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On Monday night I took a call from a coach working in Asia asking me where I thought some job opportunities might be coming up in the A-League. He was credentialled, capable and was genuinely interested in checking out what was going on in Australia.
I quickly did some mental maths and the tabulations weren’t encouraging.
Apart from John Kosmina, who was swiftly replaced Czech manager Vitezslav Lavicka (in fact, he had already got the job weeks before Kosmina departed), none of the nine others (including the two start-ups for next season) looked like budging, irrespective of how they performed.
Ernie Merrick, for all the criticism he gets for his kick-and-rush style, looks like leading Melbourne to the championship.
Frank Farina has got Queensland Roar motivated and switched on.
Lawrie McKinna, though presiding over one of the most boring teams in the comp, could safely be Mariners coach for life if he so wished.
David Mitchell turned around Perth Glory last season and has made them a genuine title contender.
Aurelio Vidmar, though faltering in the end stages of the campaign, can rest on his Asian Champions League laurels.
Ricki Herbert is the heart and soul of Wellington Phoenix and an immovable object.
Miron Bleiberg and Ian Ferguson haven’t even kicked a ball in anger, and will at least have one season to show what they can do before getting the heave-ho.
The only potential candidate for a sideways move seems to be Newcastle’s Gary van Egmond, coach of the year not so long ago and an unhappy recipient of the wooden spoon this season. But he’s got the Asian Champions League campaign in a few weeks’ time and, with Branko Culina announced as his new high-performance manager, you know who’d like to take his job next.
So the vista for any foreign coach looking for work opportunities in the Australian game isn’t that lively. Positively barren, in fact. Which is unfortunate as I would hazard a large part of the appeal of the European leagues is the volatility of the coaches’ job market. On any given week fans can’t be 100 per cent certain who’s going to be coaching their team. It keeps the game in the news, the papers churning out, the TV bulletins ticking over.
In the past 24 hours Chelsea sacked Luiz Felipe Scolari, one of the best coaches in the world and by far and away the best remunerated, whose failure, if it can be called that, was to take the Blues to fourth place after 25 games of the English Premier League season, just seven points shy of leaders Manchester United.
The axe fell after a scoreless draw with 12th-placed Hull.
His sacking came a day after Jimmy Nail-lookalike Tony Adams was dumped as manager of Portsmouth following Pompey’s dramatic 3-2 loss to Liverpool. He was only in the job three months.
That brings to a over a half dozen the number of managers sacked in the English Premier League in 2008/09 and there is still a third of the season to go.
Obviously the A-League is not the EPL in any way, shape or form: it is small in number, there is a restrictive salary cap, and no form of relegation/promotion exists.
But it would be a far more exciting competition, I would venture, if coaches were held to a greater expectation of performance by fans, club owners and the media, just as they are in England.
As it stands presently getting a coaching job in the A-League, excepting the perennial hot seat of Sydney FC, is like getting tenure in the public service.
There is a common view that having such stability makes for a better football competition, but how so? All I’ve seen stability do in four seasons of the A-League is encourage a culture of mediocrity, safety and monotony. Would it be so bad, then, to replicate a little bit of the employment circus of the EPL?
Circuses might be going out of style in the real world, but in football, as we’ve seen in the English Premier League, they’re positively cutting edge.
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