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In yesterday’s Age, Michael Lynch wrote about the five key things Australia needs to work on to be ready for South Africa 2010.
The bulk of these things have been discussed at great length on The Roar, such as keeping Dukes in the fold for insurance; finding a partner for Neill; trying out a few of the younger players, and so on.
The fifth of Lynch’s points caught my eye: the need for players such as Moore, Sterjovski and Culina to stay fit when their season finishes up in early March (if they’re lucky).
As we know, it’s not just the quality of the A-League that might put their international careers in jeopardy, it’s the shortness of the A-League season that is likely to do the most damage in that regard.
His suggestion was to organise loan deals for them to enable them to play for an additional couple of months. And this is certainly doable and becoming more common for A-League players.
But an alternative idea came to me as I was mulling this idea over.
What if we were to put together an A-League squad of eighteen or so players, including the four or five names that are in contention for a trip to South Africa, and have them train together and play a series of friendlies in the two or three months following the end of the A-League season next year.
It wouldn’t matter who we played, as long as we organised a game every two or three weeks.
This would be over and above the program that would be organised for the full national squad of 23 to 26 players (I imagine a few of the A-League players would join as training members, like last time).
Not only would we keep the key four or five players match fit, they’d be training together. And we would also be blooding a few younger players at U20 and U23 level (such as Kantarovski, Celeski, Mullen, Jesic, Danning, Gan, Payne, Zullo, and Patafta) from which we might be able pull out a name in case of last minute injuries, as can often happen.
I would see the benefits going a bit beyond keeping the true Socceroos match fit. Surely this is a better idea than finding them individual loan deals?
Or is it?
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