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The overall long term problem for the Australia football team is summed up in that Korean goal. The defense was split wide open, earthquake size. Some decent positioning and short passing from the opposition, and bam, a convincing goal.
In attack most Australian goals come from a sloppy ball bouncing about. There are a few exceptions, but slick ball passing to cut up the defense is not a common sight.
This is a pretty consistent story. It doesn’t fill one with confidence that Australia is going out with a stern defense, some crafty attack, and a coherent mode of play that will dominate a lesser team to death. Rather you feel Australia could lose to anyone really.
The last Asian Cup highlighted that only too well. Same for the World Cup qualifiers, where Schwarzer got us through single handedly. From his work we got this reputation – by result card review – that we had a stout Italian-like quality defense.
The truth was our defense was loose and we were ready to be eaten up as soon as we came against a cutting attack. It started with the USA in the warm ups and then Germany did the job good.
But like the World Cup qualifier results, we do tend to get the results, and a result is a result, true.
But in my opinion these results don’t reflect the true nature of the game and artificially inflate our world ranking above some other teams which are better than us.
In the 2006 World Cup against Italy, a biased friend of mine was irate, believing Australia were outplaying the Italians and should be rewarded for it, thus the rules he opined should be changed so quality of play is rewarded rather than goals.
If that were the case today, Australia would be pretty lowly ranked.
The best I’ve seen the Aussies perform was in 1997 under Venables and ‘again’ – as Kewell says way too often in interview – under Aussie Guus. In those periods the team was nice to watch, had a nice formation, a coherent nature of play. There was a nice glue holding it all together, Areldite-like.
In ’97 we had a young Kewell and Big Dukes, both approaching their genuine world class stage, our attack was cutting and dangerous, supported by organisation which was good and solid.
It was frustrating in those days as Australia were underrated I felt. We were really quite good.
Today and between those periods, the glue is missing. Rather than Areldite, it’s more like the unreliable Perkins Paste that just comes apart against the slightest force.
And no we don’t expect to play like the powerhouses – Spain for example and their almost absurd tippy tappy thing, we don’t have the quality for that yet – but I do expect them to play like they did in those good periods. That is, to their potential. Indeed, under Guus we went beyond it, where I felt we could have beat anyone with a little luck.
The big frustration is we have and have had some really classy players amongst us at times, but we just don’t play, most times, with cohesion to realise that potential.
While I wouldn’t like to get into the prediction game – the Asian cup is so unpredictable, which is one thing I so like about it – we could just scrape those results like we did against Korea. The team do seem determined at least following the last debacle, and I’m starting to like the Kewell / Cahill upfront combination.
But I still fear that someone is coming out to open us up, expose our Perkins Paste adhesive, those dark horse teams from the west of the confederation in particular for some reason.
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