Graham Arnold’s China crisis

 
The Bear Roar Pro

By The Bear, 17 Sep 2008 The Bear is a Roar Pro

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With our Olympic athletes and administrators returning to deserved accolades and applause from the Australian public, the conspicuous silence from FFA and the coaching team of Graham Arnold and David Mitchell continues.

Far from continuing to leave an Olympic legacy, our FFA has set football development in Australia back at least two decades. No results, no player development, no “feel good” factors, no accountability.

What we got was debasement of a generation of younger players, additionally with spurious doubts cast over the abilities to play in the heat and, even more ridiculous claims that they lacked the maturity to play at the elite level.

Throughout the Olympics, Arnold was very coy at specifying why his team (or was it FFA’s?) were not only consistently outplayed, but always out-gunned.

Which brings me to the latest (that is most recent) deflecting technique of Graham’s. As if name-dropping Harry Kewell in every other press conference (was he ever REALLY a contender for these Olympics?) and bigging-up the numbers of A-League players in his squad were tediously insufficient, he has now stooped to an all time low.

“We’ve had problems scoring with this team. This is generally a problem with all levels of Australia’s national teams.” This was his assessment post-Côte d’Ivoire game, where Australia was dealt the knock-out blow, to an embarrassingly tepid campaign.

What burns me the most about Arnold’s comment is what relevancy has it with this Olympic tournament? He left the developing squad players Vidosic, Burns and Djite in preference to completely untried, untested Rukavytsya, and Thompson, just coming back from injury, and a superfluous North.

The immediate lead-up campaign in Asia offered very little in terms of goals for Arnold. And despite the qualifying rounds producing scoring efforts from the Sarkies and Milligan combination, in China, Sarkies found the pine more often than not, and even more so did Arnold’s “goal machine”, Mark Bridge.

The “ring in”, Matt Simon, was even more rarely sighted.

Was this statement meant to placate us Aussie fans? We who had to sit through his squad selections, and had to watch all the tactical fumbling? If it was, it was not only cruel, but an errant observation and a more errant justification.

Now I may have only started following this game at the Arok era (the 80’s for those not in the know), but I do recall many great strikers of the ball even in that era. Maybe Arnold should be kinder to his teammates of the day? I recall many splendid wins, gutsy defeats and goals, goals, goals!

But in any case, now, in our Qantas era, especially, we do score goals.

We must have had the players in the lead-up to that World Cup in 2006 that could (and did) score goals. Otherwise we would not have got there. And I recall only losing to Italy by a last-minute penalty, in the round of 16 in Germany.

What is most concerning is the level of professionalism that Arnold must have, to use comments like these, apparently to save his own job or international managing reputation. This type of revisionism, and outdated attitudes will hold Australia back, and has already.

Will we see Carney hold back from putting his laces through the next long-range attempt?

I would love to hear Arnie’s explanation and clarifications of this latest justification.

Yet, those words of his have been left unsupervised, to bounce around in the eerie media vacuum left by the FFA. Five weeks, now, of ordinary football-loving Australians just trying to work out what it is that Graham Arnold would have us believe, now.

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