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The problem with most clichés, as much as they are anathema to any writer, is that they are true. That point was brought home to me late last week when I met Afshin Ghotbi, the Iranian-American former coach of Persepolis FC who was in Sydney on holiday with his Dutch-Korean girlfriend, Yorum.
It is indeed a small world. And nowhere more than in football.
I’d first spoken to Afshin back in 2006 when he was assistant to Pim Verbeek in South Korea, the same time I’d first met the Dutchman. They lived in Seoul, I lived in Sydney and we might well as have been on separate planets. Their mission at the time, post Dick Advocaat at Germany 2006, was to win the Asian Cup.
Fast-forward three years and Pim is now coach of Australia and Afshin, as I reported on The World Game on Monday, wants to work in the A-League.
For now, Afshin is back at home in Dubai, cooling his heels and waiting for the right job offer. He’s already been approached to work in a cashed-up Middle Eastern league but has made it plain his preference is to work where there are opportunities for real change; where he can make a difference.
It is the same mentality that has guided the career paths of his mentors, Guus Hiddink, Verbeek and Advocaat and it is incumbent upon Australian football administrators to attract to our fledgling league this calibre of football adventurer that exists in and around the Asian/Middle Eastern football axis. Men like Ghotbi, like Jorvan Vieira.
Some would call them “mercenaries”, but that is unfair; mercenary suggests someone who is just there to do a job, get paid, then leave at the first opportunity.
Ghotbi, for one, stayed in Korea for the best part of a decade, as did Verbeek.
(Hiddink might be accused of being one for the speed by which he took and left the Australia job but those were the unique conditions of his assignment. Since then he appears to have bunkered down with some permanence in Russia.)
As I first wrote back in December, for a very young league still learning the ropes of professionalism and the Asian football scene the A-League has a dearth of good foreign coaches and we are losing ground to the Japanese by the day in persisting with local over quality.
There is no reason why foreign coaches can’t come here. They are more affordable than you might think and Australia offers lifestyle and educational opportunities not always available elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East that makes this country a very attractive option for them and their families.
But the overriding objective of our administrators seems to be fast-tracking the coaching careers of ex-players who still have a great deal to learn and an even greater deal of territory to cover before they should rightfully get the chance to call themselves a “coach”. Men like Paul Okon, like Alex Tobin, even Aurelio Vidmar.
In some ways the “success” of Vidmar’s Adelaide United in Asia has been one of the worst things that could happen to the development of the Australian game because it covers up a lot of what is wrong with the domestic league. There is still an all-pervasive kick-and-rush mentality and cult of physicality while slick, smart combination football and tactical smarts are placed at a low premium.
Ghotbi told me after the Sydney-Wellington game at the Sydney Football Stadium that what he’d seen was “absolutely horrible” and that there was scarcely a passage of play where more than five passes had been strung together.
The A-League can be better. We just need to open up our small minds to that small world.
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