Beleaguered AFC Richmond pulled off its first win under misfit American manager Ted Lasso on Saturday. Yet the manner of its reinvigorating comeback against Watford, including the bizarre benching of star striker Jamie Tartt, offered more questions than answers about the Greyhounds' prospects under its unlikely new gaffer.
Your humble scribe had the headscratching pleasure of spending a day behind the scenes with Lasso recently.
He's a man equal parts toothy smile and motivational meme; a veritable tsunami of decidedly un-British optimism, expressed often through well-intentioned platitudes left over from his American football past.
"I try not to dabble in the big picture," said Lasso when asked about the broader implications of the Watford win. "I don't run around with enough paints and brushes."
While the garrulous Lasso is perpetually pep-talk ready, it's his contrastingly taciturn longtime assistant Coach Beard who tackles much of the tactical heavy-lifting. The "getone-free" in a befuddling twofer brokered by mysteriously self-sabotaging Richmond owner Rebecca Welton, Beard fills in the blanks (some would say black holes) in Lasso's grasp of the finer points, or even the bullet points, of association football.
Beard diplomatically attributed the Hounds' Watford win to simply "executive decision making," insisting that he was in "absolute concurrence" with Lasso in withdrawing a fuming Tartt, who'd scored twice to draw Richmond level at halftime.
Richmond's comeback was dramatically completed in stoppage time, when veteran midfield guv’nor Roy Kent drew the keeper before slipping a perfectly-weighted sitter to Nigerian right back Sam Obisanya. As if to vindicate Lasso’s counterintuitive substitution, it was the sort of unselfish pass absent from the otherwise supremely wellrounded Tartt’s repertoire.
Yet while Saturday’s result sent shockwaves of relief through Nelson Road Stadium, some of the game’s subplots suggest rifts in its clubhouse.
“The only ‘rumors’ I love listening to are the ones that Fleetwood Mac talks about,” Lasso parried, apparently without sarcasm.
Before withdrawing Tartt on Saturday, Lasso outlandishly sprinted through the stands to seek Welton’s blessing for his controversial decision from the directors’ box. In keeping with her behavior since inheriting the Hounds in a divorce settlement with her playboy ex Rupert Mannion, Welton appeared delighted to let Lasso shoot himself in the foot.
It can only be assumed that Lasso’s deceptively perceptive removal of Tartt was intended as a morale booster for teammates who’ve sometimes wilted in his shadow. And, well, it worked.
“There is no ‘me’ in ‘team’,” said Beard in a barely-veiled reference to Tartt’s repeatedly yelling “Me!” after his stunning 29th-minute solo effort put Richmond back in the Watford game. “So shouting ‘me’ in front of the team is obviously discouraged.”
Among Lasso’s litany of idiosyncrasies is an unnerving habit of inviting coaching input from almost anyone within earshot. I observed him putting the team through a training play – which employed Tartt only as a decoy – conceived by Richmond’s previously mute kit man, one Nathan Shelley (who Lasso has rechristened “Nate the Great”).
Loyal to the so-named “Lasso Way,” Beard even solicited my advice during our at-times surreal interview after the Watford win.
“Ideas are a meritocracy,” he offered, with all the inflection of GPS prompt. “We take ‘em wherever they come.”
The tension between Tartt and Lasso, brewing almost since the latter toucheddown in London, reached boiling point with Saturday’s substitution.
“It worked out for us,” was all Lasso would say on the subject. “But, y’know, Jamie’s a good kid; he’ll be alright.”
Unaccustomed to sharing the spotlight, the return to fitness of flamboyant Mexican forward Dani Rojas, signed by Richmond during the summer transfer window, has likely further soured Tartt’s mood. Ditto his recent breakup with ultimate chav pinup, model Keeley Jones.
But perhaps most alarming of Richmond’s recent fault lines is a repeated butting of heads, sometimes literally, between Tartt and captain Roy Kent. Their embarrassing shoving match during the Watford game, which earned yellow cards for both, is likely just the tip of a very ugly iceberg.
“He doesn’t understand the word ‘team’,” said Kent after the match. “For him that’s a dirty word. Whereas dirty words for me are ‘Jamie Tartt’.”
Lasso’s open-hearted people coaching is certainly a welcome respite from the “dark arts” stylings of the José Mourinhos of the game. But it remains to be seen whether his admirable, if sometimes extreme, efforts to connect with his players – including an eyebrow-raising birthday party following Richmond’s thrashing by Crystal Palace in Lasso’s first game in charge – will translate into the on-pitch consistency required to avoid relegation.
-AFC Richmond Manager Ted Lasso
If he’s allowed to linger, Ted Lasso might yet forge a team spirit long lacking at Nelson Road. His disarmingly infectious “Lassofaire” attitude may not be enough to avoid the drop this time, but it just might be sufficient to rebound the Hounds straight back into the top flight.
— Trent Crimm, Special Correspondent