Glory and brutality were companions in Colombian football during the 1990s as the national team reached three World Cups amid a bloody drug war that did not spare sport. If Carlos Valderrama, Rene Higuita and Tino Asprilla were the maverick stars, Wilmer Cabrera was a more stable and less erratic presence.

Cabrera has brought calmness and a clarity of vision to his post-playing careers, first in a role where those qualities are indispensable – as a helicopter pilot – then in a febrile sphere where they are less common. In a measured rise over 14 years he has progressed from coaching youth teams in New York to his current role in charge of an MLS pacesetter in the embryonic 2017 season.

The Houston Dynamo have two wins from two games, like their opponents this Saturday, the Portland Timbers. It’s the style as much as the results that have drawn attention: Cabrera deployed a rambunctious 4-3-3 in a 2-1 opening-weekend win over last year’s MLS Cup champions, the Seattle Sounders, and a 3-1 victory over the Columbus Crew.

There were handsome goals from the Honduran winger, Romell Quioto, and the Mexican striker Erick Torres, who arrived as a costly Designated Player in 2015 and finally found the net against Seattle after 22 fruitless MLS appearances. He also scored against Columbus.

Talking this week at the Dynamo’s training ground, Cabrera painted himself as above all a pragmatist, ready to adapt his tactics to his resources. Under a predecessor, the former Bolton and Burnley manager, Owen Coyle, the reverse seemed true.

“I don’t want to force our players to play the possession, team-oriented [approach] that I used to play because they don’t feel that way, the personalities are different,” Cabrera said. “They like to run, they have speed and they want to attack. Our transition is quick from defending to attacking so why’re we going to change? The players are the ones that are dictating what is the best for them and right now, so far, this is the way we’re going to play because this is the type of player that we have.”

Born in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, Cabrera spent most of his 20s with América de Cali and won 48 caps for Colombia. The defender was an unused squad member in Italia 90, missed USA 94 through injury but played in every minute of all three of his country’s matches in France four years later.

Before 1990, Colombia had only once reached a World Cup – in 1962. But their 1990s sides had personalities as big as their hair, little turnover of key players, technical excellence, an inspired creator in Valderrama and an effervescent style that lifted the nation. The team had a carefree quality despite the bloody unrest being wreaked by drug lords such as Pablo Escobar, which seeped into soccer.

“We were very naive in a lot of aspects. It was just playing soccer the way we felt how to play soccer,” Cabrera said. Rene Higuita’s “scorpion kick” famously illuminated a dull goalless draw with England in a friendly at Wembley in 1995.

Less well remembered, at least in England: the goalkeeper was released the year before after seven months in prison when he was accused of acting as a go-between to help arrange the release of a girl kidnapped in a drug cartel feud. Asprilla, the gun-toting former Newcastle forward, reportedly moved to Europe after death threats.

Cabrera said that it was not until he moved to the US and saw outside media narratives about his country’s troubles that he fully understood the turbulence. “Definitely it was an unbelievable time. When I talk with my kids about it, when I talk with people about it, they are amazed,” Cabrera said. “We didn’t realise until now, when you start looking back, and you realise that it was a very rough, very tough moment and a very dangerous environment to be playing soccer.”

The defender Andres Escobar was murdered outside a Medellin nightclub 10 days after scoring an own goal in a 2-1 defeat by the US in the 1994 tournament, perhaps because of the result and his blunder.

“It just changed your perspective in all aspects because you never imagine that playing soccer brings you into a threatening environment,” Cabrera said. “For us it was fun, for us it was the way we used to live – it was our lifestyle. It became a little bit difficult, it became complicated.”

Wilmer Cabrera takes on Michael Owen during the Colombia-England game in 1998. Photograph: Olivier Morin/EPA

Cabrera hoped to follow Valderrama into MLS but a move never materialised. He finally arrived in New York in 2003 with a view to working as a helicopter pilot, a skill he had learned in Colombia and one that aligns with the seemingly-contradictory parts of his character and coaching strategy: cool rationality with a spirit of adventure.

He was sucked back into football, joined the Long Island Rough Riders, took coaching qualifications and rose through the ranks of the American game, including a stint as a fan development manager for MLS. “I started to work on soccer from the moment I arrived, tried to learn the language, start from the bottom, and it’s been quite a long journey but it’s been very positive for me because I’ve been able to work at all the levels here in the United States,” he said.

In 2012-13 he was an assistant at the Colorado Rapids under his friend and former international teammate, Oscar Pareja, who is now at FC Dallas. In 2014 the 49-year-old won plaudits for the exercise in damage limitation that was life as head coach of Chivas USA in their final MLS season, which included coaxing a 15-goal campaign from Torres.

Last year, he worked for a Dynamo affiliate, the Rio Grande Valley FC Toros. They reached the United Soccer League playoffs, going a league-record 758 minutes without conceding a goal.

He was picked by Houston ahead of their interim head coach, Wade Barrett, who lifted the team to levels of obduracy and organisation reminiscent of Dominic Kinnear, Coyle’s long-tenured predecessor, without notably improving results. In 2016 the Dynamo finished bottom of the Western Conference.

Amid the cooing over Houston’s exciting debut it has been overlooked that in their first two MLS fixtures last year they drew 3-3 with the New England Revolution then battered Dallas, 5-0. But Coyle left in May (soon surfacing in Blackburn, albeit fleetingly) during a second season of muddled performances and mixed results.

“A real strength of Wilmer’s is that he’s very clear with what he expects from the guys positionally and within the framework of the team and he knows that those points need to be reinforced on a very regular basis. I think what stands out with Wilmer is he’s just as much a teacher as a coach and that’s something that is really important in our league,” said Matt Jordan, the Dynamo vice-president/general manager.

Cabrera’s bilingualism and background was a plus for US Soccer when it appointed him in 2007 to be the first Hispanic head coach of a male American national side – the under-17s. “The obvious influence of South American is something that weighed into our decision,” Sunil Gulati, the US Soccer Federation president, told Soccer America.

It also helps in Houston, where the Dynamo play in a city that is roughly 40% Hispanic and have a roster that features eleven players born in South or Central America.

“Guys from England are always, I guess, going to bring in the most money and earn the most money, but if you want to win you’ve got to look elsewhere. You can only have three DPs on a team so it’s about finding the other role players,” said AJ DeLaGarza, an off-season signing from the Los Angeles Galaxy.

“First of all, you want to look for good players whose characteristics translate to Major League Soccer and historically, players from countries like Honduras and Colombia and Argentina and Costa Rica and Panama, those are markets that the players transition well to our league,” Jordan said.

“It’s an added bonus that those profiles fit the demographics of our city. On top of that, when you look at the climate here, the conditions that we have to play in here, we want players to embrace that and feel very comfortable here.”

Like Pareja’s Dallas, Houston aim to be devastating on the counter-attack. Still, when fatigue and summer heat bite, there’s the question of how an aging back line will cope against fast, incisive opponents, especially since a three-man midfield offers limited protection down the flanks. The back four against Seattle was DeLaGarza (29), Adolfo Machado (32), Leonardo (29) and DaMarcus Beasley (34). The only starters under 28 were the three forwards: Alberth Elis (21), Torres (24) and Quioto (25). But the Sounders XI was no younger.

The Dynamo had only 36% of possession against Seattle and 40% against Columbus, according to league statistics. Broken down into five-minute intervals, Houston had more of the ball than their opponents for just 25 minutes of those 180.

“The bright side is we’re winning and we’re still not playing, I would say, very well. We’re very dynamic going forward but defending and keeping the ball we know we have to get better, and playing a full 90-plus minutes,” said DeLaGarza.

Coyle made energetic and sincere attempts to embrace MLS but ended up as another statistic confirming the truism that the league’s idiosyncratic – some might say arcane – nature makes it all but impregnable to outsiders.

If Cabrera thrives in Texas it will be as much a tribute to the American development system as to the legacy of the experiences he absorbed in his native land. “I’m a local coach like any other coach,” he said. “I’ve lived here in the United States for 14 years, so now my lifestyle is American style. I’m an American coach.”