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There’s never anything wrong with a bit of chutzpah. But there’s good chutzpah and then there’s Anthony Mundine-style chutzpah, and I don’t know about you but for me a lot of what is coming out of Gold Coast United owner Clive Palmer’s mouth of late has been Choc cringeworthy: not only is the club going to win everything in sight next season, it’s going to do it undefeated.
“We’ve got a unique opportunity at this time to remain undefeated in winning the A-League. We really think we can do that. That’s what our new goal is now. On paper, our team is so much more experienced than anyone in the A-League,” he said at the press conference/stage production on Wednesday to announce the signing of Holland-based Socceroos stalwart Jason Culina as the club’s marquee player.
Experienced maybe, but experienced isn’t a guarantee of managing expectations – and it’s expectations that are getting out of control with Gold Coast; an eerie echo of the same expectations that have effectively cruelled Sydney FC from its inception.
He might be (according to some) Australia’s richest man, but with his helicopter and golf cart act, Palmer looks more Rodney Dangerfield than Roman Abramovich.
The club needs to put a rein on his ego because even though the theatrics and hubris are entertaining it’s becoming a distraction from what will be the club’s most difficult task: engaging with the local community and being a club for the people of the Gold Coast.
However I do think there is something in Palmer’s idea for a $10,000 salary-cap credit for every game a recruited Socceroo has played for his country.
“When some of these guys have played more than 20 games or more, it gives them over $200,000 – not to pay the salaries they earn in Europe but certainly somewhere in between.”
It sounds unwieldy, it perhaps is, but at least the big unit is putting back on the agenda the whole idea of the “returning Socceroo fund” that former Football Federation Australia chief executive John O’Neill first mooted back in 2004 or 2005 but then disappeared into the too-hard basket on his departure for rugby.
The FFA really dropped the ball on that concept and it’s an indictment on the game’s administration that it’s been left to mavericks such as Palmer to resuscitate it, if only in spirit.
He’s done very, very well to recruit Culina and, like Sydney with Dwight Yorke in “Version 1.0”, given every other team in the league a gift they must exploit to their own benefit.
Hopefully some of the other teams might repay the compliment.
Not with Tiattos and Aloisis and Agostinos and other past-it former Socceroos but with Carneys and Beauchamps and Grellas – players currently in and around the current Socceroos set-up and with plenty still left to give, on and off the park.
But to date, even with Culina on board, Gold Coast really hasn’t reinvented the A-League wheel.
That will happen when an A-League club makes a major investment in the Asian football scene and brings a headline Japanese, Korean, West or South-East Asian star to our league for a full season or more.
Bleiberg himself made a convincing argument for more Asian players in our league in September last year to counter the predations of the J-League (and now the K-League) on our dwindling player ranks. He warned if nothing was done the consequences would be “catastrophic”.
What – other than the situation becoming more critical – has changed in the interim?
Apropos of the Australia–Indonesia Asian Cup qualifier on January 28 in Jakarta, it’s telling of the local game’s myopia that young Indonesians are getting picked up by Brazilian clubs but can’t even get a trial in the A-League.
To paraphrase an old quote from Lee Kuan Yew, it’s high time we started adjusting to our neighbourhood.
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