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Harry Kewell played a starring role in the best moment of my life. When he volleyed home that equaliser against Croatia, he fulfilled every childhood wish I’d ever had about the Socceroos.
Of all the goals Kewell scored in his long and storied career, his coolly-taken volley in the white-hot atmosphere of the Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion at the World Cup in 2006 will forever be my favourite.
It’s partly because of the goal’s significance, and partly because I was one of the 20,000-odd Australian fans massed along the terraces at the time, that this pivotal moment in Australian football history means so much to me.
Fresh out of university, I had grown up thinking it inconceivable that Australia would ever qualify for the World Cup, let alone knock out an established European nation en route to the second round.
When Kewell’s volley hit the back of the net and a sea of Socceroos supporters exploded into utter delirium, he proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Australia belonged on the world stage.
To me, that was the magic of Kewell.
He had a knack for scoring big goals, but more importantly he often scored them on the big stage, and in the process he transformed the image of Australian footballers overseas just when the English Premier League was becoming a global phenomenon.
Who could ever forget Kewell mugging Rio Ferdinand and simply waltzing past goalkeeper David James to score Australia’s second goal in that famous 3-1 friendly win over England at Upton Park?
Kewell was absolutely mesmerising that day, even if it was the start of the downward slide which followed his summer move to Liverpool.
His nadir was reached at the UEFA Champions League final in Istanbul just over two years later, when a clearly injured Kewell limped from the pitch midway through the first half to a chorus of jeers.
A lesser man might not have been able to put behind him the pain of missing out on Liverpool’s astonishing comeback, yet Kewell shook off his incessant injury concerns to play a key role in the Socceroos’ 2006 World Cup campaign.
It was Australia’s talisman to whom coach Guus Hiddink turned for inspiration in the playoff decider against Uruguay, and Kewell rewarded him by springing from the bench and immediately setting up Mark Bresciano to level the tie.
However it was his intervention against Croatia, some nine years after he famously scored his first goal for the Socceroos as a teenager in Tehran, which cemented Kewell’s place in the record books.
From the national team to the Premier League, Galatasaray to Al-Gharafa and a couple of stints in the A-League, he scored goals wherever he went and proved that Australians belong on the world stage.
Yet to eulogise Kewell’s career is to overlook the fairly obvious fact he wasn’t always loved by all.
A taciturn character at times, the die was cast when Kewell occasionally started to miss trivial Socceroos encounters, often at the behest of various club sides.
Even then it’s hard to doubt Kewell’s commitment to the cause, and it was surely no better illustrated than by his epic stoush with long-time critic Mike Cockerill at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, which descended into the sort of slanging match soap opera scripts are made of.
There’s no doubt that Kewell could be a divisive character, and even when he came back to the A-League he alienated many supporters.
The manner of his departure from Melbourne Victory and subsequent resurfacing at rivals Melbourne Heart irritated some, while the failure to replicate his early-career form annoyed others.
But if football is for the fans – and too often that’s a premise overlooked by the mass media – then Kewell deserves to be remembered as one of Australia’s very best.
He may not be everyone’s favourite, but he’ll always be the player whose goal took us to the last 16 of a World Cup.
For that, he deserves our acclaim.