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I’m the last person to tell Pim Verbeek that Nick Carle should be a first-choice Socceroo. I’ve good humouredly tried in the past, and he just won’t have a bar of it. His trusted assistant, Henk Duut,
similarly expressionless, is of the same opinion.
So it doesn’t matter what I write here, or what you say, or what Simon Hill says, or Craig Foster or Les Murray or Michael Cockerill or Tony Tannous or whoever. It’s now up to Carle himself to prove he’s got what Verbeek needs and in recent weeks, as that preposterous cliché goes, he’s let his football do the talking.
Carle has started in the last half dozen matches or more for his club, Crystal Palace, which is in a rich vein of form in the Championship, sitting in eighth on 36 points, just shy of sixth place and a playoff spot.
He’s playing regular full-match football for a good team (no worse than a lot of the other clubs for which our first XI play) and winning over Palace’s fans after dropping out of manager Neil Warnock’s plans briefly during the season.
Rehashing the arguments why Carle is a great player, however, isn’t going to win over Verbeek.
What I think is the key to unlocking the gate that Verbeek has erected around Carle’s national-team ambitions is pressing his case as a player that needs to be fit, confident and ready for the call to perform should any of his more-starred midfielders in the current Socceroos squad be injured.
It is no one’s interests for Carle to continue being shunned from the squad. He needs to be around it, to be part of it, to feel like he has a place being in amongst it. It would be remarkable if he has not had some of his self-belief dented by the palaver that has gone on over his selection dramas in the past 12 months.
It is in the country’s interest, ultimately, for him to be the best he can be, physically and mentally, for the responsibility of wearing the gold shirt.
As it is in the country’s interest to plan for any contingency. And a Socceroos line-up without a Harry Kewell, without a Tim Cahill, without a Mark Bresciano, without a Brett Holman, is a very real one.
Verbeek wants the luxury of having the choice of three players for every position on the park and in any estimation of our national-team options Carle would have to be a key deputy for each attacking position in Verbeek’s midfield.
But where other fringe players are seemingly offered ample opportunities to train with our first team, Carle gets little truck.
In my opinion this is ultimately not working for the welfare of the team looking ahead to the 2010 World Cup, should we get there.
Putting all our store in just a small number of players strikes me as an unnecessary gamble and moreover is arguably not creating genuine competition for all starting places in the team.
Carle is good enough to be a Socceroo – we saw that against Nigeria and Argentina in 2007 – and he’s certainly good enough to wear a warm-up tracksuit.
And that’s the last thing – for now – I’ll say on the matter, folks.
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