Why A-League's finest are not up to the task

Why A-League's finest are not up to the task

ANOTHER stark night of education, another superb learning opportunity for Australian football, but will we ever learn?

Thursday's Kuwait loss was not so much about the result as the performance, with a team of the A-League's finest unable to demonstrate even the most basic patterns of possession play or creativity. They were so utterly outplayed and embarrassed by the Kuwait players, who showed greater technical proficiency, as to make the vast improvement of our young players the highest national priority.

After our coaches, that is, because the truth is that the team played A-League football. They played what they know and what they are trained to deliver every day, and in the end this style, not the personnel, was shown for what it is - basic.


Serious doubts remain over whether Pim Verbeek is able to coach a local side to produce good, attacking football, or how much time he needs to do so, but these can be answered in time and the picture will be clearer after the next few qualifiers. Other matters are more urgent.

Such as how the pattern of yesteryear repeats. Recall when Verbeek was goaded to use only local players for the first few World Cup qualifiers in January last year, since the European-based stars were not to arrive in Melbourne to play Qatar until a day before the match? Yet after holding numerous camps during the finals series to assess the locals, Verbeek chose none and the team won comfortably.

Now this match was billed as the A-League's chance to strike back, the great revenge of the local game after Verbeek's straightforward and uncontroversial comments. The result is clear.

Yet Verbeek had already explained succinctly that while the domestic style of football might be entertaining, given the public's current perception of what football is, it does not prepare players for international duty because of its naivety, and this aspect can no longer be up for debate.

Verbeek tried to match a few youngsters with older heads, but we must face the fact that, outside of Craig Moore, the rest of the older players are those who were proven ineffective in European football and are receiving caps because a greater proportion of players are overseas than ever before. There are plenty of players who had long, successful NSL careers, yet received not a single cap for Australia. They must be despondent today.

This is why I advocate using the next generation, because if a player is not a genuine chance to play for the first team he should not play. Yet the hesitation over doing so makes a mockery of the entire Olympic campaign, since after two years together players such as Nikolai Topor-Stanley, Billy Celeski and Stuart Musialik should be able to step straight back into the rhythm of a team and pick up the patterns. This is precisely why the Olympic campaign should be one of development, not results. Now we can agree it was neither.

At any rate, the opportunity to re-educate the youngsters in camps over the past few months is long gone, because the intention was never present early enough.

But it was the style of football against Kuwait that hurt - not just inexperience but the lack of collective understanding of how to play, the lack of personality in midfield, the resorting to long balls a la 1985 and the poor combination play, with the Kuwait midfield toying with the Aussies at times. And all of this is down to our coaching as expressed through the players, not the other way around.

The point right now is to look beyond the Kuwait result to see the deeper problems and to fix them at last. Perhaps now local resistance to importing quality coaches will cease as the collective commitment to learn and improve takes root.

Because then you would see, after years of daily work under high-quality technicians with a different vision of the game, the same players demonstrate an entirely different style of football.

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