1 Journalism
How footy kicked off: Origins of Our Great Game Unclear (Advertiser headline)
By Roy Hay
Where did what we now call Australian Rules football come from?
Many people still believe that the game was influenced by Gaelic football, an impression that is sometimes reinforced by the hybrid game played between teams of Australian and Irish footballers in recent years. But the Gaelic game was not codified or some would say reinvented until the 1880s and there is no contemporary evidence that Victorians borrowed from the Irish in any significant way in the 1850s when our version of football started.
Others, including the Australian Football League, have tried to emphasise links with Aboriginal games played in the western district of Victoria especially one called marngrook. The link in the latter case is often said to be Tom Wills, who grew up near Ararat and probably played with the local Aboriginal children in his youth. He later coached and played for the Aboriginal cricket team before they went on their celebrated tour of England in 1868, though Wills did not accompany them. Wills also wrote a letter to Bell’s Life in Victoria in 1858 suggesting the setting up of a football club and drafting a code of rules. This is often seen as a key step in the evolution of the game.
Martin Flanagan, author, journalist, novelist and now playwright, has turned his imaginative book The Call into a theatrical experience currently running at the Malthouse in Melbourne. In it Flanagan has restated his credo that Tom Wills was the bridge between Aboriginal culture and the creation of ‘a game of our own’, the dominant football code in this part of the world. Flanagan’s work delivers the message to readers and audiences who may or may not know anything about the history of the game in its formative years, so a generation may grow up accepting this vision as historically and psychologically accurate. And of course it is politically correct in the early twenty-first century, putting Aborigines back in the picture from which they have been excluded for generations. The Australian Football League reinforced similar ideas when it supported the erection of a monument to Wills at Moyston in western Victoria. The pleasure which leading Aboriginal players like Michael Long have taken in the notion that their ancestors were there at the origins of the game they have graced with such skill is not to be discounted, nor is the possibility that the rational methods of the academic historian may not be the only appropriate ones for the investigation of cultural practices and the transmission of ideas between social groups.
So it is probably, as my wife would say, curmudgeonly to suggest that Flanagan’s novel and play are myth-making not history. Some words about having a game of our own were put into Tom Wills’ mouth by H C A Harrison in his memoirs published in 1923 but Wills’ original letter has no such content. Indeed, Wills suggested that if football did not appeal a rifle club or even an athletics meeting would be reasonable substitutes.
In the mid-nineteenth century the game which was emerging took a decade or two to become clearly distinguished from the other forms practised in the colonies. Flanagan himself makes use of an article from the Argus in 1860. The nub of that article was that Wills was not using the round ball, which was the preferred kind for the game being played at the time. Games were played on rectangular pitches, round balls were used, rules were debated and styles varied for many years before the game settled down into anything we would recognise as close to the code we play today.
Historians including Bill Mandle, Geoffrey Blainey, Rob Hess, Robin Grow and Bernard Whimpress have demolished the anachronistic attempts to give the game Irish or Aboriginal antecedents. The celebrated marngrook references come from later publications like James Dawson’s Australian Aborigines: The Language and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1981 edition, originally published 1881, p. 85. High marking was not a feature of early Australian Rules so the suggestion this was derived from the Aboriginal game is also very dubious.
Familiarity with the mores of Melbourne bourgeoisie in the mid-nineteenth century would destroy any notion that they would reach out to an Aboriginal activity for a game to teach their sons, Tom Wills or no Tom Wills. Their focus, perhaps regrettably, was the United Kingdom, though the game they helped evolve eventually set up a unique pattern among Australian sports in that it was one which was not played in that country. As I have argued in my article ‘The last night of Poms: Australia as a post-colonial society’ in John Bale and Mike Cronin (eds), Sport and Postcolonialism, Berg, Oxford, 2003, the only characteristic Victorian football shared with the later Gaelic game was that it was not played elsewhere. Cricket became the national game in Australia, precisely because it could be played against the English as part of the great imperial project. Aussie Rules could not, and hence its legacy, like its origins, is very curious, with only the invented hybrid game against the Irish to give it a modern international dimension.
(An edited version of this article appleared in the Geelong Advertiser, 6 November 2004, p. 37.)
Don’t hold your breath waiting for corruption to be tackled
By Roy Hay
There have been a number of high profile cases or allegations of corruption in sport in recent weeks. Mike Newell, manager of Luton Town football club in England has just blown the whistle on the culture of bungs, bribes and backhanders which he claims is rife in football. Agents of players have offered him substantial sums of money for participating in transfer deals. He has now talked to the Football Association about his information, but the governing body is not revealing what was discussed at this stage. He has been supported by another club manager, Ian Holloway of Queens Park Rangers and by England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson, himself under fire after giving an indiscreet interview to a journalist from the News of the World posing as an Arab sheikh. In Germany, a referee has been found guilty of match fixing on behalf of Croatian gambling interests.
All this is not new and not restricted to English or even European football. We had a case in Geelong some years ago, when a supporter, acting independently of his club, tried to bribe an opposition goalkeeper to throw a game. When an official of the goalkeeper’s club encouraged the keeper to persist with the negotiations in order to obtain physical evidence of the transaction, (a cheque was offered!) the tribunal found that official and the keeper guilty of an offence as well as the original briber.
Corruption goes a long way back in football history. My grandfather remains the only football manager to be suspended for life for refusing to apologise, after he accused a director of his club of trying to bribe a referee in 1926. He too claimed to have written evidence, but could not produce it at the tribunal and was told to withdraw the allegation and apologise. The man he accused was not only a club director but had been treasurer of the Scottish Football Association for twenty years. The next year the treasurer was voted out of that position and my grandfather was offered reinstatement. As I say, when you find a trout in the milk, it is circumstantial evidence that someone has been watering the product.
But it is not in sport that the biggest corruption goes on. The Australian Wheat Board is being investigated for indirectly bankrolling the Saddam Hussein regime under the United Nations oil for food program. Internal Memoranda produced to the Cole inquiry show officials were briefed on where the money was going. But how high in the chain did knowledge of this undercover payment go? Were Ministers involved directly or indirectly? The terms of reference were carefully drawn up to prevent scrutiny of government, though the Department of Foreign Affairs has said it will forward all material requested.
Late in 2004, the Australian Ambassador, Michael Thawley, acting on instructions from the government, took steps to head off an inquiry into the matter, because of fears that the US Senate was influenced by American wheat growers who were trying to break into Australian export markets. Now Norm Coleman, the US Senator, is claiming that he has been snowed by the ambassador and current incumbent, Denis Richardson, former head of ASIO, has been asked to ‘Please Explain’.
What is particularly galling is that it is Australia’s reputation which is in tatters as a result of this imbroglio, though the Prime Minister appears to be only concerned with his and the government’s appearance. His reputation is not the same as the country’s despite his claim to speak in the national interest. If he did not know, he should have known and he has let every Australian down. This is particularly sad because he has been trying to take the high ground on a whole series of international and moral issues, contrasting Australia’s conduct with that of other lesser nations who failed to live up to standards of probity and ethical behaviour espoused by the people of this country. So we are exposed to charges of hypocrisy and double standards once again.
Even the Attorney General has said paying ‘modest facilitation’ to sweeten trade deals is permissible. How he regards the Wheat Board’s subventions will be interesting to see given that this was the biggest payment of its kind according to the United Nations.
Where does trade and commerce stop and corruption begin? Is this the tip of the iceberg or the actions of a small minority of rogues? And what of our responses? Are we exhibiting hypocrisy or is this the necessary reining in of the feral elements on the margins of our otherwise functioning economy and society. The private sector has had its Alan Bond, Christopher Skase, Rene Rivkin, Larry Adler and a number of others.
It is easy to get things out of proportion when a particularly heinous case is revealed, yet you always wonder whether the extreme examples are just that: normal practice but pushed a little further than is acceptable at any particular time. I have often suggested, not entirely facetiously, that capitalism only functions because people at the margins are always breaking the rules under which the rest of us are expected and constrained to operate. And it is the same in sport, as Judge Robert Read who was a member of the last bungs inquiry in England put it, ‘It is very difficult to stop an agent from choosing to offer a bribe, very difficult to stop somebody from accepting a bribe. How they then conceal that will cause a few more ruses to be discovered, and new and more exciting methods of doing the dirty will be found’.
(Quote by Judge Robert Reid in the Electronic Telegraph, 2 February 2006. Reid was a member of the last bungs inquiry in England in 1993 after which George Graham was suspended but Brian Clough was not, primarily because of his failing health, according to Reid.)
An edited version of this article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 4 February 2006, p. 31 under the headline: Double Standards: Corruption and Commerce.
My grandfather’s story can be found in Roy Hay, James Dun Hay, 1881-1940: The Story of a Footballer, available from SESA, Griffiths Bookshop, Geelong, or Melbourne Sports Books at RRP of $25.00.
A-League on a knife edge
By Roy Hay
Much as everyone connected with association football in Australia wants the new A-League to succeed the signs at present are not as rosy as the announcement of a large $120 million sponsorship by Foxtel last week suggest. The champion club from the inaugural season, Sydney FC, has run out of money and the Chairman of the Football Federation of Australia, Frank Lowy, has had to raise his family’s shareholding in the club from just over 20 per cent to a controlling 51 per cent. Personal investment is something Lowy hoped to avoid, having learned his lesson when he mortgaged his house for a period to support the Hakoah Club in Sydney, where he had his first encounter with Australian football in the 1960s.
The League has also assumed ownership of the last National Soccer League champion, Perth Glory, after founding owner Nick Tana pulled out following several years of subsidising the club, particularly at a time when the eastern part of the old Soccer Australia was not pulling its weight in terms of promotion of the game. Tana promoted and sponsored the Glory, setting an example which none of the other clubs followed, and obviously he has decided the time has come to hand over to someone else. The League is confident of finding a purchaser for the club, but with the season imminent, it does not have much time.
The New Zealand Knights, which finished last season, tailed off in last place, uncompetitive and playing to derisory crowds, has just lost its manager, John Adshead, and is struggling to be ready for the new season which starts with a pre-season cup in July. Though the financial reports are not in yet, it is widely believed that all clubs lost money on the inaugural season, despite higher than projected crowds, the attraction of some sponsorship, a very positive media reaction and enormous goodwill on the part of the football public.
Melbourne Victory drew impressive support last year, but did not make the finals. While it looks set to regain its star player Archie Thompson, who has been on loan to national coach, Guus Hiddink’s PSV Eindhoven, champion of Holland, the Victory needs to add significantly to its squad if it is to challenge for honours in 2006–07. The Victory has some important sponsorship, but it would be fair to say that it has not cracked the Melbourne commercial scene as yet. Mooted recruitment of Brazilian talent seems to have stalled, though the development of young players like Adrian Leijer, Vince Lia and Kristian Sarkies has been very impressive, with Leijer being called up on stand-by for the Socceroos earlier in the year. But they need backing in depth if the Victory is to challenge for honours this year.
The history of the game in this country is of impressive starts followed by a quick falling off from the initial euphoria, resulting in internal bickering and loss of public support. This time, while the international outlook is very different with the Socceroos qualification for the World Cup finals and the acceptance of Australia into the Asian Football Confederation, the problem of establishing a viable domestic national league remains. With all eyes on the World Cup for the next two months, the domestic game has a period when the spotlight will not be on it. Whether this gives an opportunity for the clubs and the league to capitalise on the focus on the world game, or means that they will struggle to get financial support for their own purposes, remains to be seen. But certainly the second half of 2006 will be a critical period for the A-League in Australia.
(This article appeared on the Football Federation of Victoria website <www.footballfedvic.com.au> on Tuesday, 2 May 2006 and in Australian and British Soccer Weekly, 9 May 2006, p. 8.. An edited version under the headline 'National league still beset by problems,' appeared in the Geelong Advertiser, Wednesday 3 May 2006, p. 48.)
Just a suggestion
I am not sure SESA should be encouraging others to risk their money, but if you have the entrepreneurial spirit and you want to have a flutter in May, my suggestion is you buy up a number of Socceroo shirts and an equal number of blue Greek soccer tops. Cut them down the middle and sew them together, one half of each. When I asked George Kalimeris and Jim Argyros, former players with Geelong Olympic, who now run a fish shop in Bay City Plaza in Geelong the other day who they would be barracking for when the Socceroos take on Greece in May, in the last home game before the World Cup, they replied, 'We can't lose mate'.
I suspect that in that sell-out crowd at the MCG there will be thousands of people who will be barracking for both sides, reflecting the kind of society Australia's football-loving community has become. The idea of the half and half shirt is not new. When Argentina and Maradona took on the Socceroos in Sydney in a World Cup qualifier in 1993, I saw a young female supporter wearing just such a top. Then at the game against Iran at the MCG in 1997 I saw another with her toe nails painted in Iran colours, but she was in tears when Australia lost on that occasion. The World Game invites people to celebrate more than one loyalty and culture and Australia is one of the best places to recognise that.
Joey ties the knot
By Roy Hay
Kate Dzidzic and Joey Didulica lead the dance at their wedding reception
Geelong’s star football (soccer) goalkeeper, Joey Didulica, tied the knot with his bride Kate Dzidzic at St Monica’s Catholic Church in Moonee Ponds on Friday. It was a sparkling ceremony attended by a large circle of the bride’s and groom’s family and friends and members of the Croatian community from Geelong and Melbourne. Even the officiating priest got in the act, insisting on having his photograph taken along with the happy couple with his own camera !
In the evening the reception took place at the Ultima Function Centre in Keilor as the guests gave the young couple a great send off. Among the speakers were Joey’s best man and North Geelong star Mijo Trupkovic and the former principal of Wesley College, David Loader, who encouraged Kate to follow her heart to Europe where Joey is playing with Austria Vienna in the Austrian Bundesliga.
The highlight of the evening, however, was Joey’s response on behalf of himself and his bride, delivered in Croatian and English and bringing the house down. If he ever tires of goalkeeping he has a career as a stand-up comic just waiting for him. After a brief honeymoon the couple will return to Vienna as the football competition is in its winter break, but Joey’s next major event will be with the Croatian national team in a tournament in Hong Kong, where he has been promised a starting role by the coach in the build up to the World Cup in Germany. Coincidentally Croatia is drawn in the same group as Australia and Joey could be in direct opposition to his childhood friend Josip Skoko of the Socceroos.
Mijo Trupkovic should have the last word though. Having praised the bridegroom and saluted his football career, he ended with a rousing ‘Go Aussies’, which brought the house down again.
(An edited version appeared in the Geelong Advertiser, Monday, 9 January 2006, p. 7.)
Vale George Best
By Roy Hay
Why do grown men weep for little boys who do not grow up? Do they weep for themselves? In a lifetime following football I can remember few more inspiring moments than watching in disbelief as George Best mesmerised club and international team-mates and opponents at Old Trafford and Hampden Park.
His first manager, Matt (later Sir Matt) Busby, treated the young Best with benign neglect and occasional crisis interventions. There is still uncertainty as to whether he did issue the famous injunction that the young Irishman was not be coached, but apart from arranging for him to be looked after by a club landlady and encouraging him later to get a girlfriend who would be less trouble than the married woman he was dating, another intervention which backfired, Busby maintained a considerable distance from his young genius. The tightly organised youth system put in place by (Sir) Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford, and the cotton-wooling of Ryan Giggsin his youth was a direct reaction to the laissez-faire of the Best/Busby era.
Best’s genius caused frustrations in a team game. He wrought great anguish in Bobby Charlton and Denis Law, indeed the latter put his goalscoring decline down to the increasing prowess and selfishness of Best. Law would get into dangerous positions in the penalty box but George was off doing his own thing on the wing, which often ended in outrageous goals for the alchemist.
Hugh McIlvanney wrote:
With feet as sensitive as a pick-pocket’s hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was hypnotic. The bewildering repertoire of fients and swerves, sudden stops and demoralising spurts, exploited a freakish elasticity of limb and torso, tremendous physical strength and resilience for so slight a figure and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple.
The Best quotations, by or about the player, have reached Shanklian proportions, ‘I spent a lot of my money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.’ Or Kevin Keegan being described as not fit to lace George Best’s drinks. It is asserted too that Manchester United had to modify their training routines to prevent Best monopolising the ball. When they introduced two touch routines he used the second one to knock the ball against an opponent’s shins, collected the rebound and was off again.
Jim Baxter of Glasgow Rangers and Scotland said, ‘He was the finest footballer I ever saw, and I include Pele …’ Best’s team-mate and England internationalist David Sadler reflected,
He was definitely the greatest player I’ve ever seen. I’m talking from experience, on the basis of what I saw every day, in matches and in training, and I would say you could have put George in just about any position in our 1968 team and he would have been better than the person who was playing there. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it, but at that time Tony Dunne was probably the best left-back in Europe, and George could have done the job better than him. In Nobby Stiles’s position he would have been quite capable of getting the ball, because he was a tremendous tackler, and when he got it, he’d have used it better than Nobby. He could head the ball better than me, and probably as well as Bill Foulkes, and he could do everything Bobby Charlton did and more. People say Pele didn’t tackle because he didn’t have to. George didn’t have to, but he did. You couldn’t beat him on a football pitch There was nothing a player could do to defeat him, mentally you couldn’t kick him out of the game because he’d bounce straight back and tackle you twice as hard.
Michael Parkinson, comments in the Electronic Telegraph around 6 July 1998
That is as good a definition of genius as I have ever come across. In the overwrought, delirious atmosphere of modern football, where mediocrity is lauded and the commonplace celebrated, it is important we are reminded what great players look like so we might recognise them when they come along. We forget. After all, it’s been a long time since George Best.
The George Best record for Manchester United was extraordinary. The current United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson talking about one of his present-day stars, Ryan Giggs, said:
He’ll never be a Best. Nobody will. George was unique, the greatest talent our football ever produced, easily. Look at the scoring record – 137 goals in 361 League games and a total of 179 goals for United in 466 matches played. That’s phenomenal for a man who did not get the share of gift goals that come to specialist strikers. George nearly always had to beat men to score.
George Best’s life was touched by tragedy. His mother died an alcoholic, though her severe drinking began after that of her son, and might be related to his trajectory. The son’s alcoholism did not seem to be genetic.
Edited versions of this article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser, 28 November 2005, p. 35 and in Australian and British Soccer Weekly on Tuesday 29 November 2005 and on the Football Federation of Victoria website at <http://www.footballfedvic.com.au/> on 28 November 2005.
We always qualify for the World Cup in Germany
By Roy Hay
When people asked me earlier this year could the Socceroos do it, I used to try to cheer them up by saying, ‘We always qualify for the World Cup in Germany’.
At the time it was whistling for a wind and a statistical generalisation based on a single example, now we have doubled the sample size, and the claim remains true.
No Australian football (soccer) team ever makes it easy for the fans.
On Wednesday night in Sydney the boys in green and gold flirted with defeat on several occasions as the Uruguayans created several openings in and around the Australian penalty area.
As long as inspirational midfielder and playmaker Alvaro Recoba was on the field Australia was always just a goal away from catastrophe as the chances of scoring three against a mean defence was very remote.
Yet Dutch master coach Guus Hiddink pulled another rabbit from his magician’s hat.
In Montevideo he started suprisingly with a very attacking formation, including three out-and-out strikers, Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka and the only A-League player, Melbourne Victory’s Archie Thompson.
Now he began more cautiously with a midfield strengthened by the inclusion of Tim Cahill and Marco Bresciano, both of whom went into the two-leg tie with one caution to their name.
Had either been booked in the Centenario they could have played no part in the critical second leg.
Australia stuttered in the opening fifteen minutes as if the weight of history were too much, and big defender Tony Popovic got himself a yellow card after 28 minutes for holding off his opponent with a flying elbow.
Then came Hiddink’s master stroke.
Realising that Australia had an extra defensive player, he removed Popovic and replaced him with the talismanic Kewell.
Kewell immediately unhinged Uruguay by scampering down the left, wriggling past a couple of defenders and seemed to be lining up for a shot which he shanked only for the ball to squeeze into the path of Bresciano, and the Parma opportunist blasted it through the upraised arms of keeper Carini.
There was bedlam in Sydney, and around Australia, as Australia at last had a level playing field and the tie was locked at one-all on aggregate.
Kewell was to make several other critical contributions, none more so than when wing-back Scott Chipperfield got himself stranded upfield and Kewell sprinted back to prevent a Uruguayan cross into the box where there were unmarked players.
Despite a lack of match fitness, Kewell was continually influential as his team went after a second and decisive goal.
Late in the game Hiddink replaced Brett Emerton with Geelong’s Josip Skoko, who had time to set up Viduka with one chance and fire a long shot narrowly wide of the post, before the referee blew for the end of extra-time and we had the penalty shoot-out.
Keeper Mark Schwarzer, as he had done previously against Canada in a similar situation, pulled off two brilliant saves and John Aloisi matched Jimmy MacKay in 1974 with the goal which takes Australia to the World Cup.
What does this mean for football in Australia?
Apart from the $8 million to be shared between the players and the Football Federation of Australia, there is the chance for a new generation of heroes to take part on the world stage next June.
Guaranteed media exposure and the rise in the profile of the game down under, at home and abroad, are certain.
But the World Cup qualification is underpinned by more significant changes which have taken place in the game recently.
Soccer is already the most popular participatory code of football among the young, boys and girls, and they now have something extra to aim for.
The domestic A-League has already drawn crowds above the expectations of the new regime at the Football Federation of Australia under Frank Lowy and John O’Neill, and the standard is higher than that of the old National Soccer League.
Above all, there is pleasant atmosphere in which to watch games and the young are responding magnificently.
Entry to the Asian Confederation of FIFA means no more sudden-death qualification against a South American country, but a broad competition for one of at least four places at future World Cups.
The national team and club sides will participate in lucrative and highly popular competitions which will reinforce the country’s growing economic, political and social involvement in Asia.
Sponsors like Qantas, Hyundai and Samsung are already on board and will, possibly for the first time, have a chance to act as a bridge to the greater integration of Australia into the geographic region of which it is increasingly a part.
So though the game in Sydney was wonderful, it is only a part of the march of the world game in Australia.
Edited versions of this article appeared on the Football Federation of Victoria website at <http://www.footballfedvic.com.au/> on 18 November 2005 and in the Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 19 November 2005, pp. 100-01.
Back to the future, not the past
By Roy Hay
Is it time to scrap the Australian youth coaching scheme and replace it with what went before or something based on Brazilian or French models as Craig Foster and Les Scheinflug in the their different ways suggest? Foster blames an English coaching mafia, code for the people who have developed the Australian Institute of Sport and various State institute programs. Scheinflug points to his record as coach of the senior and developing squads and argues that the work that he and his predecessors did has been neglected by a current administration consisting of non-soccer people. He complains that the most recent crop of national coaches, Frank Farina and Angelo Postecoglou in particular were appointed too early in their coaching careers and lacked the experience to cope with international tournament pressures.
The recent performances of the Under-17 Joeys and Under-20 Young Socceroos in World Cup tournaments seem to give cause for concern as does the absence of superstars like Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka among the current crop of graduates from these squads. While Frank Lowy castigates Foster for being ill-informed his reply is very short on specifics of what the Football Federation of Australia is doing to address some of the issues identified. At grass roots level coaches and interested parties are concerned that Australia is losing its way in youth development for a variety of reasons not touched upon in the public debate so far.
But before we start turfing baby and bathwater down the sink, or returning to a supposed golden age in the past, lets look more closely at what has happened in the last decade. First, and probably most important, is that countries overseas have begun to take youth development seriously and the international spread of coaching skills, assisted by FIFA and its Confederations, has raised the standard of the teams taking part in all youth tournaments. Secondly, many countries have examined the Australian youth development system, and taken the appropriate bits from it to graft on to their own programs, so that we now find ourselves up against the people we have helped teach. A similar thing has happened with the Australian cricket team and its academy system. The bar has been raised and we need to innovate or go backwards.
On the question of the domestic coaches appointed, how are they to gain the experience sought by Scheinflug if they are not appointed while their playing knowledge of the world game is current and when they have shown that they can manage domestic competitions, as Farina did with the Brisbane Strikers and Postecoglou with South Melbourne, both NSL champions? As to the Institute programs, Ron Smith has wide experience in Asia, where Australia’s future lies while his successor Steve O’Connor is a highly experienced Australian player and coach. He is not an English clone. At state level there is wide variety of experience, not all of it English by any means.
The appointment of Ernie Merrick as coach of the Melbourne Victory is now beginning to be recognised for the inspired choice it was. Merrick is the highest credentialled coach in Australia and he and his back-up team have put together what is generally regarded as the best blend of young talent, backed by experience in the new A-League. His assistant is a young Australian Aaron Healey whose own career at the top level was truncated by injury, but who has imbibed his sports science and acceptance of modern technology from Merrick. The future of Australian football lies with the players like Adrian Leijer, Kristian Sarkies, Michael Ferrante, Vince Lia, Simon Storey and others who are gaining their stripes against the Dwight Yorkes and Brian Deanes of the A-League. Driving them on are players and winners of the calibre of Geoffrey Claeys and Kevin Muscat, whose experience and on-field teaching have proved invaluable.
Having said this there are problems with the current system of talent identification with perhaps too much emphasis on age and physicality rather than skill and talent. The relative age effect which biases selection in favour of players born just after a cut-off date for age-governed tournaments has been shown to be still operative in Australia (and not only in Australia, however). Youngsters drawn from regional areas have greater difficulty in getting into representative teams than their metropolitan counterparts. The tyranny of distance still operates, despite many efforts to overcome it.
So while it is good headline-making stuff to call for a revolution or a return to the golden age, lets hope Frank Lowy and his team keep their nerve and assist the current system to evolve, taking account of new developments around the globe, innovating sensibly and on the basis of tested, scientific methods, and above all drawing on the good qualities which we have in the sport here. Having said that, nothing in this piece is intended to deny Craig Foster and Les Schienflug’s absolute right to criticise what is happening, but the debate needs to be raised a notch and specifics have to replace windy rhetoric.
This article appeared on the Football Federation of Victoria website http://www.footballfedvic.com.au and in Australian and British Soccer Weekly on 4 October 2005, p. 7. © SESA
Australia and the World Cup
By Roy Hay
Getting to the World Cup was hard enough, but now Australia faces the current and five times world champion, Brazil, European powerhouse Croatia and Asian champion Japan in one of the toughest groups at Germany 2006. Yet coach Guus Hiddink and his squad will not approach these games next June with an inferiority complex.
The record against Brazil includes one victory and one draw in recent competitive encounters, while that against Japan is very even, five wins, five losses and four draws. Croatia in the last game in the group looms as the most interesting, particularly for locals, since Geelong’s Socceroo midfielder Josip Skoko could find himself trying to score past Croatian keeper Joey Didulica, who grew up with him in the North Geelong juniors.
Didulica is number three on the Croatian keeping list at the moment, while Skoko has just played his first full league game for his English Premier League club Wigan Athletic since his transfer from Turkish club Genclerbirligi.
Should Australia qualify from its Group F as runner-up it is likely to face Italy as potential winner of Group E at the quarter-final knock-out stage.
Between now and June Australia has a series of qualifying matches in the Asian Confederation competition which it will join on 1 January 2006 thanks to the Frank Lowy/John O’Neill inspired move from Oceania.
In addition it will have a couple of friendly matches including one against Greece before leaving for Kaiserslautern, Munich and Stuttgart.
All these cities lie in the south of Germany which should make for easy travelling for team and fans, who will be desperately trying to obtain tickets in the next couple of weeks.
When Australia last played in the World Cup in Germany in 1974 it faced the might of East and West Germany and Chile, coming away with one draw and two narrow losses and winning lots of friends and appreciation for its efforts.
This time the target will be qualification from the group stage knowing that once it gets to sudden death knock-out matches anything is possible for a squad of players nearly all of whom are performing in some of the best leagues in Europe.
Look out for starring performances by Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell, Marco Bresciano and Jason Culina, and perhaps a cameo from Melbourne Victory’s Archie Thompson, the only A-League player in the recent qualifiers.
If Sydney FC can do well in the FIFA World Club Cup which is about to start in Japan, then players like Saso Petrovski, Jacob Timpano and David Zdrilic might force their way into contention as well.
(An edited version of this article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Monday, 12 December 2006, p. 45.)
Have Geelong’s senior clubs any future?
By Roy Hay
Geelong has five senior clubs, North Geelong, Geelong, Corio, Geelong Rangers and Bell Park. Each grew out of a particular migrant community, Croatian, Macedonian, Hungarian, Scottish and Italian, though all have tried to varying degrees to attract members from outside that founding group. They all can trace their origins to the post-war migrant boom and no further. Rangers like to point to the Caledonian Shield in their clubrooms which dates from the 1920s but there is no connection between the clubs which played then and the modern one.
For the last two decades the clubs have marked time and managed to survive. In a way that is impressive in itself, since several other teams have disappeared since the war while others are the product of amalgamations and take-overs. This is true of both Corio and Geelong for example. Corio was successively British, German and Italian before the Hungarians from Northern Suburbs took over, while Geelong was British, Italian and Anglo-Irish prior to the Macedonians of East Geelong arriving.
Only one Geelong team, North Geelong, has reached the Victorian Premier League, which it did in 1992, winning the Premiership under coach Branko Culina in its first season in the top division. Since then North has slipped back to Division Two of the State League until this year, when it will return to Division One. Bell Park which challenged North for local bragging rights is now in Division Three of the Provisional League while Corio will play in Division Three of the State League and Geelong Rangers has just been promoted to Division Three where it will join Geelong which was relegated last year. (All subject to changes if there are amalgamations or clubs drop out of leagues).
None of these clubs can survive on their membership fees and gate money. Attendances are often below 100 apart from the Geelong Advertiser Cup pre-season tournament which gets numbers up into the low hundreds. Clubs attract small amounts of local sponsorship and advertising, sell alcohol in their club bars and run interminable fund raisers which often cost almost as much as they bring in. Players in FFV competitions below the level of Division One of the State League are required to be amateurs, which means they can legally get a small payment towards expenses, though some receive brown envelopes in addition from a variety of sources.
North Geelong’s success last season was critically dependent on the attraction of an excellent coach, Robbie Krajacic, a top player with Bulleen, and the return of key members of the 1992 Premiership team and other players who had played in the National Soccer League for the Melbourne Knights or Sydney United, the Cervinski brothers, Mijo Trupkovic and Grgo Saric. This was an expensive process and it will become more so if North seeks to return to the Premier League in future.
So the clubs have a past, but have they a future? The following are some of the arguments as to why they do not.
1 Demographic changes, the end of European migration, means no replenishment of traditional support.
2 The integration of generations of migrants into Australia so that they do not need their soccer clubs as a bridge into the host society.
3 Geographical dispersion. The potential fans of these northern suburbs clubs now live in Lara or Torquay rather than Bell Park and Corio.
4 The example of Melbourne Victory. Showed you can attract fans to a genuinely non-ethnically identified and but locally focussed club.
5 None of the clubs have adequate resources or organisation to appeal to significant sponsors and can offer sponsors very little by way of brand promotion.
6 The existence of the present clubs probably prevents the emergence of a genuine wide-appeal Geelong club, so not only are the clubs condemning themselves to a permanent struggle for survival, they are holding back the development of the game in Geelong at a time when it should be capitalising on the success of the Socceroos in World Cup qualification.
(This piece was broadcast on Geelong's community radio station 94.7 The Pulse on the Soccer Show with Tonci Prusac on Saturday, 3 December 2005 at 1-2 pm. It also appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Wedneesday, 7 December 2005, p. 53.)
Victory collapse to Mariners
By Roy Hay
Melbourne Victory continued its dismal run of recent results with a two-nil loss at home to Central Coast Mariners at Olympic Park last night in front of 13,892 fans. Four home games in succession have produced no goals and three defeats.
Victory welcomed back skipper Kevin Muscat and Socceroo Archie Thompson, though Thompson started on the bench after his Australian duties and the celebrations which followed. Central defender Geoffrey Claeys was out with a groin problem allowing youngster Daniel Piorkowski to continue to partner Geelong’s teenager Adrian Leijer in central defence. Ricky Diaco had his first A-League start alongside Daniel Allsopp in attack and Andy Vlahos dropped to the bench. The Mariners were missing two of their stars, former Melbourne Knight Tom Pondeljak and Andre Gumprecht.
In 9 minutes keeper Eugene Galekovic threw the ball to Muscat who found Richard Kitsbichler clear on the right. The Austrian winger’s low cross was thrashed over the bar by Allsopp with the goal gaping.
Two minutes later Vince Lia created another opening for Allsopp but this time he put the free header wide. Allsopp has only scored one goal this season and while his work rate cannot be faulted, his confidence in shooting positions has deserted him.
For the Mariners, Damien Brown’s quick free kick released Dean Heffernan whose driven cross was carried over the line by keeper Galekovic. The errors continued when Galekovic handled outside the penalty area and Vince Lia got himself booked for kicking the ball away in 37 minutes. From the free kick Brown struck a swinging ball into the area and former Morwell Falcon John Hutchinson got a slight touch to deflect it past Galekovic for the Mariners’ opening goal.
Victory had not scored in six hours of play when the half-time whistle blew and the patient crowd were shouting for Archie Thompson to make an appearance. But the first Victory substitution was Vlahos for defensive midfielder Steve Pantelidis at half-time. Rain began to fall heavily making the pitch slippery as the Victory chased the game in the second half. Not till 63 minutes had passed did coach Ernie Merrick swap Thompson for Diaco. Thompson was soon in the action with a pass just ahead of Vlahos.
In 74 minutes Brown split the Victory defence with a pass to Dean Heffernan who quietened the home crowd with a simple second goal for the Mariners. Victory looked bereft of ideas in the last fifteen minutes and the Mariners played out time with little difficulty.
One strange statistic in the new A-League is that there have been 24 away wins and only 15 home wins, a reversal of the normal pattern in most leagues around the world.
(Alan Clark supplied the last point. An edited version of this article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Saturday 19 November 2005, p. 98.)