In 1998 two Chicago teams won championships on the strength of a core group of veterans.
But while the NBA champion Bulls traded Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr and Luc Longley, declined to re-sign Dennis Rodman and watched Michael Jordan retire, the Major League Soccer champion Fire welcomed back its veterans with open arms.
Granted, all the Fire players were under contract and the Bulls were staring at a group of free agents. But while the Bulls decided to rebuild, the Fire will try to make it two championships in two years.
“We recognize how important their experience and their play is to our team,” Fire coach Bob Bradley said of captain Peter Nowak, Lubos Kubik, Roman Kosecki, Jerzy Podbrozny, Francis Okaroh and Frank Klopas. “But we also feel like we have good depth and that we have the ability to adjust on a given day, depending on who is available.”
That depth could be crucial this season as the Fire tries to repeat as MLS and U.S. Open Cup champion. The Fire also will try to add a third title when it competes in the CONCACAF Champions Cup later in the summer.
“The addition of CONCACAF is not that big a difference over what we had last year,” Bradley said. “We certainly know what it means to be busy after last year.”
The CONCACAF tournament features league champions from North and Central America. Neither a site nor a date has been announced. The last two years the tournament was held in Washington. D.C. United, the tournament’s defending champion, also will participate.
The Fire spent almost all of July on the road, between a five-game trip and U.S. Open Cup matches.
“This season will be very long,” said Nowak, 34, who thinks he can play three more seasons. He missed more than a month last season with a knee injury, the first time in his career that he had an serious injury.
“We worked very hard last year and it was no problem to play that many games,” he said. “We should forget about last year. This will be a difficult year for us.”
Okaroh, 35, will team with another 35-year-old in Kubik and the baby of the group, 23-year-old C.J. Brown in the Fire defense.
“We’re a year older; that means we’re a year more mature,” Okaroh said. “We’re just going to have to pace ourselves. It’s going to be harder so we have to work harder.”
Not only will the Fire be tested with three competitions, it also enters the season with a huge bull’s-eye attached to it.
At this time last season, Fire players were better off wearing “Hi, my name is . . .” tags. Now the defending champions have the entire league gunning for them.
“When teams play us now it will be like a Cup final for them,” Okaroh said.
In a rarity in professional sports these days, the Fire started the 1999 season–which began Saturday night in San Jose, Calif.–with virtually the same lineup that took the field in October in Pasadena. Kosecki was serving the first game of a three-game suspension for “abusive behavior” toward the referee in the final exhibition game.
Zach Thornton, Chris Armas, Ante Razov and Brown spent much of their off-season with the U.S. national team, picking up invaluable experience in quality competition.
“It should help a lot,” Brown said. “It should give me more confidence. That’s a big factor for me now, having confidence on the ball.”
While Bradley said the national team experience is beneficial, he also has to make sure that those players don’t think their spot in the Fire lineup is automatic.
“We are very excited about those players having a chance to play for the U.S.,” Bradley said. “But when they come back to our team, they are still judged by how they play day in and day out.”
Josh Wolff, who spent last season shuttling back and forth between the Fire and the Project-40 team, will be with the Fire the entire season, giving the team more depth at forward and creating competition for playing time with Razov and Kosecki. In 32 games with the Fire and Project-40 team, Wolff scored 20 goals.
Also back are Manny Lagos and Andrew Lewis. Lagos played just one game last season and Lewis only 13 because of injuries. Diego Gutierrez missed the first half of the season with a knee injury, but played 13 games in the second half and the playoffs and figures to play a vital role as an outside midfielder. Rookie Dema Kovalenko will take Wolff’s spot on the Project-40 team and have an opportunity to earn playing time with the big club.
In its second season, the Fire has gone from learning how to compete as a first-year team to defending two championships.
“There is no guarantee that everything will come together the same way (as last year),” Bradley said. “The only part of last year we’ve talked about is re-establishing the way we want to work together every day and having an understanding of the fact that our success last year was based upon a lot of days of good work.”
