What is wrong with our national teams?

It's simple: Australia's a first world nation, so the need to be successful isn't as great as if you were in a third world nation or a war-torn country. I mean, look at Lionel Messi, whom I consider to be the greatest sportsman of all time. Born and raised in Argentina. Had growth hormone deficiency as a child. River Plate could not pay for growth hormone treatment because Argentina's economy was shot to pieces between 1998 and 2002. To get treatment, he had to trial with Barcelona. So he left home at the age of thirteen to trial with Barcelona not just to get into La Masia, but also because of health concerns. Most young Aussie athletes don't know how easy they have it compared with the countries where football is by far and away the only sport that matters. In 2006 when Kevin Sheedy was coaching Essendon the club brought in Socceroo Jason Davidson to speak to the first year players about what he went through when he was at boarding school in Japan. Australia's footballers have it tougher than any other of Australia's sportsmen. They are where the funding should be going.

AFL uses this sort of thing for publicity , apparently every basketballer they have recruited was good enough for the NBA. AFL impacted more from their resource grubbing ways, taking the Lexus center in Melbourne.. If a sport is recrutiing from other sports maybe its because their isn't a high enough internal competition standard.

There is a simple formula. The more hype and talking up which happens before the event - the bigger the failure at the event. Predictions of top 5 finish in Rio - look what happened All the pressure's on them really, they're supposed to win," Horne said. Just before last week's disaster and now..... "Defensive problems can be fixed EASILY" Nathan Grey after last week Guess what is going to happen. Talking up works when the team is winning - other teams believe you. When you talk you when the team is losing, others just laugh at you. Maybe it is time for Wallabies and everyone in ARU to take vow of silence

Very funny, good come back . It stems from that everyone gets a trophy attitude that started in the 90s . Scoreboards are irrelevant -- Comment from The Roar's iPhone app.

The seed was planted by 'Hot Chocolate' you mean?

We have the "everyone's a winner " generation coming through. Started in the 90's -- Comment from The Roar's iPhone app.

I think we are over reacting. In 2015 we won the cricket world cup, won the Asian cup in football (the largest confederation in the biggest sport in the world) and came second in RWC. Although the first two events were held on home soil. We had someone recently win the tour de france, golfs no.1 and danny Riccardo is doing well. Look at the seventies and eighties, we won fewer gold medals than now, our cricket team in the mid eighties suffered a slump. It took us 20 years to beat West indes in the Carribean and even our even our star studded team could win in India. Australia never qualified for the football world cup. We were better at tennis, motor gp and hockey and that's because fewer countries took these sports seriously. The failure at the Olympics can be attributed to other countries stepping up in sports we traditionally do well at ie GB in cycling and Two superstars in swimming coming from US in Phelps and Ledecky. One thing I would agree with everyone was that it was amazing how many Australians could not handle the pressure in tight finishes. Personally, I prefer Australia qualifying for the football world cup over winning more gold medals and us being world champions at hockey and dominating tennis. The football world cup across all metrics is much larger than the Olympics. I am not sure us winning gold in pentathlon, yachting or shooting got many headlines around the globe.

Do you care what China think then?

Of course Soccer is also an English sport but doesn't assume the colonial tag it seems. It is a pleasant change to have Soccer as the scape goat instead of our indigenous code, in respect of poaching all the best athletes in the nation. Soccer is certainly the sport with highest participation rate in Australia, followed by Cricket and Swimming I believe.

By extension I have a solution for Australia's swimming woes. Perhaps you could write to dear Kitty or whatever she goes by. We seek to enter a new sport in Tokyo Olympics which only we play- tinning. The rules are the same as swimming but each swimmer is required to have a tin of baked beans or other non perishable foods strapped to her/his head at all times. That way we can win medals in the pool without having to swim faster than Team USA. Yay! Go team Oz!

Not that we're likely to see that matchup for a while!

Cricket and rugby are clever as we like to think of them as important, so we get great value for money out of winning them. No one else who doesn't play these sports gives a thought to them or our winning them, but we do and that's what counts for making people feel good about themselves :)

The truth is that many potential sportsman and sportswoman have taken to playing soccer instead of the English games introduced into Australia and which are not played by the majority of nations such as rugby (both codes) and cricket. It is far easier to win a cricket or rugby World Cup when the teams which seriously have a chance of winning number about six whereas the soccer World Cup which the socceroos are unlikely to ever win involves teams from across the world. The more kids who are diverted away from the English colonial sports to soccer the worse Australia will become at rugby and cricket. Simples peeps.

But the Kiwi 7 sides were from Rugby backgrounds I assume. I dont reckon recruiting players from such diverse sporting DNA's for our mens 7 side would have worked as it did for our women. Rugby 7's reminds me of touch and as such has evolved seperate from the main game in regards to skill set as has T20 and even ODI in Cricket I have heard that Hockey is suffering from a decline in interest at the GR in this nation, not that it was huge anyway while this is by no means an exclusive challenge to this sport. The sheer range choice of sports now on offer spreads the potential to excel in any much thinner I reckon.

Australia were overly dominant in cricket because they had the best foundation with a 4-day Sheffield Shield. Then most other test cricket countries did not have a dollar to compete. Then Cricket Australia were intent on copying the IPL and split the Sheffield Shield season for the Big Bash.. WHy is it no one points out the Australian Cricket team is incredibly highly paid compared to their opponents. Cricket Austrralia 300m turnover dwarfs the whole Olympic team financially, and they sabotaged themselves, Aussie media puts dollar figures on every sport in the Olympics but hides them for cricket. Boomers played very welll and outsmarted their opponents with teamwork in the group stage and Lithuania but it was played at a pedestrian pace. Boomers I though they were physically vulnerable to a hard running defensive team with size and power inside. Bogut was playing injured, Baynes was their only beef in the center but lacks length, Ingles and Anderson were pushovers inside. Then because Serbia went so hard at them they weren;t fit enough to keep up and could not do anything. Against older Spain the Boomers played without their earlier team work but did well individually while Serbian thugs had no chance of mugging the US like they did to the Australians and got thrashed in the final. OPals they were went in with old guards 30+, and Serbia monstered them with a full court press. Despite having the one unstoppable unit in the womens game inside the paint, they could not even deliver a pass to Cambage by the end of the game.Again another otherwise ordinary team were able to physically mug the Aussies. Mens Hockey shows what happens when you have a team that has gone past their peak ages collectively.. The other teams looked to have that physical edge and more fitness around them. Womens Hockey they actually did well in a lot of their games, but failed to score. The lack of scoring cost them any chance. I noticed they did keep shooting from wide angles instead of squaring the ball and that was one of the reasons they struggled to score. Matildas were playing very well, this is the first time you would say they up there with the best teams, but others stepped up to the plate as well. They were just as likely to lose in the quarters as they were to win any of the medals though and ended up with a penalty shoot out lottery. In rugby you had two totally different approaches. For the mens they not only limited themselves to rugby players but most were rejects from Super rugby. When non established nations like Kenya and USA can regularly finish higher it was embarassing. For the womens they stretched the net as far as possible, to get the diverse talents they needed for sevens. They recruited speed from athletics and touch football, passing ability from touch football and basketball, they got a few strong players to be able to match the Kiwis.

The key factor in improving our national team's performance is getting talent in. AFL particularly sucks up the real talent. There are a number of AFL players who could have been elite basketballers, but played AFL instead. But it's improving - guys like Matty Dellavadova obviously have the talent to be AFL players, if not stars. But he chose to play basketball. We could do so much better if more people made that decision. One example is Scott Pendlebury of Collingwood.

I'm biased maybe but like some others here on The Roar, I believe we really got the bronze against Spain. I am pretty proud of how we took it up to both the US in the qualifying round and Spain in the bronze play-off. Those are arguably the 2 best teams in the world. I don't think we wilted against Spain - we did enough to win but the chips didn't fall our way (i.e. we were robbed by filthy refereeing).