What do we want from our Socceroos?

 
Mike Tuckerman Columnist

By , 20 Oct 2009 Mike Tuckerman is a Roar Expert

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Australian player Vince Grella (right) during the Socceroos pre-match training session at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. AAP Image/Luis Enrique Ascui

Australian player Vince Grella (right) during the Socceroos pre-match training session at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. AAP Image/Luis Enrique Ascui

It was Karl Marx who claimed that religion is the opiate of the masses, but in this day and age, he may as well have been referring to sport. No matter the catastrophes that befall us, from financial crises to terrible acts of nature, many of us perk up when the topic returns to sporting endeavours.

Not surprisingly, Australia’s plodding 1-0 win over Oman in last week’s Asian Cup qualifier conjured a complex set of emotions.

From vexed consternation to a spot of hand-wringing to good old fashioned white-hot rage, Socceroos fans were treated to the whole gamut of frustration.

No one was more frustrated than ex-Socceroo midfielder Craig Foster, who rued the style of football on display in a withering piece for the Fairfax Sunday papers.

Foster is an easy target for the boo boys, who dislike his seemingly hectoring tone and penchant for negative appraisals.

Yet, as far as analysts go, he’s our most vigilant watchdog – constantly willing our team to success, desperate to see the Socceroos reach a higher plane.

He’s perfectly entitled to claim that “(p)assable results do not hide the fact this team (is) destined to fail.”

But by whose definition of failure are we reckoning with?

Talk to Pim Verbeek, and he makes it perfectly clear that his job description was to steer Australia to the World Cup finals in 2010 – and what’s all this hubbub about the Asian Cup?

Unfortunately for the results-driven Dutchman, we Aussies are a determined lot – more “in it to win it” than “just happy to be here,” and at the moment we look like a team struggling with Plan A, let alone one that has an obvious Plan B.

Australia may have qualified for the World Cup finals at a canter, but as Foster suggests, currently the Socceroos don’t look like controlling the game against the kind of top-class opposition they’ll meet in South Africa, let alone supposedly weaker Asian teams.

However, all this desire to control games and subdue perfectly capable opponents makes me wonder if we’re not suffering from some kind of major superiority complex.

Of all the good-natured jibes used to describe Oman’s veteran coach Claude Le Roy – did he look like the sort of foppish cartoon villain you might find in one of Hergé’s classic “Tintin” comics to anyone else? – not much was written about his CV.

Here was a coach who has achieved success with a variety of African nations, has coached at club level in his native France and England – to say nothing of stints in the UAE and China – and who knows a thing or two about qualifying for major tournaments.

Should we really have expected to trample all over an Oman side looking to qualify for its third successive Asian Cup?

Judging by the outpouring of frustration from fans, of whom just over 20,000 bothered to show up at Etihad Stadium, the answer appears to be an unequivocal “yes.”

If that’s the case, how will Australian fans react to another dogged but technically limited performance in South Africa?

Will it be recognised that a team of purportedly honest grafters has done well to be mix it with football’s elite once again, or will we pine for the days when we played England off the park in 2003, and dominated Nigeria in 2007?

Or will a nation so used to international sporting success, often in fields dominated by only a small handful of countries, demand style as well as substance in our quest for international glory.

In short: what do we want from our Socceroos?

If football is as much about philosophising as it is about on-field action – and let’s face it, there’s only so much one can say about that performance against Oman – what do Socceroos fans, both committed and casual, think about the current state of the national team?

I’m interested to hear what you think.

Follow Mike on twitter @Mike_Tuckerman
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