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Imagine 20 years in the future; 2029 at the PFA awards. Josip Simunic steps up on the stage and accepts the Alex Tobin award for service to Australian Football.
I imagine that whole idea will disgust many Socceroos supporters. However, we now have a similar situation of having Craig Johnston, who represented the England B team and was selected for the England Euro 1988 squad, getting rewarded for service to Australian Football.
Am I the only person who has a problem with that?
There’s no doubt that Craig Johnston is a great Australian success story. He was a battler who sacrifices a lot to travel to England for the dream of being a professional footballer.
He was initially rejected but he worked hard, training every day to become an important part of one of the best club teams in the world with Liverpool.
Now there were certainly extraneous factors that prevented Craig Johnston from playing for Australia. First, he wasn’t treated well by the Australian Football Federation and he had a lot of pressure from club managers not to play for Australia.
However, he isn’t the only Australian player who had severe issues with the administrative body. Many other Socceroos, such as the Socceroos in the 70’s and 80’s, had problems with administrators and sometimes led to the threat of a strike, but it never stopped them from representing their country.
Craig Johnston wasn’t the only Australian player in that time period that was overseas either. He was the most high profile player, but we still had the likes of Patikas, Mitchell, Farina and Krncevic, who at times came over to play for the Socceroos.
They may pick and choose when to represent Australia, but they still turn up for the Green and Gold at times at the wrath of their clubs. This is not mentioning the pressures that Kewell, Viduka and Cahill have from their clubs to represent Australia.
If we listen to Craig Johnston, his problem was based on the fact that AFF did not pay for a trip home when he was injured in England. I may not know all the details, but if I was in AFF and I got a phone call from a random person I never heard of and had never been connected to our youth national side, I probably wouldn’t be handing over any money either.
Also, this was also omitted from his impassionate speech. This was what Frank Arok, the Socceroos coach at the time, had to say about Craig Johnston playing for the Socceroos.
“I met Craig in Newcastle at the time and he agreed to play. The only problem was that he wanted weekly payments equivalent to what he was getting at Liverpool. This was over $7,000 per week, so I told him that this was impossible for us to pay. It disturbed me that we couldn’t get him for one or two games at least because we needed his leadership and profile, but he was adamant that he wanted that money.”
Obviously, his issues with the administrative body and the issue with his manager in England weren’t insurmountable for him to represent Australia. If he wanted to represent Australia he could have, if Frank Arok was telling the truth.
He made the choice to represent England and that’s fine. Everyone has a right to migrate to another country and represent that country in a sport. If he felt he was more English then he was Australian at the time, then so be it.
However, for that decision he could never be considered an Australian footballer, because he made the decision to become an English footballer.
For him to be rewarded as an Australian footballer is a slap on the face to people who have represented Australia, as well as people like Eddie Bosnar, who made it clear that he would rather stayed uncapped than represent another country in sport when he rejected Croatia.
Craig Johnston, you are a great Australian success story, but you are not an Australian Footballer and you shouldn’t have been rewarded as one.
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