Juergen Klinsmann, who will be working for ESPN during the World Cup, had A FEW WORDS with an AP reporter about Landon Donovans' time at Bayern and the decision to pass on the USMNT Head Coaching job.
California Klinsy told the AP that he decided not to take the job "because he wasn't guaranteed top players" for the 2007 Copa America and CONCACAF Gold Cup:
"There were different opinions, you know, what players could get the permissions in MLS, what role it plays. And I thought here, it's not going the right directions in that specific moment. … So I said, 'You know, it's OK, move on.''\
I'm sorry, but this is some lame stuff here. Is Klinsmann saying that because Sunil Gulati told him he couldn't have the best American MLS players in the middle of the season all to himself for roughly two months that somehow that was unreasonable?
In case you've forgotten, let me refresh your memory:
The 2007 Gold Cup was held from June 6 through June 24. The USA took an A lineup and won.
The Copa America started on June 26 and went to July 15. The US took what could fairly be described as a B team and bombed out of the first round.
So tell me: if he had a similar job during the middle of the 2007 Bundesliga season and decided that he wanted to take, say, Schweinsteiger, Kahn, Frings, Klose and the rest of that merry band out of their club sides for the better part of two months, what do you suppose the answer would have been.
I mean aside from the gales of hysterical laughter.
That's simply ridiculous and if he doesn't know it then he's simply ridiculous.
This is about the fourth or fifth explanation we've gotten as to just why it is he turned down the job and this one makes even less sense than the others.
As to Landon's stint at Bayern in 2009, Klinsy says it was the board who wanted the guy gone, not him. Whether or not that's entirely true, it's at least entirely plausible. Either way, he claims:
"It was absolutely not a disappointment, it was Landon taking a big risk coming in for three months, knowing ahead of him is Luca Toni, Miro Klose and Lukas Podolski. He made a lot out of it. You know, I was not agreeing with the board that he was sent back home, and was not agreeing with a lot of things."
What's more revealing, however, is the news that he says the clubs stars were mean to Donovan:
"………the stars of Bayern Munich, a group that included Franck Ribery, Lucio, Martin Demichelis, Daniel Van Buyten and Mark van Bommel, didn't make it easy on Donovan.
"They don't tell you, you know, 'Good to have you here, you know. We give you the starting spot.' They tell you the opposite. But he experienced that and he worked his way through."
Except that it wasn't up to Ribery or Lucio or van Buyton whether or not Landon got "the starting spot".
Unless Klinsmann made his lineup decisions based on dressing room balloting then I fail to see where this makes a lot of sense either.
Now it's certainly true that on every professional team in every sport in every country in the world established veterans don't often welcome new guys who've shown up trying to take their jobs away with great displays of love and enthusiasm. Everybody knows it and while it's nice of Juergen to share this with us it's something that we surely could have assumed.
Yes, you'd like to see a high level of professionalism, but of course you don't always get that.
But his statement seems to imply that the teams' established stars were, well, jerks about it or something. Maybe they refused to talk to him or they put Icy Hot in his jock or (joke removed due to being too tired to argue about it) or whatever.
We need more facts here, but all we get is the usual "everything is everyone else's fault" tale from the guy.
In other words, new day, same old Klinsmann.