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An Open Letter to Dave Dir
by: Viking

To Dear Dave Dir, Coach of the Dallas Burn:

Congratulations on surviving another season of Major League Soccer.  On behalf of the fans, thank you for trying your hardest and dedicating another year of your career to building the Dallas Burn, and Major League Soccer. 

As fans, the 2000 season held a lot of promise.  The superb close to the regular season last year, advancing to the final game of the championship series, both provided Burn fans with a short but sweet off-season before the big 2000 season.  Ticket sales clipped along nicely, and the core fans were expecting the best.  Literally.  With some draft-day player changes, the Burn looked like it might be ready to claim the championship.  Even the opening day’s come-from-behind victory over Chicago seemed to confirm that nothing would prevent the Burn from being the team to beat in 2000.

Instead, the Burn ended up in the group of death among the three divisions of MLS, and plowed their way through the season. As week after week went by, the Burn came up with inventive ways to make games close at home, lose road games, and get themselves slapped around in blow outs worthy of a much lesser team.   In a season that begged for consistent performances just to make .500, the team never won enough to put doubts to rest, never lost enough to lose hope.  Why?

Youth was not the problem.   You played Rhine, Broome, Korol, Martinez, and Alavanja extensively during the year, and they won a handful of games for you, three of them critical ones (Columbus, New England, and Chicago).  In the balance of a season that showed remarkably good play by more experienced teams around MLS, you got all you were entitled to from the second generation. 

Second,  let’s put to rest any notion that players on national team duty, or gone for any other reason, were responsible for inconsistent play.  Oscar Pareja, Jason Kreis, Ariel Graziani, Zarco, and Chad Deering didn’t miss many games in a 32 game season.   The following are their statistics (started/played): Pareja (27/29), Kreis (27/27), Graziani (24/24), Zarco (22/25), Deering (24/29).  The only player on the entire team that appeared in more games than these players was Matt Jordan, who played in 31. Iron Man Ted played in 29 games, but started only 22, the same number as the lowest of the above cadre.   When your starting goalkeeper misses one game, your lead striker misses 8,  last year’s league MVP misses 5, and your sweeper misses 7 games, you’ve had a good year.  The top three strikers in MLS played in 28, 29, and 24 games respectively.  I’m not going to wade through the season to see how many games Burn players missed at the same time, because that would prove the case even further.

We can also put to rest the notion that Serge Daniv is somehow the teams most valuable player, and him missing 18 games was instrumental in the Burn having another .500 season.  Although Daniv is a fine player and seems poised to become MVP material, he’s not today.  His performance over Martinez, Rhine, Broome, or Zarco is not enough to make a team so utterly unable to win three in a row.  He plays outside midfielder, a position the Burn could actually be the deepest in.

After the length of the season, we can now see that the schedule turned out to be only a marginal handicap.  The Burn played ten games against three teams that didn’t make the playoffs, and only managed to split those.  Add that to the lost games against San Jose and Colorado, and you begin to see the lost opportunity. 

The Burn managed to get bounced from the playoffs in straight games, the only team this year to lose in two straight games and exit the playoffs without a point.  Slam bam thank you ma’am.  How does it feel to be the bitch of that dog Clint Mathis?  And just to add insult to injury, let’s not forget that no one took fewer shots during the regular season than the Burn, and only the Quakes scored fewer goals on the road.  How exactly does this happen when the Burn has the premier power-shot forward in all of MLS?

This leaves two possible areas of improvement, over which you have some control.  First, your tactical tendencies are now well known in the League.  Burnball is build from the back, bring it to midfield, send it to the outside at 30 yards, send it back to the middle either at the 18 or the endline, repeat as necessary.   It should be obvious by the low shot total, that something is missing.   The Burn won critical games late this year when they actually counterattacked in numbers at speed.  Sometimes you have to allow the players to do things you are not comfortable with, just to keep your opponent off balance.  Teams that learn that the Burn’s first pass in transition is always back, find pressing the attack a pretty low risk venture.

The second thing you might improve is your communication.  You appear unable to communicate effectively with the team.  The thing a soccer coach does more than anything else, is talk.  Put down cones for practice comes in a close second.  IF A COACH is not an effective communicator, he can’t give adequate direction in training, he can’t make abstract concepts clear, he can’t provide motivation by talking to players in a way that prepares them to take the field and destroy the opponent in the opening minutes.   He cannot build trust, or instill confidence.  He cannot produce a team motivated to win each and every time they step on the field.  Effective is not effusive.  To some extent, the fewer words a coach uses to get across his message, the better.  But that means those words have to be very well chosen, and extremely effective in their outcome.   What little the fans know of your coaching style isn’t encouraging in this respect.

This is the most difficult task you face, and one for which you may not be prepared.  For all your ability to identify players that appear talented enough to start and play in MLS, your inability to prepare them to perform the instant of the opening whistle is a larger problem.  Wasting talent with poor mental and physical preparation is just as much an indicator of coaching ability as getting great games from average players.   I think you are guilty of both. 

That means the improvement on this team depends on your ability to become a better coach.   Another defender will make a difference on the field, sure.  But there are two dozen coaches in America that want your job who could do that, and they might not have your liabilities.  Most business organizations would not waste their time giving a manager the chance to improve, when the manager has already proven himself lacking.   Once a weak link is identified in lean and successful companies, that link is gone.  Many organizations in America don’t waste their time asking someone to change who they are, they just change people.   It’s the quick, direct, and ruthless way to succeed.  A clean break is often the best result for all involved.

But if you are lucky enough to earn the indulgence of benevolent management, you owe it to the team, the league, the fans, and your patron saint, to succeed.   Anything less than excellence is unacceptable.