The Star Tribune is expanding its soccer coverage by adding Jon Marthaler's Soccer Insider column beginning today. It will cover all soccer at all levels and appear in the newspaper and on startribune.com every Saturday.
They called him the "Artful Dodger." A Twin Cities-area columnist stuck Alan Willey with that nickname within the first month of his Minnesota Kicks career in 1976, thanks to his early penchant for stealing the ball from a defender and scoring, and it stuck with him throughout his nine-year NASL career. He tallied 129 NASL goals, the second-most in league history; 95 of those came in Minnesota, for the Kicks and later for the short-lived Strikers.
On Saturday night, Minnesota United FC will lead a celebration of Willey, who was inducted into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame in 2003. The team is selling throwback Kicks-style orange T-shirt jerseys adorned with Willey's number 9, as well as cutouts of his head on Popsicle sticks. "That head's pretty big, let me tell you," said Willey of the design. "My wife just keeps looking at it and she's laughing out loud." The team will also honor him at halftime and give fans a chance to celebrate perhaps Minnesota's best-ever player.
Willey sees himself in Christian Ramirez, last year's top scorer in the NASL. "Christian is more like what I would be, working off a target man," he said. Like Willey, Ramirez is not a traditional big, tall center forward. Pablo Campos, the team leader with four goals, is much better in that role — similar to Ron Futcher, Willey's strike partner in so many Kicks lineups.
In those days, the Kicks would play the ball to Futcher, and Willey would read whether Futcher would flick the ball on or play it with his feet, and time his run to meet the ball. "He'd just lay it off and I'd have a shot," Willey said.
Though the United tried to play Campos and Ramirez together for two games in the early season, à la Futcher and Willey, eventually coach Manny Lagos settled into using a single forward.
Willey, who took over as the color commentator on the team's television broadcasts this year, understands the move. "They were losing the midfield battle," he said. "I think what Manny did is he went to an extra midfield player and just played one up front. I can see where he went with Pablo, because Pablo is more of a target man." Because of that single-forward look, Ramirez hasn't started since the season's fourth game.
Ramirez will likely get his chances; Minnesota has 20 games left in the season after Saturday night, and Campos is 32 and still returning from a major knee injury. Willey, who would know, is confident in Ramirez's ability to steal a few goals of his own. "He's just a natural goal scorer," he said.
