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'Old soccer' leads to Postecoglou's 'new football'

5th August, 2014
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The FFA need a new coach to replace Ange Postecoglou. (Image: AAP/Joe Castro)
Roar Guru
5th August, 2014
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When Ange Postecoglou was growing up in Melbourne, the second largest Greek community in the world, he played Aussie rules and supported the Carlton Blues.

Carlton is one of the eight founding members of the Melbourne rules competition of 1897 and has a long and proud tradition in the Australian rules universe. The club originally represented the suburb of Carlton in Melbourne’s inner north, and its nickname of the Blues comes from the predominantly navy blue colour of its playing uniform.

Carlton had historically been one of Australian rules’ most successful clubs, having won sixteen senior premierships throughout its history, equal with Essendon as the most of any club.

What’s wrong with that you say. Doesn’t everyone growing up in Melbourne play Australian Rules?

Eating funny, foreign food and talking about Manfred Schaefer, Ray Baartz, Atti Abonyi or Eddie Krncevic with garlic on your breath didn’t get you much attention or win you many friends in the Carlton schoolyard in an era of wall to wall Australian rules.

“There was a while there when I didn’t love soccer” confessed Ange, “I loved Australian Rules. It was the way you fitted in. You want to fit in and not be the kid with a long surname that doesn’t fit in. Sport is the boys’ common denominator in the schoolyard jungle.”

That experience taught Postecoglou resilience and a strong determination for what he really wanted to do, because his love for the game of football was being severely tested.

It would have been so easy to become one of the Aussie rules pack and be bullied into being a player and follower. It would have been so tempting to be a part of the mockery of all things foreign, like soccer, even though it was one of his father’s great loves.

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How he responded to those strong, hurtful influences on his young life and how he gathered the courage to go against the hostile Anglo-Saxon flow was to shape and determine his football career, his life’s philosophy and his great passion to take other Australians with him on a lifelong football journey.

Postecoglou’s experiences over the years and his subsequent rise to the top of Australian team sport and his anointment as Australia’s national men’s football team head coach, mirrors the vicissitudes of the wider world of Australian football and the highs and lows it and its followers have experienced over that time.

For many, football was once seen as a foreign invader that wasn’t Australian and had nothing to do with Australian society. Postecoglou’s schoolyard derisions were played out across the country and re-enforced in a number of cultural and media outlets.

It was no use trying to point out that Australia’s great national patriotic pastimes of cricket and rugby, were foreign games too. Even Melbourne rules, the forerunner of Australian rules was also originally derived from the English Rugby school. The collective penny never dropped.

No, soccer was always the enemy.

That was really tough for the lately arrived Australians and their families, as other Australians weren’t accepting of something that they really loved and wanted to talk about. It became a taboo subject at times and something that you were ashamed to support.

To be a football fan was almost to be part of a subculture on the fringe of society. In Johnny Warren’s parlance, this was the era of “sheilas, wogs and poofters”.

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As a result, the game was poorly run and administered. There was not enough resolve or courage to work together, pulling in the same direction amidst the backdrop of being treated as second class citizens.

There have been a number of points on the slippery slope when it was thought the game was going to die. Well, the game itself was never going to die, but the framework within which it operated to give it a chance to survive was going to perish.

We still get nervous when people start talking about having turned the corner, because we have seen the false dawns.

When football went national in 1977, before the AFL and the NRL as the first ever truly national sporting competition, we thought that was the turning point for the professional game in Australia.

Even the A-League looked like it was dying at times, with the press and Clive Palmer baying for blood and for the FFA empire to fall.

Through some courageous decisions, like that of a young Postecoglou, changes were made and great sports administrators like John O’Neill and David Gallop were appointed to steer us out of dangerous waters.

It’s now history, we are a part of our own society and not seen as un-Australian any more. The Socceroos and the A-League have played a big part in that. Football is definitely now an important player in the Australian mainstream sporting landscape and is growing in stature.

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As Archie Thompson says in his autobiographical recollections of Australian football, What Doesn’t Kill You Only Makes You Stronger.

We could point to the Socceroos success in 2006 at the German World Cup or the growth and improved technical standard of the A-League as pivotal in the growth of football in Australia, but let’s also talk about the courage of a few brave men in Australia who have stuck by this game and given it their utmost support through bad times, as well as good ones. People like Johnny Warren, Les Murray, Frank Lowy and now David Gallop, whose contributions have been hugely significant.

And let’s not forget Postecoglou’s own role in almost single-handedly altering the football philosophy of Australia amidst the regimented Dutch generals trying to pull it apart and re-assemble it with a German accent.

Under Postecoglou, Brisbane transformed the A-League as it played a modern high-tempo possession-based attacking game. He is now carrying that transformation through to the Socceroos and their quest for international recognition.

After 32 years of bad luck trying to qualify for the FIFA World Cup, perhaps our luck is changing.

What if Postecoglou had not stood up to the Aussie Rules schoolyard bullies of his childhood and if he continued to play and follow Aussie Rules and denounced football and his Greek heritage.

What significance would that have been for Australia?

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And let’s not forget, Postecoglou only got a chance of a start at Brisbane Roar because Frank Farina had failed a roadside alcohol breath test.

There’s still a long way to go and still a lot of room for improvement. I also don’t think we have done our history well as a code and sufficiently recognised the efforts of the pioneers of the past and what courage they displayed to get us to where we are now.

Perhaps Ange Postecoglou, with his brand of ‘new football’, while experienced in ‘old soccer’, can help us to play our part in re-building the bridges, working together and all pulling in the same direction for the future good of our game.

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