When Whitecaps striker Darren Mattocks plays at his best, he has some of the fastest feet in Major League Soccer. Less than 48 hours after landing in Jamaica for the off-season, he ran off his mouth on a television program called Soccer GPS, blaming Martin Rennie for both his own lacklustre play this season and the team’s failure to make the playoffs.
“When Darren lead [sic] the team as a rookie, Vancouver was in the playoffs, right?” Yes, Mattocks referred to himself in the third person throughout the interview. It gets better. “In my second season, the coach have me on the bench the majority of the season. We couldn’t agree. The player who lead the MLS in scoring played for Vancouver, couldn’t put them in the playoffs. So you read between the lines.”
Let’s not forget, last Christmas Mattocks predicted it would be him, not Camilo, who would score 20 goals this season.
More after the jump.
At one point, Mattocks says he “carried the team on his shoulders into the playoffs” last year. No mention of the fact that the Whitecaps backed into the post-season thanks to a futile second half by three other Western Conference teams.
Yes, Mattocks scored some important goals in 2012, and led the team in that statistic. He filled the net at a rate of one goal every 186 minutes played — but he required more than 300 minutes played per goal in 2013. Perhaps that significant drop in production is what led to Rennie sitting him down. Sadly, he learned little from watching Camilo score a goal every 110 minutes for his MLS Golden Boot.
He wasn’t happy with his play this season, because “I know what I am capable of, and this year I didn’t do that. I didn’t score goals,” but when asked why his play was below expectations, Mattocks blamed the coach. “He didn’t play me!”
Fine. What about the games you did play in, young Darren? “When Vancouver is lose [sic], the coach say ‘Darren, come’,” said Mattocks. “When the team is winning, I’m not play there.”
Host Wayne Walker asked if there were plans to return to Vancouver. Mattocks laughed and said, “well that’s between me and my agent.” He didn’t flat out say he wants out, but suggested as much. “If I said I didn’t want to go back to Vancouver, I’d be lying. It’s very beautiful. It’s very clean. But I have to look at my football, too.”
For Walker’s part, he gave Mattocks plenty of opportunities to back off the ego-centric chatter: “What do you mean when you say that you and the coach couldn’t agree? I’m very suspicious of players who talk about their coach like that.”
My favourite question: “Darren, are you a bit of a problem child?”
Mattocks’ third-person replies, including a reference to himself as “one of Jamaica’s stars”, won’t win himself any points with teammates, future coaches, or any of these other teams that are supposedly champing at the bit to buy his services.
Is the guy a talent? Sure. But he’s also a self-centred brat who needs a veteran or two to show him his place. Some, like TSN soccer analyst Jason de Vos, have suggested Jay DeMerit and Nigel Reo-Coker should have done that this year. Word is that Martin Rennie, in hopes that long stretches on the bench might give Mattocks a chance to work out his attitude himself, actually prevented them from doing so.