- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Opinion
Questions will be asked of Matildas coach Tony Gustavsson in the wake of Australia’s quarter-final AFC Asian Cup exit, but perhaps it’s also time to direct a bit of scrutiny elsewhere.
Late last year Gustavsson said he was “all about tournament mode”, but unfortunately for the Swede there are no more major tournaments on the horizon until next year’s World Cup.
The Aussies were forced to contend with a dodgy pitch, some dubious refereeing and a couple of uncharacteristic misses from Sam Kerr in Pune, but it’s hard to see how defeat to rank outsiders South Korea is anything less than an abject failure.
It shouldn’t be particularly contentious to point that out, yet there’s a bit of a strange vibe surrounding the Matildas online – one that in certain quarters seems to equate any criticism of the side with inherent misogyny.
Yet for all the criticism of Gustavsson’s tactics, his choice of substitutions against the South Koreans and even the side he opted to field in the 18-0 group stage win over Indonesia, it’s hard not to wonder whether there aren’t some other factors at play in the continuing employment of a coach who has now lost ten of his 20 games in charge.
Now that Football Australia is cut off from the revenue streams brought in by the A-Leagues, they need a successful World Cup co-hosted with New Zealand to help replenish the coffers.
Gustavsson, with his bold personality and gift of the gab, is arguably the most commercially appealing manager the Matildas have ever had.
But can he coach? I still don’t know the answer to that, and on the basis of everything we’ve seen from his time in charge so far, I’m not sure Gustavsson does either.
However, one person who has a better idea about women’s football than most is Canberra United assistant coach Sarah West, who wrote a long and detailed thread on Twitter last night pointing out that the women’s game remains chronically under-resourced.
Is the Matildas’ malaise just another example of why the top-down model is failing?
(Photo by Thananuwat Srirasant/Getty Images)
It’s a question the Western Sydney Wanderers might as well reckon with this week after the club sacked coach Carl Robinson on the back of Saturday night’s dismal 3-0 defeat to Brisbane Roar.
Robinson’s position was untenable long before the latest in a long line of baffling losses, even if few online critics – many of whom are based in Sydney and Melbourne and tend to ignore clubs outside of those two cities – gave the impressive Roar much credit for the win.
After Josep Gombau and Markus Babbel, Robinson was the third foreign coach brought in to oversee a club that once boasted the biggest and most boisterous crowds in the league.
There’s no doubt the Wanderers were adversely impacted by the demolition of Parramatta Stadium, yet they’ve been playing at the best stadium in Australia since October 2019. When are they going to make some decisions that might actually go some way towards filling it?
The only game they’ve looked like a half-decent football side in recently was that 3-3 draw with Melbourne City, in which Labinot Haliti took charge for the ill Robinson. It begs the question of why they recently brought former Newcastle Jets coach Gary van Egmond in as another assistant.
However, one of the reasons there’s relatively little scrutiny of the decision-making processes in the A-Leagues – at least compared to Europe – is because there’s scant football media to conduct it.
But if administrators want to act like this is all just the same as European football, then a little extra scrutiny surely wouldn’t go astray. That way we might end up with some better decisions – like scheduling more night-time football instead of kicking off at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon in the blazing Sydney summer sun.
And maybe we’d understand a little bit more about how a coach who has won six games in charge of a key national team plans to win a World Cup on home soil too.