What’s really holding “soccer” back?

 
Jesse Fink Roar Guru

By , 12 Jun 2009 Jesse Fink is a Roar Guru

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Australia's Scott McDonald and Iraq's Haidar Hussain during the Australian Socceroos v Iraq World Cup qualifier. AAP Image/Dave Hunt

Australia's Scott McDonald and Iraq's Haidar Hussain during the Australian Socceroos v Iraq World Cup qualifier. AAP Image/Dave Hunt

There were many talking points to come out of Wednesday night’s Australia Vs Bahrain WCQ, a major one being the continued and inexplicable international career of Brett Holman, which I have attended to in my Friday column for The World Game. It deserves a blog on its own.

Another is Scott McDonald, who couldn’t hit a barnyard door with a cowpat and whose time as a striker for the Socceroos must surely be up.

But what I found most interesting – and there wasn’t that much to find interesting at Homebush; it was probably the most tedious thing I’ve seen since one of those interminable Andy Warhol art movies from the 1960s – was the way Sydney’s Daily Telegraph launched a blistering character attack on Pim Verbeek in the lead-up to the game, blaming his media ban on players for the poor attendance.

It continued on Thursday.

Phil Rothfield, the executive editor of the sports pages, declared: “Soccer will never make it as a major sport in this country while Pim Verbeek is in charge of our national team. Forget about the boring style of soccer, it is Pim’s petulance and disdain for Australian culture which [sic] is holding the game back.”

Coming from a paper whose golden-boy reporter Nick Walshaw calls Scott McDonald “Scotty Mitchell” and which rated Holman’s performance as “6/10” you really have to question the wisdom of listening to anything the Telegraph says.

But it’s the biggest-selling paper in Australia’s biggest city, so we need to take notice.

Now I’ve made my own criticisms of Verbeek here and on TWG while also commending him, but the Telegraph has stepped over the line. We were all disappointed by the media ban, by the withdrawal of players including Tim Cahill, by the very late substitution of Nicky Carle for Holman, but they are the prerogatives of the national-team manager, whose job is to best prepare his team for South Africa 2010 as he sees fit.

He may not be right – in regards keeping Holman on the pitch I think he made a grievous error – but they are his decisions to make and we must respect his position, his experience and his reasons for making them.

So Pim himself is not holding the game back. Frankly how that can be said about someone who has just led Australia to the World Cup really is quite perplexing.

In my view what is holding the game back is the mediocrity of the media that reports on the sport we all love, chief among them the Daily Telegraph and its satellite papers in the News Limited family.

Four years on from our second World Cup qualification, they still have no idea what they’re writing about.

It is the stubborn persisting in calling it “soccer”, even on Fox Sports, the so-called “home of football”. It is the sequestering of live coverage of qualification games on to pay TV, where only those people who can afford it are able to watch our national football team while the vast majority of people are forced to go without.

Yes, I write for SBS, and it is thankfully how I earn a living, but even if I didn’t I’d still thank God for its very existence. SBS employs people with passion, fearlessness, knowledge and a real commitment to the sport – and has demonstrated that commitment through thick and thin, even back in the days when Socceroos was a dirty word.

That much cannot be said about many other media outlets when it comes to football.

There was a moment in Fox’s coverage before the Qatar match in Doha last weekend that summed up for me the fairweather nature of so much of the Australian media’s relationship with the biggest sport in the world.

Robbie Slater, the former Socceroo, was in the midst of praising Verbeek for getting Australia to the World Cup and then made an aside about criticism of the Dutchman as having come from “the usual quarters”.

The irony of this is that Slater, “soccer’s number one analyst” according to his column byline for News Limited, was the biggest critic of Verbeek’s appointment, even before he arrived in the country.

“Underwhelming” was his choice of word to describe how he felt about Verbeek being selected over the Frenchman Philippe Troussier.

Now Verbeek, if we are to judge by the tenor of the commentary on Fox, can do no wrong. Slater, particularly, is a Verbeek cheerboy.

Football cannot be held back in this country so long as there is a vibrant, knowledgeable, independent and committed media behind it that engages people with the sincerity of its passion and the sophistication of its debate.

The sport is just too big, too beautiful to be curtailed.

SBS is leading the way. Now it’s up to the rest of the side to pick up its game.

This is my 100th blog for The Roar and I’ve had a blast getting to know a lot of you. Special thanks to The Bear, Stifler’s Mom, Vicentin, Kazama, Midfielder, Ben of Phnom Penh, Millster, Sledgeross, Dasilva, Dickroo, Dazza Japan, Koala Bear, Mick of Newie, Pippinu and even the exasperating Slippery Jim (or Contrarian, as I’ve come to know him).

Your input has been enlightening, entertaining and always challenging. This small corner of the world game is better off for your presence.

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