- scooper9
- Youth Academy
- Joined: 15 Dec 2005
- Posts: 506
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 Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2006 7:21 am |
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Why Roos can do well
As Australia’s historic second World Cup sojourn looms close, I find myself wishing I had a euro for every time I have been asked how the team will fare in it. It would fatten up my meal allowances in Germany considerably.
Why, it might even allow me the odd bratwurst roll at a bus station snack bar.
Fact is I think the Aussies will do well, and so I have said to every taxi driver and hamburger cook thus far. And the performance in the experiment against Greece did nothing to change my mind.
And neither did that brave performance against the classy Dutch.
Of course, in the first place, what one should define is what constitutes doing well.
Let’s agree on that: finishing third in Group F would not be a case of doing well. It would be failure. Finishing fourth would be humiliation. It has to be finishing second or bust.
But rest easy. Australia can, and I believe will, finish at least second in its group, beyond which things are in the lap of the gods (besides, space here and my gastric fortitude denies me the latitude to ponder what may happen in phase two against Italy or the Czech Republic).
Why do I believe Australia will do well?
There are three very, I believe, compelling reasons.
1. We have the players
Take a look at Australia’s squad – or at least the top end of it - and you’ll find that, in terms of experience and the weekly grind that makes players good and ready for a tournament such as this, the Australians do not pale and should have little to fear.
In earning their bread – and good bread it is – these players play in leagues that, across the board, are no different or inferior to those of their group opponents.
Forget for a moment that these players originally hail from Australia, traditionally some kind of football backwater in the eyes of the world.
In an immediate sense they hail not from Australia but from some of the more elite leagues of western Europe: those of Italy, England, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland and the like.
They live and earn their keep, week in and week out, under the same pressures and regular needs as the players of their likely opponents.
They are not, in this sense, players of a third world football nation. They hail from the elite.
As the players of Brazil surely do.
Can the same be said of the players of Croatia or Japan?
No. Of the Japanese squad selected by coach Zico only six play outside Japan with Shunsuke Nakamura of Celtic and Hidetoshi Nakata of Bolton probably the highest ranked among them. The remaining 17 all play in the J-League.
No disrespect to the splendid J-League of course. But one has to doubt if it has the fierceness of competition, not to mention salary scale, of the Serie A of Bresciano and Grella, the Primera of Aloisi, or the Premiership of Kewell, Viduka, Cahill, Schwarzer, Neill, Emerton and Moore.
The Croatian squad is wider spread, their domiciles straddling no less than ten countries from Russia to Scotland. Three play in the Serie A and five in the Bundesliga. The rest are scattered in Belgium, Austria, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Scotland and Croatia.
Their star turn is Dado Prso who bangs in goals for Glasgow Rangers, a nice CV but it it’s not exactly up there with that of a Suker or a Boban and it won’t do to put the willies up Craig Moore or Mark Schwarzer. Don’t know about you but I wouldn’t swap ten Dados for one Viduka.
2. We beat Uruguay
Croatia qualified for the World Cup undefeated and having topped its group at the expense of Sweden – who also qualified – Bulgaria, Hungary, Iceland and Malta.
Japan made it via overcoming Iran, Bahrain and North Korea.
Neither had to encounter quite the test of a Uruguay as Australia did.
The Uruguay task for Australia was quite enormous. The cauldron and intimidation of the Centenario in such a circumstance cannot possibly be compared with playing in Stockholm or Sofia, nor Tehran or Pyongyang.
Beating the Uruguayans, and their giant heart over two legs, is as tough as it comes in football. To do that is no child’s play and the Aussies did it (as Brazil, who have never beaten Uruguay in a World Cup match away from home, also know).
It’s a comforting CV with which to go in to a World Cup finals, posing the question: is either Japan or Croatia as strong as Uruguay?
No they are not and Australia can feel comforted.
3. We have the best coach
Best is a relative and subjective term but on modern track records in national team football, Guus Hiddink surely is as about as good as it gets.
What he did with Netherlands and Korea Republic in subsequent World Cups, never mind with the under-resourced PSV, will rightly earn him a $10 million per year contract with Russia, the highest number ever paid to a coach anywhere. Is there a more arbitrary, less subjective measure of a man’s professional quality?
And let’s add what he has done with Australia.
Before Hiddink took the reigns, Australia was little more than a psychologically insecure, tactically shambolic rabble. In ten months and just eight games it has been fashioned in to a collective with a sense of purpose, a direction, belief and quite some tactical awareness.
Given where Australia was at the end of its 2005 Confederations Cup campaign this is quite some achievement. And it’s down to just Guus Hiddink.
The Dutch coach, when he first donned an Aussie track suit only last August, went about reinventing an Australian team in a Dutch guise. This meant giving the players a belief that they were not ‘third world’ – something he had already managed with the Koreans – and educating them in a syllabus of tactical sophistication that had been rare, even for those of the squad who earn their club keep under coaches celebrated as being among the best.
In its approach to the World Cup, Australia was vastly outplayed in its warm-up by the Dutch in Rotterdam. But there’s a reason for this.
Netherlands, who may have won without some heroic goalkeeping by Schwarzer, is a country with 40 years of experience in a type of game the Australians are still learning and have only been trying to play for ten months.
In that big-picture context, the 1-1 was a good outcome. Holding the Dutch, among the World Cup favourites, to that on their own soil just five days before the Cup begins, and down to 10-men for the last half hour of the game, is seriously encouraging.
Again Hiddink proved to be a master, not in the least for the way he read the play and sent on two fresh attackers, John Aloisi and Archie Thompson, after his team had been reduced by Luke Wilkshire’s red card, a point at which most coaches would have succumbed to setting up a wall of defence.
Trust him to do the opposite and send a signal of defiance.
It was one more little message to Frank Lowy: take care of who you choose to replace the great man for there are few around of the likes of Hiddink. But for the moment Australia is in Hiddink’s good hands.
And with him, and a bunch of players who believe, this shapes up as a World Cup that may yield more than many of us down under are ready to expect. |
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