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Australian Socceroos fans enjoy the atmosphere at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. AAP Image/Julian Smith
The round ball game in Australia has come on in leaps and bounds in the last five years. I remember waking up at 4:00am early one morning in November 2001 to watch the Socceroos beaten 3-0 in Montevideo for yet another failed World Cup campaign.
I remember seeing the Socceroos squander a 2-0 lead to crash out of contention for France ’98. I remember owning FIFA games on Playstation as a kid and supporting the EPL.
I also remember not giving a rats about the old NSL. I couldn’t tell you who I supported; it was a league where each ethnic group had their own team and threw flares and fought one another. At least that’s what my father often told me before telling me about the AFL – ‘a real sport’.
Then something happened.
In 2004, John Safran went to Mozambique and smeared chicken blood on himself to lift a curse placed on the Socceroos for some 30 years.
We all know what happened next: we qualified for Germany 2006, made the second round, the A-League was created, and we were admitted to the Asian confederation.
Everyone has an A-League team. A-League finals in Australia draw crowds up to 50,000, teams have cross-cultural support, better than anything the NSL could have ever dreamed.
We get to watch Socceroos play meaningful games in meaningful competitions like the Asian Cup, and I’ve seen two Socceroos World Cup appearances in four years – double the amount Johnny Warren saw in his lifetime.
For the first time, I’ve heard very little of overseas managers kicking up a stink about losing a player to Australian national duty this Asian Cup.
Surely that’s a sign of how far we’ve come.
I am a football or soccer fan. I love Fulham, Melbourne Victory and the Socceroos. I love watching England crash out of a major tournament, I love watching Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo ply their trade.
My knowledge of football is not deep like my knowledge of AFL; I don’t know the intricacies of formations and techniques, and I’m not going to discuss them here, but I feel we expect too much of football in this country.
Pim Verbeek was battered from pillar to post for losing 4-0 to Germany in a World Cup, our Socceroos were branded by some as aging and mediocre. Our formations are wrong, our domestic league is supposedly struggling after an early honeymoon period, and we cannot understand why FIFA would possibly overlook us as a World Cup destination.
Football in Australia is five years into an evolution that is going to take 20 years to complete, at least.
Our national team will not see the fruits of qualifying in 2006 until at least 2020. That’s when the batch of five year olds watching Harry Kewell and Tim Cahill become adults.
The A-League competition will take ten-plus years to establish itself. It’s to be expected that an initial honeymoon period would be followed by growing pains. Some clubs may die out, but the strong will remain and the A-League formula will continue to evolve until it establishes its niche.
The constant criticism of the ‘ordinary’ Socceroos is unfair and premature. We are considered title contenders for a major regional competition and that is something I never thought I’d see in the year 2011 after watching the Socceroos bow out in Montevideo in 2001.
We will be small fry in world football for quite a few years to come.
We’re still to earn our respect in Asia, we’re still yet to be taken seriously by FIFA, but we are in better shape than we were ten years ago. The respect will come, the technique will come, we’ll learn the FIFA politics, and the trophies will come. In 2021, our game will be in better health again.
The World Cup will come to our shores one day.
In the meantime, I’ll still support hard, I’ll accept that it won’t always be smooth sailing and there will be disappointments, but watching the Socceroos in the Asian Cup, in the World Cup, in qualifiers, in meaningful friendlies beats the hell out of pinning our hopes on two games every four years.
Let’s just enjoy the ride and be patient. Our day will come.
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