2012 Coach Rating And Review - Oscar Pareja

Through the month of December, Burgundy Wave will do a short review of every player who received even a paltry sum of minutes in 2012. We start with the goalkeepers and then move our way up to the forwards. We've done all the players, so it's time for Oscar Pareja.

2012 is about to draw to a close, so we might as well get our coach out of the way to finish off this player rating and review series. Unsurprisingly, Oscar Pareja won't be getting very high marks in his end of season review -- how often does a coach ever get high marks after a 19-loss season?

There were certainly a few things out of Pareja's control this year: Injuries hit the team hard at times, there was a lot of bad luck and a lot of players just weren't cut out to a complete system change. That's no excuse for some of the tactical naivete that Pareja showed throughout the season, of course.

Oscar started the year wanting to play on the attack as much as possible, but didn't have the player personnel to do so. His 'never say die' attitude turned a lot of potential ties into losses -- nobody likes to bunker, but Gary Smith was pretty good at getting fifth place in the West every year with a good bunker or six. He tinkered endlessly with rosters and formations even when he didn't need to, often with disastrous results. (The 'Drew Moor in the midfield and 4-1-4-1 experiments against RSL and Seattle come immediately to mind.) Every defensive option he brought in was more of an attacking option than a defensive one, in a season where the team gave up 50 goals. (Mercifully, they blew that defense up and have already started work on improving it with Diego Calderon.)

There was improvement late into the year both tactically and game management-wise from Oscar, we have to hope that will continue into next season.

COACH RATING: 3.5

.GIF TO SUM UP THEIR SEASON: