Forget ‘green’ football, pick Nicky Carle

 
Jesse Fink Roar Pro

By , 6 Jun 2008 Jesse Fink is a Roar Pro

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Uruguay’s Dario Rodriguez tackles Australia’s Nick Carle during the Australia versus Uruguay soccer match at Telstra Stadium, Sydney, Saturday, June 2, 2007. Uruguay defeated Australia 2 - 1. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

My good friend Pino Paonessa, who runs the excellent East Sydney cafe Latteria with his brother Tommy and mate Vito, is a typical football tragic with a difference: he holds an FFA coaching licence.

During the week he was invited out to the lecture room at Football NSW’s Valentine Park headquarters at Parklea to hear a review of the recently convened FFA National Coaching Conference held at Homebush.

An impressive array of talent had been assembled for the two-day pow wow: Jurgen Klinsmann, Jean-Michel Benezet, Erich Rutemöller and Josef Venglos, among others.

It was a nice gesture by Football NSW to invite the mums and dads of Australian coaching out west and put on this free night for those who couldn’t afford – or weren’t invited – to Homebush.

However Pino, who coaches under-15s Bankstown Sports Strikers, didn’t come away from the evening particularly impressed with the philosophies espoused by this football think-tank. It was all stats and figures, he told me. Eugenics sort of stuff: height, weight, leap, ability to cover X amount of metres in ten seconds, blah blah blah.

Football today, he was told, was all about set play, rigid structure, and crossing the ball; a lot of goals were scored early in games when teams weren’t properly “organised”.

But Pino wasn’t having any of it.

What about Argentina? He said. What about Lionel Messi? The guy was the size of Tattoo from Fantasy Island and played the game by running straight at players.

His football was about finesse, about dribbling, about unlocking with skill the elaborate codes that master coaches had transferred from the whiteboard to the pitch.

It was time, he told me, for Australian coaches – all coaches – to stop being so cerebral and analytical and put on a pedestal the thing that makes good footballers great: imagination.

Of course, this was manna from heaven to this writer. I’m a big believer in art over craft and for a long time have been promoting the cause of Nicky Carle, whom I believe is the most gifted attacking player we have in this country.

Technically he is a class apart from anyone else, except for perhaps Harry Kewell when he is at his best, glimpses of which we saw last Sunday in the World Cup qualifier against Iraq in Brisbane.

Kewell had a wonderful game and was the difference between the two sides. But imagine what we could have done had we managed to fit Kewell and Carle on the pitch. Australia would have been lethal.

But Pim Verbeek is still reading from the Graham Arnold coaching manual and not picking Carle.

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to ask Verbeek about Carle and got something akin to Arnold’s defence: that Carle didn’t put in enough effort tracking back; that he had to be more mobile across the pitch, going backwards and forwards.

All of which may be true, who am I to doubt Verbeek. But isn’t it possible for an Australia side just to make a concession for god-given talent when it’s in our midst?

Instead, since the era of Guus Hiddink, we’ve followed a more analytical path: calling up young, fit players who can adhere to systems, who can run all day and not drop, and who will blindly follow the coach’s gospel. A player such as Luke Wilkshire is the prototype. He came to prominence under Hiddink, kept his place under Arnold, and is now a key figure in Verbeek’s Socceroos. Others are Jason Culina, Brett Emerton and now David Carney.

Physical stamina is their strength, not creativity.

And it is creativity that Australia, under Verbeek, sorely lacks. Outside of Kewell and Mark Bresciano, there are no players in the side who you sense have that unteachable quality to pull out something game breaking, something special, at any time.

Carle is that kind of player.

And in my opinion we will need him this weekend in Dubai for the second leg of the Iraq showdown.

We’ve tried aerial tactics before in the Middle East, with little success, and I’m not sure that just pegging balls in the direction of Josh Kennedy and praying for the best is necessarily the best way to go.

Graham Arnold tried so-called “green football” twice – in Kuwait City in 2006 and Bangkok in 2007 – and found it desperately wanting both times, the last occasion against our opponents this weekend, Iraq.

The Iraqis aren’t midgets, so the lanky, slippery Kennedy isn’t going to have the same advantage he exploited against the Qataris in May. He will be hustled and grappled and most likely neutralised by the Iraqi defenders.

The key, I believe, is putting on a player who has the ability to do something extraordinary in a very constricted space, and there are only three players who can do that for Australia: Kewell, Bresciano and Carle.

If Australia wants to come away with a result in Dubai, starting Carle alongside Bresciano, behind a strike partnership of Kennedy/Kewell and McDonald/Kewell, for instance, would be a very aggressive but positive move.

But, like so many times in the past, I feel like I’m screaming into a deep, deep canyon and no one is listening. Maybe with Roar readers we can start a hell of a racket.

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