to make it right,” Waibel said, noting that the self-evaluation of his own role and the coaches is as important as the ongoing player evaluations. “We don’t tend to evaluate on a daily basis as easily and as readily available as a practice and a game gives you. We evaluate every game, but we need to go back and figure out why some weeks were better than others.”
Knee-jerk reactions are natural after any season, but Waibel and his staff are charged with a much more wide-scoped task as he looks to build RSL back into a team that can compete for championships on a yearly basis.
With a crucial CONCACAF Champions League quarterfinal match against Tigres in Mexico on the horizon as early as February 23, the makeup of the team and transition into the 2016 campaign becomes even more critical.
“My job is to manage the long-term vision. The fans are rightfully enabled to manage the short-term and the day-to-day opinions. We’ll be thorough,” Waibel said. “We’ll look at every angle. And we’ll take everything into consideration. Thankfully, having played and been on the coaching side, I can look at almost every angle of the situation with an educated eye.”
For the record, Waibel predicted an MLS Cup final of FC Dallas hosting the Columbus Crew.
To hear the full interview, click here.
