- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Sydney's Shannon Cole (left) and Brisbane's Tommy Oar (right) during the round 25 A-League match between Brisbane Roar and Sydney F.C at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010. (AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
When the A-League’s Young Footballer of the Year is announced at the annual awards night a week from today, it should be a decision between the two outstanding youngsters of season five, Tommy Oar and Mathew Leckie.
As was the case on Saturday night at Hindmarsh Stadium, I would expect the Adelaide flier to come out on top, but not by a great deal.
But before that can happen, the FFA has the not so clear-cut matter of confirming that Leckie will be the January nomination for the best under 21s player of the month.
Amazingly, the Adelaide flier has yet to be nominated as one of the five monthly award winners, but if order is restored, based on his stirring efforts throughout what has been a dismal campaign for the Reds, that should be confirmed some time this week.
The five nominees to date have been Kofi Danning (August), Leigh Broxham (September), Oar (October), Rostyn Griffiths (November) and Ben Kantarovski (December).
The anomaly in the monthly nomination process is that there are some mighty fine performers, especially in the second half of the season, who will miss out on a nomination.
Provided Leckie does receive the January gong, check out this list of rising stars unlucky not to figure in the selection panel’s final deliberations:
Mitchell Langerak
Robbie Kruse
Luke DeVere
Sean Rooney
Adam Sarota
The most unlucky of those would be Kruse, whose form in January, and since, has been excellent.
Despite Kruse’s claims, it would be a tragedy if Leckie missed out on one of the monthly awards, thus ruling him out of the overall prize. I made my thoughts on Leckie’s impact this season clear in a previous article on The Roar.
Others who may have had a sniff of a monthly nomination throughout the season included Mate Dugandzic, David Williams and Michael Zullo.
All up, there has been some sound development among Australia’s emerging talent, and that’s not even factoring in guys like Michael Marrone, Tarek Elrich, Ivan Franjic and Andrija Jukic, who don’t quite make the under 21s cut-off.
But if you were to list a field of the best six under 21s performers of the season, four of the five monthly nominees to date would be lucky to sneak in. My six would be;
Mathew Leckie
Tommy Oar
Robbie Kruse
Mitchell Langerak
Sean Rooney
Luke DeVere
That’s to take nothing away from someone like Broxham, who has had a very consistent season and finally cemented his spot in the Melbourne Victory 11, or a Kantarovski, who I feel has a massive future, but it is more a reflection on the need to look at the overall governance of this award.
To my mind, the current model of a single monthly nominee over six months isn’t quite the best solution to identifying all the kids that have emerged throughout the season.
Certainly, it gives the award and its sponsor monthly “space” throughout the season, but from a purely footballing perspective, it means kids like Kruse, Langerak, Rooney, Sarota and DeVere miss out on some recognition, when they deserve it.
One solution, for next year and beyond, might be to adopt the AFL’s Rising Star model, where one player is nominated every round, from which the selection panel pick the overall winner.
If there are not enough emerging youngsters in the A-League to warrant a weekly nominee (remembering that there are less teams and less players on the pitch compared with the AFL), then another option might be to select three or four nominees at the end of every third of the season.
That would have given us nine or 12 total nominations this season, which most likely would have captured the likes of Kruse, Langerak, Rooney, DeVere, Sarota Dugandzic, Williams and Zullo.
This season’s selection panel, consisting of Pim Verbeek (when he has been available to watch the games of that voting month), Young Socceroos coach Jan Versleijen, national technical director Han Berger, assistant national technical director Alistair Edwards, Fox’s Andy Harper, plus a writer from Fairfax and News Ltd, have painted themselves into a corner a touch by having to choose between Leckie and Kruse in January.
But having a more flexible agenda next season will certainly help the panel, and our emerging talent.
Are you the ultimate team manager? Pick your own superstar team and go head to head with other football fans for glory and cash prizes on Draftstars. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.