What Can A National Team Head Coach Do?

Let’s be honest, a national team head coach cannot do a lot to affect his team’s success. With limited time and limited access to his players, he is not going to have a great effect on the quality of players on the pitch. In fact, even the tactical instruction that he imparts will not have a huge impact given these constraints. For the most part, his players will only have the quality and the tactical knowledge they bring with them from their club experience. This is doubly true for a Canadian coach, given that he will have greater time and access limitations than most.

What does that leave? The only cards the international coach has to play are squad selection, substitution, and inspiration. These are the limited tools available to him to separate his squad from the fray. It is Dale Mitchell’s total failure in use of these tools that warrants his immediate removal as the Head Coach of the Canadian National Team.

Against Honduras, Mitchell’s squad choices – both starters and bench – were poor, and were exposed to disastrous effect. The tandem of Adrian Serioux and Richard Hastings was ineffective throughout. Mitchell should not really be blamed for performance: Serioux repeatedly lost the plot completely, and both were terrible closing players down. However, had Mitchell asked himself, ‘who are my best defenders’ or ‘who is most important to their club’, he would have landed on Jim Brennan alongside Mike Klukowski, with one playing centrally. He was stuck with Serioux, perhaps, but including Brennan would have been a marked improvement.

Mitchell’s selection of Patrice Bernier, and, more vitally, his positioning on the right flank was ultimately ruinous. Bernier is simply not effective as a true winger – he rarely plays outside of central midfield for his club – and, as a result, the right side was a black hole, narrowing the Canadian attack, and allowing Honduras to slide its left-sided players more to the centre in defence, disrupting Canada’s dominant central players. Mitchell could easily have chosen Bernier and played him centrally, moving Julian de Guzman forward, sliding Dwayne De Rosario to the left, and swapping Radzinski to the right. He didn’t, and the error was compounded when Tomasz Radzinski was removed due to injury, and Iain Hume – the only winger on the bench – was forced into the match early into a rare, awkward stint on the left.

This pointed to the worst mistake Mitchell made against Honduras: the substitutes bench. Mitchell was always going to make a striker for striker swap, and Radzinski and Hume essentially share one spot, so for all intents and purposes Canada did not even have one extra attacker or midfielder. When Canada went down a goal in the 56th minute, they did not have a single card to play for offence. True, the camp squad didn’t offer many options – since Issey Nakajima-Farran was clearly out of form – but if Mitchell had selected Oliver Occean for match day, he could have subbed Occean in for Bernier and moved to a 4-4-2 with De Rosario and Hume on the wings. The obvious additional question is why Nakajima-Farran wasn’t replaced in camp. True, Josh Simpson has yet to return from injury, and Jamie Peters is in no man’s land, but Will Johnson could have been brought in a moment’s notice, and, as it turned out, could have filled a vital role.

Finally, it would be difficult to imagine a less inspirational figure than Dale Mitchell. Before the match Dale Mitchell was visibly the most nervous man in the building; high in the running for most nervous man in the country. During the match, he shuffles impassively, but does nothing to rally or embolden his team. The contrast between Mitchell and Stephen Hart, who was so forceful and animated when he led Canada in its only recent positive form, could not have been more stark.

Yes, there are terrible institutional problems, both at the CSA and at CONCACAF, that make the job difficult, perhaps impossible, for a Canadian coach. The consistently arbitrary and unfair group draws; the lack of friendly matches; the lack of funds; the poor venue selection: these, and other, challenges may make it impossible for Canadian squads to qualify. At the same time, it is hard not to imagine that a Rene Simoes-led Canada would have banked four or six points by now.

Give Dale Mitchell a shot to pull off a miracle in Mexico. After he fails there, fire him, promote Stephen Hart to head coach, and bring John Limniatis – currently the only successful Canadian-born coach in football not named Frank Yallop – into the program as an occasional assistant coach.