It’s the mullet. Go to e-bay and type in “Paul Wade”, and you’ll find a football card circa 1980-something with Paul Wade’s face on it. The top of his head is a mass of spiky hair, leading down to that much maligned, yet strangely popular cut that is “business at the front, party at the back”.

25 years ago, Wade and his fellow footballers wore it with pride. Stare at the picture long enough and you’ll soon be jumping on your iPod and downloading “The Never Ending Story” or “The Final Countdown” for a mullet music fix. They don’t make footballers like they used to, which, in some regards is a good thing.

Not everyone looks good with a Village People moustache and a bubble perm. Wade, and his eighties pretty-boy mates, frozen in time on internet auction sites, have a lot to answer for.

And Paul Wade really was a footballer of his era.

Born in the north of England, Wade migrated to our shores when he was eleven years old. He landed in 1974, the year Australia first went to the World Cup. Such was the coverage of soccer in Melbourne at the time that he didn’t even know the Socceroos were taking part.

He started playing Aussie Rules to fit in with his schoolmates until his mother dragged him along to soccer training where his high-work rate and attitude shone through.

A few years later, the skinny kid was starring in the National Soccer League (the A-League of its day), and soon, the national team.

He played 84 full internationals, 46 as captain. He jokes that the only reason he wore the skipper’s armband was because his was the only surname officials could pronounce.

“I honestly don’t think I would have got a game today. I was right for my time. There’s probably one place in each team for a hard worker who never gives in. My touch would let me down these days. The running joke was my second touch on the ball was a tackle, because I’d give it away at the first touch. My only regret is there wasn’t much money, and life today would be a bit easier. There’s a whole generation of blokes who played for Australia, who have some great memories, but little else. And I’m one of the lucky ones.”

His last appearance in green and gold was in 1996, but he stays fit by running coaching clinics in schools. To put that in context, imagine Harry Kewell or Tim Cahill in 20 years driving around Sydney’s suburbs on a day to day basis, placing cones on a field and teaching kids to dribble a ball. That’s what Wadey does.

As hard as it is to believe in this age of millionaire footballers, there was a time when soccer players, at least in Australia, were like you and me. They had real jobs, rubbed shoulders with real people and trained real hard two or three times a week.

They couldn’t afford to play professionally.

To illustrate the point, Wade tells the story of a television appearance during their two-legged playoffs against Argentina in 1993. The South Americans were two-time winners of the World Cup, with a team full of international superstars including a bloke named Diego Maradona.

The Aussies did well to draw the first game 1-all at the Sydney Football Stadium, before losing 1-nil at the intimidating River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires. Argentina, a proud and successful footballing nation, qualified for USA ’94, but the plucky Socceroos made them work for it.

Being captain and having marked Maradona during the matches, Wade was asked to go on a top-rating chat show. He laughs at the scenario. “Roaul Blanco the assistant coach was an Argentinean. He acted as translator and they asked me a few questions to put in perspective the difference between football in Argentina and Australia. They knew we were part timers. The host asked how much we made. So, I said “10 thousand…and I’m one of the highest paid at South Melbourne”.

The host and panel looked at each other, and said “that’s fantastic…ten thousand a WEEK!” I said “no, no, it’s ten thousand a YEAR”. Blanco whispers to me “Wadey, don’t take the piss out of me in front of the whole country, tell them what you really earn.”

And I said “I swear, I only make ten grand a year!” Roaul shook his head and made something up for the host, and to this day still thinks I was taking the piss. But the sad thing was … I wasn’t.”

Wade, his spikey mullet now a fierce looking crew-cut, laughs at the image of footballers three decades ago. “It was Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters. Johnny Warren couldn’t have put it any better. That’s how the Aussie public saw us. And overseas? Forget it!” He smiles as he recalls a tour by Italian giants AC Milan in the early 1990s.

“We went out to a Sydney restaurant, and the Aussies were all sitting around wearing our Kingaroo tracksuits, and in walked the boys from Italy. They were dressed in suits, and had drop-dead gorgeous women on their arms.

All of a sudden twenty Socceroos slouched in their chairs and slid under the table.

The tour was pretty shambolic. In the second game in Melbourne, the first half ran 10 minutes short, and the second half even shorter, because Milan had to fly home. The worst part was when we played at Princes Park, there was a cricket pitch in the middle. You had millions of dollars worth of Italian players sliding all over the place and falling over.

They also had portable floodlights because the lights weren’t good enough. We couldn’t see a thing. God knows what the Italians thought. Franco Baresi, one of their greatest ever players, went home and did an interview, and absolutely slaughtered us. He famously said something like “it’s not the end of the world but you can see it from Princes Park.”

“It was a tournament sponsored by Coke Cola, so we had “Coke” across the shirt. I’m not sure if it even had the Australian emblem on it. And then, after we’d swapped shirts, the manager came in and asked us to put them out for washing. We all looked at each other and said “what do you mean? We’ve just given them away. Take a look at that: Roberto Donadoni’s shirt. How good is that?” And he went off his head.. “We haven’t got anything for the next game now!! What are we going to play in?” He got up and stormed out saying “well I’ll bloody well go out and get them myself!” And he did. He walked into the visitor’s dressing room and asked for them back. No wonder the world didn’t respect us.”

The world respects us now, although it took a while.

Wade played under the old Soccer Australia administration, now referred to as the bad old days of the game in this country. We hadn’t qualified for the World Cup in 31 years, and the organisation was broke. The Socceroos struggled to attract quality opposition, and even when they did, no one turned up to watch. Any talk of “football” meant rugby league, union, or AFL.

But as any self respecting Aussie sport fan will tell you, the government held an inquiry which found the game was indeed being badly run, leading to sweeping changes, including the involvement of billionaire Frank Lowy, and the creation of the Football Federation in 2005.

Old soccer became new football. Australia shifted its allegiance from the Oceania Confederation (goodbye American Samoa!) and started testing its skills in Asia (hello Japan and Korea!). We’re about to play in our second straight World Cup, and Wade knows that if he emigrated now, he’d definitely know we’re taking part.

“I think the fact that everyone is talking about hosting a World Cup shows how far we’ve come. We’re in the big time now and Australia has figured out how big the game is. People who used to follow Greece or Italy or Croatia don’t want to anymore. I go to the schools and sign green and gold shirts. I used to sign black and white ones, or red and white chequered ones.

“The war is over. We don’t even think about not qualifying for the next World Cup in Brazil. As far as we’re concerned, we’re there. Which is great, because in my day people didn’t even know we were playing.”

IN HIS OWN WORDS:
I made loads of enemies as a commentator. But that was my job. At one stage, the entire national team, from goalkeeper, to strikers and ball boys wouldn’t talk to me. I once heard a commentator say something like “there are two halves and a round ball…” and I swore from the moment I heard that I’d never sit on the fence.

So when the Socceroos played Fiji at Coffs Harbour I gave it to them. Not because they didn’t play well or win, but because they weren’t trying. It was a lazy performance. So I was critical and got black-banned by the Socceroos.

So in 2002, I had to interview Paul Okon the Socceroos captain after a game, and felt terrible…absolutely terrible about it, and I had a seizure on air, while I was talking to him. People used to look at me and see I was licking my lips and think I had a funny taste in my mouth.

But I’d be having a seizure. I’d actually had my first one in front of another person at the doctors just before we played Argentina in ’93. The physio and doctor ordered me to see a neurologist when I got home. I didn’t even know what a neurologist was. So I didn’t go, but the team doctor rang again and asked if I’d been, and he told me I had epilepsy.

I didn’t know I had it. I would get an “aura”, which is a feeling over your body, and is part of the seizure. I used to drive with my daughters in the car and have seizures I didn’t know about.

So Okon wasn’t happy about me interviewing him anyway. He was under pressure and had to do the interview because there was a guy with a camera standing right in front of him. Full credit to him, he could have told me to piss off, but he didn’t. I actually liked him as a person and player, and he knew it was part of his job as skipper.

I asked him three questions, but I didn’t know I was having a seizure and my voice was slow and slurring. I came out of the seizure, and all I remember was Okon yelling at me and swearing. He was livid, because he thought I’d been taking the piss out of him…licking my lips and speaking slowly.

I watch the vision now, and think “Gee…Okon did well”, because think about it, I was slurring my words, and when he was answering my questions, I was smacking my lips.

He thought I was going “nah nah nah nah nah” to him. I had no idea what was going on. So I chased him, and the team manager came out at the tunnel entrance and also told me to piss off.

Then another gut came out and did the same. And all the time, I’m thinking “what the hell is going on here?” And then someone said “he’s telling you to piss off because you were taking the piss out of him”, and I started to realise what had happened. But for a good ten minutes, I was lost. It was all a case of bad-timing. I used to take my medication like clockwork, so I wouldn’t fall apart on air, and this was the first time I got caught out.

That night, I tried calling Okon. And it was on the radio all the next day, so I rang again and left messages saying “Hey it’s Wadey, I’ve had a seizure. Can you call me?”…nothing. I tried again and again and again. I eventually saw him at the airport on the way to a game and told him not to worry about it, I’d had a seizure and I apologised. It was so awkward, because Okon looked at me and didn’t know what to say. It was like he thought “I’ve treated you badly, and let myself down.”

He didn’t know, and I feel sad we haven’t patched it up.

I had my first grand mal seizure…a big one…in front of a doctor, and ten minutes earlier I had the whole family in the car. I think back at how lucky I was. The doctor looked across the desk from me and said “you’re having a seizure”, and “bang!” I was out of it, shaking uncontrollably. The ambulance came and they stretcher me out of there, and the waiting room was full, so I didn’t move.

They thought I was dead, so no one said a word. In the ambulance, I said to the female ambo I was bloody sweaty. She shook her head and said “I think you’ll have to have a shower” ..because I’d pissed myself. But that’s what happens when you have a seizure, but I was SO embarrassed.

The doctor said to me “Paul, we can try and juggle the medication cocktail, or see if you’re a candidate for an operation.” And I was.

The doctor sat me down and said I could be paralysed or blinded. He also said “you could die. But someone died last week, so the odds are with you now.” I love their gallows humour.

My wife Val, the kids, my closest friends were all worried for me, but I just didn’t want the life I was leading. I was relying on everyone to get me everywhere. Laurie McKinna the Central Coast coach was great, Brian Brown from Marconi, Channel Seven director Brian Barnard, would pick me up on the highway, and I’d sit there and watch cars go by. I look back now, and think “There was an Australian captain, who played 118 times for his country, standing by the road in the rain, waiting for a lift.”

The lowest point was getting on a train, and a group of youths got on and one of them knocked me into the window and started to take the piss out of me.

While they were doing it, I had flashbacks to marking Maradona and playing in front of massive crowds and winning championships and wearing the green and gold, and there I was on the train, almost midnight, getting pushed and shoved and abused by kids. I thought “it can’t get worse than this.

The operation was a big one.. anything with your brain is. They cut me from the top of my head, down to the front of my ear. They pulled the front of my face down, took a pile of bone the size of your palm out of my head, went in, took out part of my brain the size of two matchboxes. Put the bone back, patched up my face and slammed 65 staples into my head. I thought that was bad, but it got infected, and I had to go through it all again!

I thought it was a pimple, but it got bigger and bigger and didn’t look right. So when I saw the surgeon again, he put his face in his hands and said “oh shit…we have to go straight into hospital again”. I had to go into hospital for six weeks. The nurses and I got on famously. I knew their life stories back to front. And to get rid of the infection, they had to cut the bone in my head and leave it open. So I could touch the side of my brain. I still have a lump on the side of my head. They put a steel plate with screws in. I thought I was screwed before, but now I really am!

While recovering, I had to sit and do nothing. So I went on television to educate people. I went on Sunrise and Melissa Doyle introduced me as the “brainless Paul Wade”. And I laughed and laughed, and said “yep..i’m brainless!”

I don’t have seizures anymore. I can drive. I take medication, and my memory lets me down sometimes. But it’s a small price to pay. My body is shot to pieces, but I love coaching kids and giving them the dream that one day they can do what I did. I tell the children I coach that if they ask for my autograph, they have to give me one of theirs in return.

And if they play for Australia one day, they have to give me two tickets. I love my life, it’s not perfect, but it’s as close to it as you can get. It sure beats working for a living.