Adrian Heath has always punched above his weight. At just 5ft 6in and barely 150lb in the heavyweight world of Division One in the 1980s with Everton, he had no choice. Now, his latest bout is just a week away and he faces a catchweight contest for the ages as he attempts to put Orlando City firmly on the MLS map.
Typically, expansion teams don’t fare terribly well in their early years. In the NFL, Jacksonville and Houston have yet to reach a Super Bowl, let alone claim a title. The NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild haven’t had so much as a sniff of the Stanley Cup in 15 years and, in MLS ranks, Toronto have failed even to reach the playoffs since they debuted in 2007.
Perhaps more significantly, only two teams in MLS history have managed a playoff appearance in their inaugural season (Chicago in 1998 and Seattle in 2009), indicating the sizeable undertaking facing Heath and his Lions as they kick off against fellow newcomers New York City FC on 8 March in front of an expected crowd of 60,000.
With the whole league focus on the Citrus Bowl that day – it will be nationally televised on ESPN2 – it is the equivalent of being thrown in the sporting deep end with the ‘how-to-swim’ manual down in the shallow end.
Yet Heath is in no way fazed by the task ahead, which has been heightened by team president Phil Rawlins – and other officials – insisting it is playoffs or bust in Year One, while even on-field linchpin Kaka has said he sees no reason why Orlando shouldn’t actually win the whole shooting match in 2015.
“It’s the goal we have set for ourselves,” Heath confirmed. “We see no reason why we shouldn’t be competitive and, in MLS terms, that means reaching the playoffs. With my size, which was seen as a drawback by most people back in the day, I’ve always had to work harder than most, and this is no different.”
Even Heath’s nickname, ‘Inchy’, played on his lack of height, but there is no doubting his intention of having his team fully prepared to walk tall after four years in the lower-league USL Pro division.
Of his 30-man squad, only eight were with him last year, so it has been a race against time to integrate the 22 additions, who have arrived via trades, free agency, loans, the expansion draft and the SuperDraft. It has been a helter-skelter process over the past five months, with the coach only getting everyone together on the training field for the first time on 23 January.
He explained: “When you have 24 new players to work with [Orlando have recently waived draft pick Akeil Barrett and Brazilian acquisition Gustavo], four and a half weeks of pre-season is never going to be long enough. You hope to have everybody on the same page but this is still a work in progress. We have put a lot of work in on the training ground on our shape, both in and out of possession, and we have been doing quite a bit of work in the classroom. The most pleasing thing is that we have had progress every single game of the pre-season.
“We are now within one or two positions of being pretty set on who will run out on that Sunday evening. If we get everybody fit, I will know my starting line-up. We have a few minor knocks but I have a really good handle on what people can do and it’s now a matter of can we make some combinations, can we get other players involved? I saw some really nice stuff against New York City last Saturday and I think some of our play was excellent and has given us a platform to build on. Hopefully we can put another layer on top of that in the final week of preparation.”
Having Kaka in the mix certainly doesn’t hurt, and Heath is quick to pinpoint the former World Player of the Year as the man who the rest of the team will revolve around. The Brazilian star will no longer be the out-and-out front man of his Real Madrid and AC Milan days, but he will get plenty of licence to roam forward from a midfield trio in Orlando’s fluid 4-2-3-1 formation.
In five and a half warm-up outings, Kaka – or ‘Ricky’ to his team-mates, from his full name of Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite – has scored twice and chalked up three assists, showing a growing understanding with young Trinidadian midfielder Kevin Molino, who bagged a record 20 USL goals last season, and that gives Heath all the encouragement he needs.
He insisted: “The key thing is that we have started to trust Ricky a lot more. You know something can happen. You think he is going to lose the ball and, all of a sudden, he is off and away on the other side, and we have to realise the openings it creates around him because he is so good at running with the ball. He attracts players to him and we have to work off that and use it as a weapon going forward. We have to make sure we can make use of all those openings.
“We have some really intelligent players and just have to get them playing in combination with him. That’s only going to get better as they spend more time with each other. Four weeks is a very short period in football terms, and everybody is still only just starting to get to know each other properly.”
Whatever happens on the field, though, Heath is convinced he hitched his wagon to the right soccer train when he left England in 2008 to join a fledgling team that had no players, no facilities and no name.
He had just been knocked back for the Coventry City manager’s job after a spell as caretaker boss of the Championship side, overlooked in favour of Iain Dowie, and out of work for a prolonged spell for the first time in his life. A chance meeting in the Mainwaring Arms in Newcastle-under-Lyme with Stoke City director – and now Orlando City president – Rawlins, who was mulling over the possibility of creating his own team in the US after selling his Texas-based business, set things in motion, and the duo headed off together, originally through a two-year spell in Austin.
Heath recalled:
“I look back at my time at Coventry and I really enjoyed it there. It became difficult with their money issues but it was a good atmosphere to work in and they were a good bunch of guys.
“There had been a couple of opportunities for me, lower down, but I thought ‘I’m going to take a little break and spend a little more time at home with the wife and kids.’ I was still looking for the right opportunity but nothing came up that jumped out at me.
“Now, one thing I had seen when we had been to the USA with Coventry in the pre-season in 2006 was the way the game was developing there. We had been to Portland in front of a huge crowd and it was quite an experience. It was also a country that I had always liked, so I explored some situations out in the States and talked to a few people. Then the local thing came up with Phil, and it was like it was meant to be.
“I had so much confidence in the growth of the game in America, I was convinced I had to be on board with this idea. I didn’t make any money in the first year here but I realised it was a chance to build something. The most important thing was to get my foot in the door and that was the reasoning behind going to Austin.”
That corner of Texas turned out to be unfertile soil for the seeds planted by Rawlins and Heath, but the opportunity to buy up the USL rights of an Orlando team proved to be the inspiration and catalyst for something distinctly more successful. Right from the start, the Lions created a tradition of success, topping the league three times and winning the championship twice, and an initial trickle of fans became a flood in an area completely overlooked in MLS terms.
After failing to convince league chiefs of their candidacy for elevation in 2012, the Lions hit the jackpot in 2013 as Brazilian millionaire Flavio Augusto da Silva came on board as majority owner, more than 20,000 showed up for their championship game against Charlotte, they unveiled their own stadium plans – and the major league could refuse them no longer.
Much of 2014 was geared around preparation for the step up, and the first two months of this year have been an exercise in staying aboard a rapidly-accelerating bandwagon, which has a whole city agog at what might be achieved come 8 March. Now it is all about what happens on the field and whether Heath can translate minor-league success into major-league prosperity.
There is an open and candid frankness about the 54-year-old that hides a fierce determination to succeed. His roots are still distinctly Old School yet his thinking is definitely modern, especially on the training field where there is an air of dash and élan that wouldn’t be out of place in Spain or Portugal – a far cry from his days at Burnley and Coventry.
If anything, the journey from Staffordshire to Florida seems logical, almost predictable, but Heath admitted: “In all honesty, I didn’t think we would be anywhere near where we are now after just seven years. It has been a strange one, really, because once we got to Orlando I was pretty sure it would happen, but did I think it would happen this quickly and this big? Absolutely not.
“The other thing I am now seeing is that more good players want to come here, and earlier than ever. I have emails every day talking about players whose contracts are not even up for 18 months – these are top players in the Premier League – and I think that’s the test of how far the league in America has come.”
For a league that has still to grab a firm hold of the US national sporting consciousness amid the grip of the Big Four of football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey, it is a delicious possibility for progress in the next few years, with the distinct hint that Orlando could be ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing and presenting their product.
Heath confirmed: “I am living in Florida, enjoying the football and getting well paid. It is a pretty good gig. Certainly the players have arrived and more people are looking for opportunities now. I only see that developing more and more as the league grows, and I like to think that I probably saw it earlier than most, in UK terms.
“I’m pretty sure we will get an amazing buzz running out in front of 60,000 people on Sunday week. It should be an incredible feeling. We are not naïve enough to think we will get 60,000 every week but it shows how far the game has come over here and I think we are really at the tipping point where the game is going to explode in this country.”
First, of course, it has to erupt in Orlando, but the signs are certainly promising. The whole franchise has a breath-of-fresh-air quality to it, and it is an atmosphere rooted in common-sense and reality, well balanced but straining at the leash.
On 8 March the leash will be off and it will be up to Heath, Kaka and Co to ensure the bandwagon doesn’t hit the buffers. It promises to be a wild and exciting ride, but the diminutive kid from Newcastle-under-Lyme has a firm grip of the controls. All aboard, now …
