The addition of Wilmer Cabrera as Pareja's right-hand man has been the worst-kept secret in Commerce City for some time. Today the Rapids made it official, along with the rest of the coaching staff (all of which had been leaked prior to today). The new additions:
Wilmer Cabrera - Assistant Coach
Former Men's U-17 coach for the U.

Nadal won again against Federer in the Australian Open semi-final this morning. The comparison between the psychological advantage Nadal has over Federer with how the Blaugrana consistently defeat the Merengue is an intriguing one.

In his past clubs Mourinho always had the solution to win the psychological game.

When the institution it represents is stronger than the players, the coaches, the management. Look at Mourinho's current problems with Real Madrid. I don't know if this is a grand scheme by the Great One to purposefully have Marca and As criticize him so as to win the support from the fans?

Jim Harbaugh and Sean Payton: The NFL's young brigade are animating the sport

Watching the San Francisco 49ers and New Orlean Saints putting together one of the NFL's classics last night, one was struck by the relative youth of the two opposing head coaches, patrolling the sidelines as an armada of assistant coaches and players milled around behind them.

Today Colorado made it official and hired Oscar Pareja as the team's 7th head coach. The Rapids say 6th but I like to count Roy Wegerle's 1 game as player/manager at the end of the 1996 season. ;) There's been no details as to the amount or length of his contract other than "long" according to Tim Hinchey at the press conference.

More detail tonight, but two quick notes.
The 2012 schedule was released, see it here.
President Tim Hinchey tweeted that there's a 3pm press conference to unveil Pareja as our coach and he tweeted a picture of Pareja signing his contract.

Multiple sources are reporting that the Rapids have decided on Oscar Pareja as their new head coach. Some are saying the announcement could come as early as tomorrow. As mentioned yesterday Pareja had a long career at FC Dallas and then moved into the coaching ranks there, eventually being put in charge of Dallas' youth program, considered to be the most successful thus far in MLS (in admittedly a short 5 years since the youth initiative was announced).

Now that we're through the holidays its time to get back to business. Hopefully KSE will make a coaching choice this week, as this debacle of an off-season can't go on much longer. More on that in a moment.

Sorry I went AWOL on everyone (which I'm guessing is about 5 readers at this point in the offseason ;)) for a few days, stomach flu sucks. A couple of interesting news items came out this week.

• Colorado declined the options on Miguel Comminges, Danny Earls, Steven Emory, and Michael Holody.

Holody's 3 years of service means he's eligible to be selected by other MLS teams in next week's re-entry drafts.

First of all, Colin Clarke's name has been floated in some circles as a possible candidate, but he just accepted the Carolina Railhawks job, so we can rule him out.
Today Jeff Plush did an interview with ColoradoRapids.com that lays out what they're looking for in a coaching search, and a bit about what happened with Gary Smith.

Well the first 24 hours after the Smith announcement has brought some interesting fall out.

• Nick Thomas tweeted that Paul Bravo is not a candidate for the job.
• The Rapids asked for, and were denied, permission from the Portland Timbers to speak to John Spencer about the job.
• ESPN's Jeff Carlisle dug into the story a bit to find out what the real issues were.

Well, that time off was a grand total of 3 days. Within the last hour the Rapids have announced that Gary Smith will not be returning as head coach in 2011.
Smith was out of contract and it had been reported a month or so ago that Colorado and Gary had agreed on financial terms for a new contract.

Early this week, Carlos Tevez warmed up from the sideline waiting to come on for Manchester City in a CL match against Bayern Munich. City was already down 2-0 when coach Roberto Mancini told Tevez to start warming up to come on. The problem is that Tevez warmed up 10mins prior and took it as some kind of offense that he should have to warm up again when he felt he was ready.

The Mattheaus experiment is over. After clocking 150+ NT appearances for Germany, several unremarkable club managing stints and a failure with Hungary, Bulgaria has now fired Mattheaus.Lothar had only 1 win and 2 draws in 5 qualifying matches and has effectively eliminated Bulgaria from the Euro 2012 Tournament.

According to the Egyptian Football Federation, Bob Bradley's flight was delayed today because of Homeland Security for some reason, so they expect to officially "unveil" him tomorrow.
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Well, not the biggest surprise out there (possibly instead that going to the Egyptian Football Federation for meeting 48hrs ago to announce a new head coach only to not do so...) but Bob Bradley was passed over as the next possible head coach for Santos Laguna.While Bradley has had a stellar career as a club coach, his NT head coach position for the US made his possibility of hiring a little more
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While nothing official has been stated, some Santos Laguna fan has jumped the gun on Wikipedia and announced him as the new head coach. Other fans on their club site state that this is the beginning of an effort to improve Santos, including a future move to "lure" Landon Donovan to Mexico after the end of the current MLS season.

The latest update comes via Skysports. Apparently, former Ghanaian and Serbian national Milvan Rajevac, has flown to Cairo to have talks with the Egyptian Football Association (EFA).Milvan was head coach for Ghana when they beat the US to make it to the quarterfinals of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Lugano is about to sign with the Paris Saint-Germain. It's certain to happen in the next day or so. I predict that's a decisive move for the PSG to win the championship this year. Diego Lugano will bring the garra that can overcome any obstacle. Well done Leonardo!

Maracanazos wish a warm welcome to Diego Lugano!

Looks like it after yesterday's great game. I had already referred to Mourinho as being the first hacker coach in football's history. The Special One is transforming the classy image that Real Madrid has patiently built up since 1902. Pepe and Marcelo are his preferred hound dogs in this image transformation of the Merengues.

From the files of what are they smoking... Bob Bradley is in Egypt to talk terms with possibly taking over the reins of the Pharoahs (Egypt's NT). While he isn't the only candidate (Colombian Francisco Maturana, the 1990/94 Colombian NT coach and Zoran Filipovic, the former Montenegro coach are the two others).

USSF president Sunil Gulati has just announced the head coach of the USMNT. It is Jurgen Klinsmann, current resident of Orange County, CA and one of my all-time favorite players. Klinsmann coached Germany to third place in the 2006 World Cup, then stepped down of his own choice. He was then coach of Bayern Munich in 2008-09 before moving back to the United States.

If you have kids, you know the Spongebob song, "It's the Best Day Ever..."And so it is.What was yours? Finding a $50 bill on the street? Getting into a certain school? Getting a date with that one hot girl you never thought you could?Well, perhaps it is today.Why?Bob Bradley was fired. (See article below where we called on the USSF for the umpteenth time to fire his sorry ass).

Okay, it's a tired and old title. What more, it's true. We need to fire Bob Bradley.The latest FIFA rankings are out and the US dropped out of the Top 25 for the first time since... wait for it... Bob Bradley took over. It's been a free fall as of late for the US. Currently, we are tied with Switzerland in 30th.

I wonder what happened after Dave Sarachan met Zack Galifianakis. Did they drive straight to Vegas and wild out? Did they grab Mike Magee on the way and dress him up like Bradley Cooper just for sh!ts and gigs? And will they repeat the exact same evening 2 years from now and call it a sequel?

I just read an interesting article on Soccer America today. It's definitely worth the read as the article is by a Masters of Sports Physiology student at John Moores University in Liverpool. The general premise is this, the game of soccer is growing and will continue to grow stale as long as FIFA does nothing to change the rules of the game to compensate for improved fitness of players.

The gossip mill isn't even fully revved up yet but the NY Times Goal blog is already speculating as to who could replace Bob Bradley as USMNT boss. Amazing. Apparently we are shunning the traditional full week of post-Gold Cup "should he stay or should he go?" chatter before we move on to "____ is the leading candidate" talk.

Going into the Gold Cup this year, Bob Bradley was riding a high. He had a decent, albeit extremely lucky WC 2010 showing, a win against Spain, a first half surprise upset in the making on Brazil before they came back, and there was even talk about him taking over the US Olympic team as well.Fast forward to Friday, June 3rd.

The brother of Cock and Dick Jol (seriously, you can't make that up) is finally the new manager at Fulhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifham. Took nearly a year for it to happen, but early today, Martin returned to the EPL when he signed a 2 yr contract to take over for the Cottagers.Martin's last stint with the EPL didn't go so well at Tottenham.

I got my hands on the USSF's Coaching Curriculum for youth soccer today... and I found some interesting stuff in it:1) Apparently, we overplay the 4-4-2 formation2) We dribble too much3) We don't attack out of the backfield enough4) Our passing sucksWell, no real surprises there, but what they are suggesting is that we should run the 4-3-3 (or 4-2-3-1) exclusively until the U15 bracket at which
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In one of the least anticipated, and under reported stories to come out of USSoccer yesterday was the firing, um, sorry, "not rehiring" of U20 USMNT coach Thomas Rongen.After failing to qualify for the U20 WC in a semifinal upset, Rongen has been relieved of duties until his contract ends December 31, 2011.

Barça has just tied Real Madrid in the Champions League return semi-final and will play the final most likely against Man United. After seeing the match and many other games, I was wondering if the Blaugrana actually need a coach. These players have learned to play as they do since they are 10 or so.

What does race have to do with it? Nothing. The French national teams have seen Polish immigrants in the great 1958 team, Italian and Spanish in the dream team of the 1980s and the black-blanc-beur world champion team of 1998. The debate is only about how to put back the technical aspects in front of the physical ones, point la ligne.

I had written about their comeback and had forecasted that they would win the Bundesliga back in December. Much of the Schwartzgelben's merit is tied to their coach Jürgen Klopp. He bet on a young squad and has proven that you don't need dozens of millions of euros to win a title.

Following my last post on Real Madrid, I see Mourinho as the first football hacker. The Special One analyzes his opponents source code and then introduces malware (think Pepe + Alonso + Diarra against Barça) to disrupt and corrupt. Come on Mourinho, don't let the dark side of the force eat you up for ever.

Mourinho is a dangerous coach. The Real Madrid should be careful that this man doesn't change the image and style that have contributed to the legend of the club. Mourinho has been hailed as the man who brings titles. That is true but the collateral damages can be terrible. Mourinho in his press conference yesterday evening incriminated the Barça, the refs and even Unicef.

Here's an interesting (and perhaps useless) factoid of the day. Don't know how and why I missed this last summer, but I was astonished to read just today about the huge discrepancy in the numbers of highly qualified coaches across European soccer nations, and in particular England's relative and absolute backwardness.

What is it with Scotsmen on draft day? There must be something about being "on the clock" that just makes those bhoys go absolutely batty because they seem to be the most habitually-active players come draft day. Seriously, if you thought Mo Johnston was unique you'd best think again.
If you don't believe me watch this latest installment of Inside the SuperDraft.

It's Akron Coach Caleb Porter's world, we just live in it: Five of the first eight selections were from the NCAA champion Zips, and two more went in the second round. (Goff)

So was the FO's failure to land him last year due more to something they did (or didn't do) or to his desire to stick with his program (or the college ranks in general)?

That's your new coach and his assistant in the colors of the enemy; they're basically getting the band back together but on a new label...are y'all down with it?