Valerio Gazzola tells SoccerPlus he’s ready to give it a go, for a third time
The former Impact head coach (1994-1997, 2000-2001) becomes the second official candidate to the succession of Jesse Marsch after assistant coach Mauro Biello said last week he feels he could take over for the 2013 MLS season.
Gazzola says he’s even ready to help mentor Biello and prepare him for the job within a season or two.
Now a high school teacher in the Montreal suburb of Laval, Quebec, Gazzola was until recently Canada’s U-20 Men’s National Team head coach and still serves the Canadian Soccer Association as a high performance coaching instructor.
This option might come out of left field for many since Gazzola hasn’t coached any professional team’s for close to 12 years now. After he concluded his playing days, he was hired as an assistant to head coach Eddie Firmani in the first ever instalment of the Montreal Impact in the pre-MLS days of the American Professional Soccer League (APSL) in 1993. The year after, he was thrust to the head coaching position after Firmani left and he went on winning the first of three Impact playoffs cup, in 1994.
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Another obstacle on this option is the sometimes very tensed relation Gazzola entertained with then player and current Sporting Director Nick DeSantis.
However, Gazzola would know exactly into what he went step if ever the door opened again for him to return. Not only does he speak everybody’s language in the locker room, but he understands the North American context.
If the Impact does not find the proverbial pearl in Italy as most seems to point as the management’s prime target to fill Jesse Marsch’s departure and if president Joey Saputo wants to groom Biello to an unavoidable nomination in the short term, the club now has a serious option to ponder upon in the coming weeks.
We’ll be discussing this turn of event in this week’s podcast, available in the coming days.