MISL Feature
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
TAMPA, Fla. – When he assembled his squad for the last training camp before the CONCACAF Futsal World Cup Qualifying, U.S. Men’s Futsal National Team and Milwaukee Wave coach Keith Tozer had a quick word for the Baltimore Blast’s Machel Millwood.
“It’s just so good to have you on the same side and not in the other dressing room,” Tozer told Millwood, an All-MISL forward in 2011-12.
Tozer and his 14-man squad leave for Guatemala on Wednesday with the aim of not only qualifying for November’s World Cup, but taking home a third Gold Medal from the region’s tournament. With 11 of the 14 players in the U.S. squad current MISL players as well, there has been a familiarity among the players that should translate to the futsal arena.
What will also allow the players to adapt to a game that has some major differences to the game they’re used to in the MISL is the way the indoor game has progressed in the past 10 years. While the boards obviously still play a major role in any MISL contest, the sport has progressively taken on more principles that originated in futsal, thanks in part to Tozer’s success with the Wave.
“I think there’s a lot of synergy between the indoor game and futsal,” Tozer said recently. “I think what helps us a lot is that a lot of the teams are becoming more tactical in the indoor game, [using] more futsal components in the indoor game, so for me to take a Machel Millwood from Baltimore, to take a Matt Stewart from Milwaukee, a Danny Waltman from Missouri, the learning curve is definitely much quicker.”
There are, of course, three major differences in futsal’s setup. First and foremost is the lack of boards, meaning close control becomes an even bigger key to success. The playing area’s dimensions are also smaller, as are the goals, and the ball is different to the one used in outdoor soccer, or even the MISL, with the smaller, heavier ball keeping the game one played principally on the ground.
It’s with those differences in mind that Tozer has assembled his squad, with Baltimore’s Patrick Healey, Wichita’s Kevin Ten Eyck and Nelson Santana of the Syracuse Silver Knights all selected in addition to the players already mentioned. Most of the players provide a level of versatility in their play, meaning the labels of defender, midfielder and forward don’t necessarily matter when the game gets going as the team rotates to try and create scoring opportunities.
That rotation system is one that has made its way into the MISL, with Tozer and other coaches implementing the style to great effect.
“About 10 or 12 years ago I started using a hybrid system, bringing futsal tactics into the indoor games, more darting and running, more rotations, how you defend,” Tozer said. “A lot of the components I have seen from around the world in my travels with the national team I’ve tried to blend that through with the Milwaukee Wave, and I think players like Danny Kelly, who is now the coach in Baltimore, and other guys around the league who have been part of our national team, and they have taken a lot of that back to their game, so you can see definitely a correlation when you’re watching an indoor game in our league with futsal tactics.”
One of the boosts Tozer and his squad have received for this qualifying period from U.S. Soccer has been an upgrade in the technology they’ve been able to use, with Irish fitness coach Aiden Byrne coming aboard full time, and the Polar 2 fitness program being available to all of the squad’s potential players. With players training individually away from the camps Tozer has been running, the system has allowed the coaches and trainers to monitor remotely the work the players are putting in away from the squad’s get-togethers.
“That’s been so useful up to this point, because in years past, for World Cups and CONCACAF’s, basically I’ve been handing each player a workout and saying, ‘here’s what you’re going to be doing for the next month, I’ll see you in Brazil for the World Cup’,” Tozer said. “Now with the team’s Polar 2 program, we can actually see how hard the player works, how long, how much effort they’ve put into it, and of course the other important thing, to see if they did it at all.”
The side opens the tournament on Monday, July 2 when it faces Panama at 8 p.m. ET, with games against Canada, and Milwaukee’s Ian Bennett, or El Salvador on July 3 and Guatemala on July 4 to round out the group stage. All of the games will be streamed live on CONCACAF.com, allowing MISL fans to follow the team as it tries to reach the World Cup in Thailand.
For Tozer, though, the goal remains greater than just qualification, with the past performances of 1996 and 2004 being the ones he wants this year’s team to emulate.
“What I’m telling the guys is that we’ve been gold-medal winners in 1996 and 2004, we have been one of the top teams in CONCACAF since the qualification started in 1996, and I just tell the guys our goal is to go down there and win the gold,” Tozer said. “I think they all know four out of the eight are going to qualify, but I don’t want to let them off the hook thinking, OK, we can lose this game, because we still have an opportunity. Our mindset has to be from the beginning that our goal is to go and win gold.”