Before Australia began its World Cup campaign in Germany the word was out that the boys in the green and gold had one overriding strategy, physical intimidation, and that they were little more than a bunch of thugs.
This thesis was sparked, reportedly, by a Japanese official who had been disturbed by what he saw in the pre-tournament prep game between Australia and Netherlands, which saw three Dutchmen become casualties of Australian tackling. Van Bommel, Sneijder and Van Bronckhorst didn’t finish the game.
Yet by the tournament’s end the Socceroos were among the most widely admired team's of the tournament, a gleaming advertisement for Australian sporting virtues.
Why?
In the first place probably because Australian football culture has for long been misunderstood and, at large, was the subject of prejudice. The popular notion, probably driven by Australia’s renown rugby-bent culture and its kinship with hardy colonial attitudes, was that the Aussies tend to compensate a natural shortage of creativity and artistry with lashings of frontier-building brawn.
Every time Vince Grella would execute a crunching tackle someone would say: 'There they go. All the Aussies are good at is knowing how to get stuck in'.
This has always been nonsense, or at least for as long as I have been observing Australian football. Even the 1974 Socceroos, tough as they were, had an ambition for technical and tactical finesse, coached by a Balkan and parading players like Abonyi, Rooney, Alston, Utjesenovic and Buljevic, and though as semi-amateurs they were found wanting, there was more to them than Manfred Schafer and Peter Wilson, ie. a capacity for naked bruising.
Guus Hiddink got peeved by the accusations after the Dutch game, partly because he felt they were a tactic to influence referees but also because they were unjust.
In the short time that Hiddink had been in charge the Australian team, never just bruisers even under Farina, evolved in to a cultured tactical outfit, pre-occupied with short-passing, high mobility, whirling positional interchanges and intelligent responsiveness to ploys against them.
In this they were not alone, of course. But in these dimensions, thanks to the Hiddink factor, they were among the top half dozen teams in the tournament.
Yet the myth persisted.
FIFA’s technical observers, and other neutral commentators besides, noted first and foremost Australia’s physical attributes. Even the excellent and highly respected World Soccer magazine analysed them thus:
Australia played to their physical strengths. The team’s tightly packed midfield, hard-working wide men and superior fitness were the keys to their late comeback win over Japan and the securing of a draw with a late equaliser against Croatia.
And there was more:
The game plan [against Japan] was typically Anglo-Saxon: throw as many crosses into the box as possible and exploit the expertise of captain Mark Viduka at holding the ball up and playing in runners.
We beg to differ.
Australia’s comeback win against Japan was due, in quite some part, to the fact that they responded brilliantly by tactical changes to the danger of defeat when down 0-1 with less than half an hour to go. It had nothing to do with fitness or muscle. The Japanese, unable to re-adapt, were caught and got floored.
Against Croatia, Australia consistently outplayed and tactically out-witted a team beholden to age old, admired Balkan technical virtues. Josip Simunic became so worn down and frustrated by Australia’s attacking invention that he had to collect three yellow cards before he got sent off.
Even against Brazil the Australians were tactically dominant for long passages and were the first team able to expose the vulnerabilities of the tournament favourites. With Brazil leading 1-0, a missed sitter by Kewell may have been what saved the champions from humiliation or at least embarrassment.
And if Australia, with its Dutch coach and a playing squad that is a rainbow of races and technical influences, played anything resembling the long-ball way of the Anglo-Saxons, then I am a Tibetan monk.
That said, merely to imply that the Australian team was, and is, strong on physical qualities is fair. Getting stuck in, or being prepared to, has never been far from the Australian sporting mindset.
But that needs to be understood in the context of what drives the spirit of Australian sportsmen (and, by the way, women). Former Australia coach Frank Arok called it chauvinism, an obsessed, and unique form of self-belief and self-worth.
Fearlessness is probably a better word. Australian competitors, in any sport and in either gender, appear to fear no-one.
With the Socceroos this instinct was often tempered and the potential for international success deferred. Apart from Arok, Venables and Hiddink, Australia has had a succession of national football coaches with a ‘colonial’ mentality, who tended to pull in the reins of this fearlessness in the name of ‘respecting’ opponents with a superior history or pedigree. As a result Australian teams of the past were often timid, defensive and fearful.
In Germany, and before it against Uruguay, Hiddink liberated this instinct, allowed the players to believe, and it showed.
This capacity by the Australians to be unafraid, despite the country’s low historical pedigree, was one quality that drew universal admiration for the Socceroos in Germany. Australia, albeit within the confines of tactical strategies, took the game to its opponents in every instance and believed that it could win.
And that included the games against Brazil and Italy, eight-time World Cup winners between them - now nine-time after the Azzurri's triumph in Berlin.
The world at large saw and recognised the Australian capacity to ‘have a go’ and admired it.
Then there was the fact that the Australian approach to the competition was one of profound decency. Such a lofty claim has to be expressed with care and without the suggestion that others in the tournament were not doing the same.
But it is undeniable that the Socceroos battled and competed, naively some might say, in a mind devoid of the chicanery that fuels modern modes of football achievement at the elite level.
One reason why it was disappointing that four elite European nations made the last four is that it is the Europeans – especially the elite nations - who are the world leaders in knowing how to plot the darker routes to victory. The Italians, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, even the ideologically reconstituted Germans, all engaged in various forms of deception, most notably diving, at various times.
It is also the elite Europeans who know best how to get an opponent sent off, how to waste time and how to sledge and provoke.
One didn’t see much of this from Brazil, or from the Africans, the Asians nor the Australians.
Perhaps it was some kind of naiveté. Well if that is what it takes to win a World Cup then I don’t want Australia to ever win it and I would rather they stayed naive.
Of course the reality is that it doesn’t. Brazil won five World Cups and I don’t remember them ever being accused of diving, not even when their coach was Luiz Felipe Scolari, a card carrying member of the ‘win at all costs’ faith.
The Australians were admired by neutrals because of the air of innocent sporting nobility that characterised their deeds. They were fierce battlers, crunching in the tackle and brave, both in attack and defence.
They strode about with heads held high and rarely, if ever, stooped to gamesmanship. They committed many fouls, some of them vicious (notably one each by Grella and Cahill, both of which went unpunished). But such acts were momentary lapses and never part of a broader ploy, a calculated strategy, to win games by the process of intimidating or maiming (Kevin Muscat wasn’t there, remember?).
They didn’t simulate or attempt to deceive and con, and I know of no instance when an Australian brought in to question the virtues of an opponent’s mother or sister, as Materazzi did in his contest with Zidane.
Additionally, what helped them win fans was that they played with some style, tactical sophistication (thanks to Hiddink) and plentiful attacking bravado and courage.
It is all these things that back the suggestion that the Australians, had they not been denied by ‘that penalty’, may have gone on to defeat the boorish and defensive Ukraine in the quarter finals. In any case, if they did, it would have been a globally popular outcome.
For claiming all this I will be accused, as an Australian, of making an analysis that is eminently self-fulfilling and self-congratulatory. So be it. But I stand by these claims, for one thing because they are collaborated and backed by the regiment of non-Australian opinion makers I have read, listened to and stumbled across in my travels since the World Cup.
If they and I am right, what emerges is that Australia’s national football team came out of this World Cup pretty well smelling like roses.
And that is something that ought to be noted, and protected, by the marketers at large of our national team. The ‘package’, the mixture of sporting nobility, masculine valour, kink for heroism and style that was the recipe of the Socceroos in Germany, is now a commercial product, a brand, that is eminently ready for retail and export in the international market.
Whatever the strategy might be for the way the new road for the Socceroos is plotted – whoever the new coach is and what culture he might bring to the team - this mix, this ‘package’, wants to be protected, nurtured and built.
If the plan is to use the Australian national team as a vehicle to further the cause of Australian football into new frontiers, then this image, now so broadly admired, will be a key.
It is my conviction that a different Australia, one which played expediently and using various tools of fraud that go against the spirit of sport, would have been far less admired. Indeed it would have been condemned, not least by Australian fans themselves.
Australians don’t much go in for that kind of thing. A good example is Lleyton Hewitt. Australians might rejoice when Hewitt wins a match or a tournament and might even admire his ‘mongrel’. But a knot of reservation, even shame, stays in their throat because his self-serving triumphant behaviour on court is seen as unsportsmanlike.
And Australians like their sportsmen to be sportsmen. It’s nice to see Lleyton win Wimbledon but, oh, wouldn’t it have been nicer had it been Pat Rafter, the embodiment of sporting decency.
This is central to the Socceroos’ marketability and whenever the new coach is finally confirmed, whether it’s Arnold or some bigger wig from abroad, he will need to be told by the governors that the team’s cultural identity must stay unaltered and be preserved.
The Socceroos were once, until recently, just an Australian brand. Now, thanks to Germany 06 and the way they played in it, they are a world brand.
And the reason for that goes a lot deeper than how far they went in Germany and how unjust it may have been that they lost to Italy.
Last modified: 24 August 2006 12:35:05
A not bad article, except for his insistance to make Italy the bad guy, which everyone in world soccer does... I mean to say Italy pretty much got there by diving and paying out peoples mothers and sisters is a disgrace and the fact he hides it behind little sly comments is even more disgraceful!
How can he say "Brazil have never once in my memory dived"... wtf? Just from the top of my head I can remember poor Rivaldo who had the ball smashed into him at Korea 2002, the ball hit his leg so hard it hurt his head... Also to bring up Materazzi's comments... I have the footage of when Totti blasted that penalty past a hapless Schwazer and you can clearly see that Cahill is saying some pretty obscene things to Totti from the time he puts the ball on the spot to the time he strikes it (obvisouly Tim the toffee shut up after he rippled the net)...
Socceroos: Honour for sale - Les Murray
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