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Seven years is a long time in football. Back in 2006, Ange Postecoglou was held up as the face of Australian footballing failure and hung out to dry on national television.
Today, he appears destined to become the next Socceroos coach and the man tasked with rescuing the senior national team from near-oblivion.
Unless this is all some sort of convoluted Jedi mind trick from Frank Lowy to try and get Guus Hiddink to knock a couple of zeroes off his asking price, Postecoglou will shortly receive an enticing offer to clean up Holger Oseick’s mess.
Not that all of this is Osieck’s fault. It’s been coming, of course.
The finger of blame hasn’t missed anyone – it’s been pointed at the coaching staff, the old players, the young players, their agents, Lowy, the national curriculum, the NSW Labor Party, Miley Cyrus, Tinder, and the proliferation of leather jogging pants.
Australian football’s favourite pastime, aside from football, is tearing itself apart, so this cycle of arguments and agendas and innuendo could theoretically continue forever. Eventually, though, someone has to come in and sort it out.
Postecoglou has always been the frontrunner in the three-horse race for the vacant Socceroos job, and rightly so.
This is a job, and these are circumstances almost tailor-made for him.
Seven years on from his failure as Young Socceroos coach and public bollocking from Craig Foster because we shouldn’t be losing to China at any level, Postecoglou is everything Australia needs right now.
First, he’s Australian, which – for better or worse – seems to matter to people. He’s media savvy. He’s brave, passionate, calculated and intelligent. And perhaps most importantly, he’s anything but gun shy.
He won’t need to handle a gun in the Socceroos job, but he will need to handle a broom, and take it to a manifestly dysfunctional dressing room, pronto.
In his latest weekly column for The Age, which is good as any you will find on the domestic game, Postecoglou sums up all the greed and short-termism: “What has happened over the past six or seven years is that self-interest, self-preservation and survival mechanisms have ensured that we no longer see ourselves as true Australian sportsmen.”
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s covered themselves in glory since Australia’s double bagel, perhaps aside from Mark Bresciano, who was the first to emerge from the rubble and bravely copped what was coming on the chin.
Then Lucas Neill painted a target on his forehead by claiming Australia’s biggest problem was that the new kids weren’t passionate enough, which is exactly the kind of constructive criticism you want to hear from your captain.
Neill came in for some huge whacks in the press, but none was as brutal as Fox Sports’ decision to examine his role in each of the 12 goals Australia conceded against Brazil and France. The truth shocked nobody.
Of course, it turns out Neill wasn’t trying to drive a wedge between the old and new players – he was merely trying to fire everyone up, he said after the Socceroos defeated Canada 3-0 this week.
“To react in the way we have, it was just what we wanted. We have got some confidence back and now we can build on it,” said Neill, as if Australia had just convincingly beaten a proper football team instead of, you know, Canada.
But the strongest sign of the newfound siege mentality of the golden generation was from Archie Thompson, who all but tweeted that if you weren’t a professional footballer at one time in your life, your opinion about the Socceroos’ plight is invalid.
A familiar line of argument from athletes at a time of crisis. “My JILA MINTS had an opinion,” he tweeted, as if he was trying to beat Kanye West at his own game.
Like Neill, he backtracked. But he had said enough already about the state of things.
Postecoglou’s first job at Brisbane, if you cast your mind back to the heady days of 2009, was to dismantle and destroy a rotten boys club mentality that was holding the Roar back.
He was not afraid to confront and then show the door to the likes of Craig Moore, Danny Tiatto and Bob Malcolm, which – given their personalities and tendencies at the time – would have been far easier said than done.
Then he set the standard of behaviour and performances he expected from his players, and quickly, the Brisbane shirt became the most feared in the country.
Roarcelona’s interpretation of tiki-taka wouldn’t have been possible without Postecoglou’s man management skills.
There is a risk we’re simply shifting the subject of our Messiah complex onto a more familiar face.
Granted, it’s a lot easier to do all that in the club game than in international football, but Postecoglou has such an aura about him that precious few doubt if he could do this job adequately.
He has shown numerous times of the past seven years that he is studious and passionate enough to discover the root causes of his own personal shortcomings and fix them.
It would be a terrible shame if he leaves Melbourne Victory after setting everything up for an all-guns assault on the A-League. He will also be a nightmare to replace – he’s almost a club demigod.
I actually wrote back in February that Postecoglou shouldn’t be Australia’s next coach because he’s worth more to the game if he keeps lifting the bar for club football.
But then again, I also wrote in June that the win over Iraq that got the Socceroos into the World Cup was a “career-saving victory” for Osieck, and ended the article by saying: “Holger, you did it. Bravo.” Maybe Archie was onto something.
Postecoglou doesn’t need the job any more than he needs another wide attacking option at Melbourne Victory. It’s Australia that needs him, and though it will leave his club in disarray, the situation is so dire he can’t possibly say no to his country.
The timing isn’t great, but rarely in life is it ever.
There was initial reluctance for an Australian coach after Osieck’s sacking, principally so the A-League is not disturbed. But the more skeletons that came out of the national team closet, the more a coach with the skill set of Postecoglou seemed the only sensible option.
“I’m driven by one thing, I want to grow the game in this country, that’s all I’m interested in. So wherever I’m best placed to do that, I’ll do it,” he said this week.
With respect to Graham Arnold and Tony Popovic, and to Holger and Pim, that’s the kind of chat we’ve been wanting to hear from our Socceroos coach all along. And even better, it’s coming from a guy who can back it up.
Can he handle the pressure? Try telling him he can’t.
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