Grahame Jones is annoyed, that much is clear. The Bob Bradley dance, top of mind again yesterday because the coach and Sunil Gulati met in LA to to discuss the future, is pushing the LA Times soccer writer to the breaking point. And really, can we blame him?
Jones is expressing, from a major media pulpit, what bloggers and fans have been saying for weeks. Just get it figured out already.
But where Jones differs from the rest of us is in the stated reasons for his frustrations. Jones doesn't mention the need to get a coach in for upcoming friendlies, or suggest that US Soccer is wasting time better spent moving the program forward with a decisions made; no, Grahame is just flat out testy that US Soccer operates like secret society and that information leaks out of the Fed at a rate not dissimilar Chinese Water Torture. Drip, drip, drip, slowing driving us all mad.
And I quote:
That's the way the federation operates. Nothing is revealed before a battery of lawyers has signed off on every clause on every scrap of paper. It's why soccer news breaks overseas, not here. Over here we schedule news conferences to announce old news.
Don't expect any news resulting from yesterday's meetings. Taking the temperature of this process is a matter of guessing, or in the case of Steve Goff, guessing from a an educated position in which you still essentially know nothing. Everyone is tired of guessing.
I suspect Grahame is right when he says that if a foreign manager gets the job, we'll find out from the press in the coach's homeland. As I'm not in Grahame's position, covering the sport for a major American daily and therefore scrambling for information day after day, I won't mind at all if we learn about Bradley's successor from German or Argentinian sources. I might wait until the US Soccer announcement before I buy it completely, but such is the way of the world.
Maybe even the LA Times isn't beyond a bit of doubt. For a reporter, that's got to be painful reality.
With the knowledge we have about how US Soccer operates and disseminates information, I don't blame Jones for his rant, even if it does sound like sour grapes. Like all of us, he's just ready for something - anything - to happen.
