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Interviewed recently, Tim Cahill didn’t say that much. He said he thought Qatar’s World Cup bid presentation was impressive and that when he finished his career, he wanted to come back to Australia to try and redress some of the stuff he had to put up with when he was a youngster.
“I found it very hard at first as a footballer growing up in Australia to get my opportunity … They said I was not strong enough, I was not tall enough … I was weak. I didn’t fit the format of what it took. … I feel the biggest downfall is the grassroots level.”
He gets stuck in for a little bloke and some supporters met him halfway.
How dare a rich tosser have a go at Australia like that!
Some said he was rich and out of touch. Someone said he drove a Bugatti.
One bloke said “he wanted to play for Ireland before the Socceroos…he’s only on the lookout for himself.”
Sensitive little Vegemites, aren’t we?
Timmy’s big sins were having kind words to say about Qatar, and suggesting a young Australian player might get more opportunities overseas.
How dare he have a go at the A-League!
He didn’t mention the A-League. He was talking about junior football.
We’re obviously not listening. We hear what we want to hear.
I’m the same.
I embarrassed myself a few years back down at the club by making the ridiculous statement that our thickhead junior coaches were so focused on winning this weekend that if we had a Tiny Tim Cahill in our midst he’d be playing Aussie Rules next season.
They said you could pick the good ones early.
The “good ones” apparently, according to the Australian coaching manual, are the early developers – the under-13s with 16-year-old bodies and the under-15s with five o’clock shadows.
These kids, we must assume, are the kids with the best chance of going on to be really something later on. Why else would development coaches pick them?
It’s probably just a coincidence then that in junior football, a coach with 800 kilograms on the pitch tends to prevail over the coach who plays kids with greater potential and goes into the match with a couple of hundred kilos less.
Apparently it’s about the long-term, giving the early developers all the early breaks – if they keep growing at this rate they’ll be ten feet tall by the time they’re adults and they’ll be able to dribble!
That’s the problem – early developers often stop growing early too, and we end up with blokes of average height with average skills who struggle against blokes their own size with extraordinary skills; coodabeens versus the real McCoy.
What happens to the runts who get overlooked in favour of early developers?
They can leave for other sports or, if football gets lucky, they might head overseas to find more emotionally secure and mature coaches who have eyes for more than the win-loss ratio on their CVs.
About the silliest thing a late developer can do is think that because this is Australia, they should put their faith in hard work and talent winning out in the end.
It won’t. Top coaches – not the good ones, the ones at the top – won’t have talented kids on their team who’ve been kicking around in the C team and haven’t a clue about sophisticated team play.
“If only I’d got him a couple of years ago,” they say of another 16 year old who has suddenly shot up and is now dominating in the lowly league he was consigned to for being a runt. “But it’s too late now. I can’t do anything with him.”
Leak a few goals at this level? This is the under-17As, mate!
If a young player isn’t “in the system” early they’re probably not going to make it into the system at all.
It’s a sad old paradox, but that’s the way it is.
Junior coaches are fixated on winning because those who open doors for them to higher levels of coaching are doing the same thing – only looking at “winners” who’ll make their CVs look good.
From the suburban club president pointing to the pennants picked up with kids lured from other clubs, to old Frank banging on about how well it’s all going as if junior World Cups were any more evidence of a good coaching regime than a lousy one. It might well be the latter when one sees our giants facing off against their jockeys. Pity it’s not basketball.
If we weren’t completely stupid about it we’d just declare the junior World Cups the be-all and end-all, and laugh at Argentina, Brazil and Spain for developing all the wrong types.
As Tim Cahill says, we have a problem at the grassroots.
We aren’t taking it seriously at all in Australia, we just pretend we are. Fortunately Tim Cahill hung in there but how would an undersized kid from a family whose family can’t afford the bus fare to town let alone a trip half away around the world have gone had be been born in Australia?
Thank God Maradona and Messi weren’t born in Australia.
They’d have been consigned to weaving through packs and banging sausage rolls in from the boundary and applying, er, frontal pressure, while Aussie Rules spectators would be banging on “Gee, he’d have made a great soccer player.”
They have no idea.
It’s like not even having a ticket in the lottery, allowing winning imperatives to lead junior development round by the nose.
Boeing couldn’t design a better system for banishing the exceptional and maintaining mediocrity over the long haul.
There’s a price to pay, but so long as the kids win on the weekend, that’s the main thing.
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