At one point, Tim Cahill’s departure from New York Red Bulls for Shanghai Shenhua would have been the lead story of the MLS off-season in New York.
But such has been the nature of this off-season, and such has been the drift in Cahill’s reputation in MLS this past year, that his departure has an anti-climactic feel to it – more of a tidying up of loose ends from a rapidly eclipsed era at the Red Bulls than a sense of a prized asset being lost.
This has been a particularly crazy few months in New York, that at times has seen what are now two MLS sides entering a new competitive era apparently determined to hand the initiative to each other.
So for example just as the Red Bulls looked set to benefit from the fallout of the Frank Lampard debacle in NYCFC’s camp, they conjured one of their own, when new sporting director Ali Curtis sacked folk-hero coach Mike Petke on the eve of pre-season.
Petke was not only the coach who had brought the team their first ever trophy (the 2013 Supporters Shield), but as a former player from the team’s MetroStars incarnation, his presence had done a lot to bring round long-term fans skeptical of the Red Bull buyout of the team back in 2006.
By the time the team played New England in last season’s Eastern Conference final home leg, there were banners in the team’s former colors in the corners of the stadium and past players were being paraded onto the field, in direct contrast to years of airbrushing out the past after the extensive Red Bull rebranding. These concessions weren’t Petke’s decisions, but his presence on the sidelines helped create the surprising spirit of Glasnost in the Red Bull’s recent ownership style.
But the cautious goodwill engendered by these gestures, and the sense that the post-Thierry Henry era would see the team define their unique selling point as the long-term incumbent MLS side in New York, (in implicit comparison to the nouveau NYCFC) was blown up by the sudden sacking of Petke.
The backlash from Petke’s sacking and replacement with Jesse Marsch would overshadow most of the subsequent moves the Red Bulls front office would make – including the shrewd way they managed to land the country’s top college player last year, Leo Stolz, from a lowly No18 on the draft, or outsmarting LA Galaxy to trade up for an allocation slot that saw them land Sacha Kljestan, along with Montreal playmaker Felipe Martins, last week. While Curtis had to give up the promising Ambroise Oyongo and the much-improved midfielder Eric Alexander to do so, the sequence looked to have led to an immediate net gain in the Red Bulls personnel fortunes.
Instead of heralding a brave new era however, these moves have not offered significant popular relief from the impression that Petke took a lot of long-term fans with him when he left. In all likelihood Marsch will be a tactical upgrade on Petke the motivator, but to the hardcore fans paying for “Thank you Mike Petke – Red Bull out” electronic billboards beside the Lincoln Tunnel in recent days, that’s hardly the point.
Similarly NYCFC might point to what’s been a steady stream of positive personnel decisions from their inception – up to and including the acquisition of young US talent in Mix Diskerud, and wonder why the Lampard storyline has overshadowed those decisions to the extent it has. In particular, David Villa, who has just been announced as the club’s first captain, and who was the first signing for the team, could be forgiven for wondering just where the spotlight has gone. Villa has already shown himself to be a humble and respectful presence for his new team, in his limited public utterances, and deserves much better than to be treated as an afterthought.
It’s still silly season in MLS of course – even if this one has been sillier than most in New York (we’ve not even touched on Raul showing up at the Cosmos…). The current chatter will pass and the season will be underway soon, and New York City fans will be able to assess the actual merits of Villa, Diskerud et al (while waiting for Lampard), while Red Bulls fans will be watching another new incarnation of their team without Henry, without Petke, and now without Cahill.
Looking at these departures as significant phenomena, one of those men is probably irreplaceable, one may have set his replacement up for an impossible task, and one of them seemed to believe he was irreplaceable (before he was replaced last year). Put bluntly, Cahill’s departure is a story, but it’s far from the story in New York soccer this off-season.
Tim Cahill’s time in New York
Cahill was an ambiguous presence as a designated player in MLS – showing traits of the best and worst of the species in his two and a half years with the Red Bulls.
Arriving in New York in the middle of the 2012 MLS season, after a largely indifferent season at Everton that had many writing him off and even questioning whether he’d make the 2014 World Cup squad, Cahill made all the right noises in his new home and was an instant locker room presence. Where Henry did little to hide his exasperation with the degree of media access and banal questioning he was subjected to after every game, Cahill was conspicuously on message and always scrupulously vocal in his support of the team and league project.
If he was also vocal about his national team ambitions and priorities, there was a certain amount of selective hearing that went on in New Jersey, as at that stage fans preferred to note his crowd-pleasing promises to “run through walls” for his new team. And despite a slow start in that first half-season, and the opening games of the 2013 season, they would be rewarded by a surge in form and driving play from Cahill on the run to the 2013 Supporters Shield. Along the way he became an apparently popular locker room presence – and at PR events with team-mates he was often front and center, emphasizing his everyman credentials rather than any marquee aloofness.
Ironically, given the later split with Petke, he would be seen as something of an avatar of the coach on the field in 2013 – the enforcer of Petke’s wish that the Red Bulls shed their reputation for lacking character, once and for all.
Perhaps the highlight of Cahill’s time in New York was when New York traveled to Seattle in September 2013, with both sides competing for the Supporters Shield. With Henry and Jamison Olave missing the game on turf, Cahill consistently talked up New York’s chances in the week before the game, then scored a vital equalizer to tilt the Shield charge New York’s way.
It was possibly the peak of his influence. After the Shield win, 2014 was a different story. With two years remaining on his contract Cahill reportedly asked for a significant raise during the off-season and was denied. Subsequently, he seemed to drift with the Red Bulls and MLS. He was noticeably less central within the New York locker room, and his form was indifferent too. Some put it down to his focus on the impending World Cup, but whatever the cause there was a definite malaise about Cahill’s play.
Of course this wasn’t helped by Petke trying to figure out how best to use him, given the form and roles of Bradley Wright-Phillips and Thierry Henry, as well as the late-season combination of Eric Alexander and Dax McCarty anchoring the midfield.
Just as significantly though, Cahill’s international absences went from a tacitly accepted cost of having him in New York, to something of an open irritation with the league and club. By the time Cahill returned from the World Cup, his notoriety after scoring one of the goals of the tournament was not enough to get him further than the New York bench on the season run-in. And with that run-in proving a tight one for the Red Bulls, and with Cahill absenting himself from crucial league matches for exhibition games with Australia during it, his priorities found him on a repeat collision course with those of his club.
Certainly Monday’s news did not come as much of a surprise – from his comments after the playoff elimination last season, it was fairly clear that Cahill was already on his way, and it was just a matter of where.
The Shanghai destination makes sense of the direction the Cahill story has been headed. Beyond his carefully placed talk of the team coming first Cahill has shown a healthy individual ego that suggests he wants to be branded as a leader wherever he goes (and he’ll be making a leader’s salary in Shanghai). He was always unlikely to want to sit on a bench again, even in a more prestigious league than MLS – and with his stock still at a high in Asia right now, and strangely diminished in New York, this may be Cahill’s best move right now.
