Unless you happen to be a particularly devoted aficianado of South American soccer, Marco Etcheverry's name might be unfamiliar to you. The 29-year-old Bolivian midfielder's exposure on the world stage has been fleeting indeed.
If memory serves, between a nagging injury and the birth of his first son that June, Etcheverry did not make the trip to Dublin for Bolivia's friendly at Lansdowne Road which preceded the 1994 World Cup, and when the tournament proper began in this country, his appearance was so brief, and his departure so swift, that if you so much as blinked you probably missed it.
Etcheverry, still nursing a groin strain, wasn't supposed to play at all when Bolivia faced Germany in Chicago in the first game of USA '94, but with his side trailing 1-0 he was brought on in the second half, and stayed on the pitch for less than three minutes. With the referee staring over his right shoulder, he delivered a swift boot to the shin of Lothar Matthaeus. Out came the red card, and with it a two-game suspension, and Etcheverry's World Cup was over.
Nicknamed "El Diablo", the swarthy, dark-maned Etcheverry has served for the past four years as the captain, playmaker, and linchpin for DC United, which played its fourth consecutive MLS Cup last Sunday at Foxboro Stadium. The 2-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy established DC United as the most dominant club team in the history of American soccer.
("Well," noted a wag, "that certainly makes them a tall bunch of midgets, doesn't it?")
DC United's dominance over that brief span is all the more remarkable because when Major League Soccer divided up its modest spoils at its inception four seasons back, parity was the goal. The original eight teams were allegedly created equally, and it was only by a combination of good fortune and perceptive personnel moves that one emerged head and shoulders above the others.
Having accidentally created a dominant team, MLS spent the next three years attempting to whittle United down to everybody else's size, forcing upon it several salary-cap inspired trades that robbed the team of its top scorer (El Salvador's Raul Diaz Arce), as well as several of its better American players.
(John Harkes was traded to New England, Roy Wegerle to Tampa Bay and Tony Sanneh was sold to the Germans.) The club even changed coaches last year, when Bruce Arena left to take over the helm of the US national team, and was replaced by Dutchman Thomas Rongen. Still, DC remains at the top of the heap, and that the principal constant has been Etcheverry is hardly a coincidence. The Bolivian came from Chile's Colo Colo to start United's first game in 1996 and, apart from a brief loan to Barcelona over the winter of 1997-98, has been there since. In 1998 he was named the league's Most Valuable Player, and at a Saturday night gala preceding Sunday's championship game was named to the league's "best XI" for the fourth consecutive year.
A world-class distributor of the ball, Etcheverry's other stock in trade will go by the boards next year. Over the years he has scored a record 16 shootout goals, but, largely at the urging of new MLS commissioner Don Garber, the league's competition committee last week voted to do away with that ghastly tie-breaking procedure.
About time, Alan Kelly agrees. Kelly, who collected 47 caps playing for Ireland and then sired another generation of Irish internationals in Gary and Alan, serves as the goal-keeping coach for DC United. Even as the champagne flowed freely in the DC dressing-room on Sunday afternoon, Kelly conceded that he had felt downright silly every time he attempted to explain the shootout to somebody back home.
When MLS squeezed out commissioner Doug Logan last summer and brought in Garber, whose background had been in trying to sell American Football to the Europeans, the US soccer community had reacted with understandable trepidation. Garber, by his admission, knew even less about the sport than did his predecessor.
However, watching the fits and starts of MLS from his European base had provided Garber with a unique perspective. And he proved to be a good listener.
For four years MLS had played a soccer-like game that occasionally reminded people of the real thing. By bastardising the rules in an effort to make them more palatable to the ordinary American fan, MLS had not only consistently alienated the hard-core soccer audience in the US, but held itself up to ridicule around the rest of the world. Garber, recognising that perception, wasted little time in his brief term in office in attempting to remedy both situations.
Convincing the MLS owners was not easy. We're talking about a group of men, after all, who came to the sport still convinced that the greatest threat to world peace was the 0-0 draw.
"As part of the most popular sport in the world, Major League Soccer has decided to bring our rules of competition in line with those of most internationally-respected leagues," said the new commissioner as he formally unveiled the sweeping changes earlier in the week. "Millions and millions of fans in America follow soccer the way it is played across our globe. Our audience has spoken, and we have listened."
Even in agreeing to scuttle the shootout, the MLS moguls still did not quite get it. By insisting on two, five-minute golden goal overtime periods for regular-season games, the owners revealed that they still don't understand that a draw is not only an acceptable soccer result, but sometimes quite a desirable one. The philosophy in America still echoes that of the old college football coach, Duffy Daugherty, who coined the phrase: "A tie is like kissing your sister".
The new commissioner also convinced the owners to have the game clock run forward rather than backward, a paean to American convention.
When we interviewed him just before the '94 World Cup, incidentally, Marco Etcheverry didn't speak a word of English. When we ran into him in the boozy United dressing-room following Sunday's win, he had a fat cigar clenched between his teeth and asked, in perfect English: "Do you have a match, my friend?"
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