The Sun-Herald

Saturday, September 27, 2008

The Moment of Truth

Finally, someone at head office tells it like it is.

Late last week, I spoke with Rob Baan, Football Federation Australia's National Technical Director.

Baan, in his own words, has an enormous job. He sits at the top of Australia's football tree responsible for what happens on the park, whether that's a dusty suburban grass patch where seven-year-old kids play likes bees to honey or the glittery Olympic stadium at Homebush where World Cup dreams are fulfilled (or not).

Baan sees it all.

Importantly, the guy is Dutch. That's not significant because of any relationship with Guus Hiddink or a genetically disposed understanding of Total Football.

It's important because he can cast his eye over football in Australia with third-party indifference and independence. Plus, the Dutch are straight-talkers who get straight to the point.

I spoke to Baan on Thursday. This was almost exactly six weeks after Australia bowed out of the Beijing Olympics football tournament and the first time any FFA official has spoken publicly about Australia's performance.

Six weeks.

Baan has delivered an official report to the FFA board but that has yet to be made public.

Thankfully, Baan was candid. He quits his post at the end of December so perhaps he can afford to be.

In China, he claimed, Australia simply "wasn't good enough". There, he said it.

He thought criticism of the omission of Bruce Djite and Nathan Burns was justified but that Graham Arnold, like all coaches, made a decision where the difference between his selection choices was minimal. That's part of the job. You roll the dice, Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.

Remember, we're learning all this six weeks after the event.

Baan was also keen to talk up the National Youth League that kicked off this weekend. He's right when he says it's a key piece of the jigsaw between teenage dreams and potentially realising a professional career, whether in the A-League or even overseas.

But, as he prepares to pack his bags and return to Holland, there are concerns about Australian football's future. There's resistance to change. Not at the top level, however. While the frailties of the Olympic team were exposed to all - and may be fixed over the next four to eight years - it's grassroots football whose growth is stunted.

FFA introduced its small-sided games earlier this year. The idea is simple. Kids under the age of 12 - that includes under-six and -seven age groups - don't play 11-a-side. More involvement, more touches, more technique, more fun.

It has not gone down well everywhere, particularly in New South Wales.

"We still find resistance in some various states," Baan said. "Let's say people from the old days say that we did like this for 30, 40, 50 years so why should we change? They don't even listen to the arguments."

Telling like it is may make for more arguments but as football grows up to fulfill its potential as the most popular sport in the land, debate and discussion should be a core theme.

Even if it is six weeks after the event.

For those of you who know about these things, you can follow me aound the world on Twitter here.

• by Matthew Hall at 03:15 AM
• Comments (28)

Saturday, September 20, 2008

The A-League's Lilywhite Playing Field

The world of on-pitch discipline is a complicated place where, often, not much makes sense.

Let's begin last month when John Terry, captain of the England national team, proudly (because surely he wouldn't have participated in this begrudgingly) put up his name in support of a Premier League initiative called Get On With The Game.

The campaign is one of several currently in effect aimed at showing respect to referees and the laws of the game. Hooray for that.

Yet last weekend, Terry, as captain of Chelsea, was shown a straight red card in the final stages of his team's 3-1 win against Manchester City. He made the worst kind of cynical tackle a defender can make. You can see it here.

Terry, near the halfway line, first attempted to trip, then rugby tackled, Manchester City striker Jo who would have been headfirst toward goal had he managed to skip past the defender.

They were two challenges straight out of the Sunday amateur league playbook and tactics that I confess having had to employ on several park pitches in my time. Those events did not make me proud and, in fact, highlighted that perhaps retirement from the amateur game was looming faster than I cared to acknowledge.

Referee Mark Halsey considered Terry's actions "serious foul play" and so issued a direct red card. Chelsea players were incensed by the decision and, according to a report, "surrounded referee Mark Halsey, while there was a long delay before Terry left the pitch, gesturing to City fans as he did so."

I guess Get On With The Game just got shown a card, too. Chelsea later appealed the decision. Terry was let off. The referee did not agree with the appeal and maintained he had made the correct decision. He has been banished to the boondocks and will take charge of a game in "League Two" (the English fourth division) between Chester and Shrewsbury on Sunday.

What is not in dispute: Terry cheated. He got away with it. The person charged with policing it - the referee - was punished. Kids, don't try this at home - or on the football field.

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, an A-League player called Ney Fabiano was accused of spitting at an opponent, Adelaide United defender Robert Cornthwaite, during a game.

What's available to be seen on video is totally inconclusive and TV commentators calling the game at the time had no idea what was going on. It was even suggested amid the confusion that Cornthwaite might have been the guy who copped the red card.

One thing is certain. While only Fabiano and Cornthwaite truly know what occurred, referee Matthew Breeze did not hesitate, by even a millisecond, in showing the Brazilian red.

A disciplinary committee met last Wednesday where three men, barrister John Marshall SC, solicitor Danny Moulis, and former Socceroo Milan Blagojevic, decided that Fabiano did indeed spit intentionally at Cornthwaite. Fabiano, who claimed he'd only been sent off once previously in a 12-year playing career, said the incident was an accident.

He was banned for nine matches.

This is potentially eight weeks longer out of the game than the punishment Zinedine Zidane received from FIFA for head-butting Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final and six games more than Premier League striker El Hadji Diouf copped from the England FA when he was at Liverpool for spitting at Portsmouth player Arjen de Zeeuw.

Let's not forget that it is also nine matches more than Newcastle Jet Joel Griffths received for punching an assistant referee in the groin. Like he did here.

The evidence suggests that, Griffths debacle aside, Football Federation Australia is adopting a zero tolerance policy for some onfield transgressions. The A-League is a lilywhite playing field with punishment far exceeding that for comparable offences elsewhere in the football world.

Spitting should not be tolerated. Neither should head butting an opponent nor punching an assistant referee.

But the issue here may in fact be FFA's new disciplinary regulations, introduced at the beginning of this season. The work in progress may be a work gone wrong. Or maybe not.

But as professional Footballers' Association boss Brendan Schwab suggested last week: "We are concerned that the way the regulations are presently drafted is having an inflationary impact on sanctions."

PS For those of you who know about these things, you can chase me around the world on Twitter at http://twitter.com/matthew_hall

• by Matthew Hall at 02:16 AM
• Comments (11)

Saturday, September 13, 2008

It's In The Detail

Australia's Tashkent win was the beginning of a legend.

That's not patriotic hyperbole and there's no need to crank up Advance
Australia Fair or even Tie Me Kangaroo Down on your iPod as you read this.

Simply, the 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign is taking the Socceroos on an odyssey that no other Australian team - of any sport - has ever experienced.

This is a long and winding road that weaves between challenges fully testing the ability of coaches and players. Get through this and you deserve to be in South Africa in 2010.

Perhaps some perspective.

More recently, as a member of Oceania, Australia's World Cup campaign would entail camping in Tahiti (or Coffs Harbor or Adelaide), playing a round of games against amateurs or schoolboys (remember the 31-0 win against American Samoa? They were boys), make a trip Uruguay, Iran, or Argentina, and that would be it.

Only the pioneering Socceroos of the 60s and early 70s, who meandered around Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in their own quest to qualify for a World Cup, can claim a challenge similar to the one facing Pim Verbeek's team.

By the time the 2010 finals come around Australia will have played in Dubai, Doha (twice), Kunming, Tashkent, Tokyo, and Bahrain. They will have done this at times without a list of top-drawer players like Tim Cahill, Scott McDonald, Jason Culina, Vince Grella, Mark Viduka, and an established defensive partner for Lucas Neill.

This is where Pim Verbeek is earning his money - planning a 14-game qualifying campaign with all the nuance, subtlety, and complication that is all new territory for Australian sports fans of any persuasion.

The Socceroos experience is unique. The Wallabies qualifying campaign for their World Cup pretty much consists of just turning up. Ditto for cricket. Don't get me started on rugby league's international competition. Australian rules football, despite the sport's Victorian boosters hyping non-existent international appeal, has no global relevance.

Australia's win in Tashkent was remarkable not because the well-worked goal was conceived and executed by Luke Wilkshire and Scott Chipperfield - two defenders.

It was not remarkable for Lucas Neill and Chris Coyne constructing a brick wall in front of Mark Schwarzer's goal.

It was not remarkable for the industry of Brett Holman and Brett Emerton (come to think of it, does any other national team have two players named Brett within its number?).

All of those points were remarkable but not in isolation. What made Australia's victory compelling was the intelligence Australia demonstrated - from decisions by coaching staff to the acute discipline displayed by the players.

The selection of Coyne - who plays in the English THIRD division - to counter Uzbekistan's potential power in the air.

Slowing down play at any and every opportunity to regain control of the tempo.

Maintaining possession.

Knowing the difference between aggression and anger.

Scoring a goal at a critical time and then, crucially, holding a 1-0 lead away from home.

A long and winding qualifying campaign is not about whether flashy Nick Carle plays in the hole or whether Harry Kewell is an appropriate target man if we're playing one striker up top. It's about the tiniest details that, in this sport often decided by centimetres, add up at the end of 14 games.

Tashkent was Verbeek's smartest game yet but here's his advantage: Does anyone (other than his assistants) have any idea how he'll approach Qatar in Brisbane next month?

No.

And that is a good thing.

• by Matthew Hall at 05:08 AM
• Comments (15)

Saturday, September 6, 2008

A Diplomatic Football

Turkey's president will travel to Armenia to watch a football match this weekend. Who cares? Well, actually, this is a big deal.

Abdullah Gul's trip to Yerevan, for the Armenia-Turkey World Cup qualifier, will be the first time a Turkish leader has visited Armenia since the tiny country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This even though Turkey was one of the first countries to recognise Armenia's independence.

Geography and religion mean Turkey and Armenia have never really got on. Armenia is acknowledged as being the first nation to adopt Christianity but found itself an island surrounded by Islam. Complications? Let me count the ways...

Neighbourly relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey have never been great. Armenia and Azerbaijan still dispute territorial claim over Nagorno-Karabakh (Google it) and fought a Balkan-like war between 1988 and 1994. You possibly never heard about it.

More attention, however, is given to the Armenian Genocide that occurred around 1915. Turkey refuses to acknowledge the deaths of about 1.5 million Armenians as "genocide", claiming figures are exaggerated, that many deaths were from disease and starvation, and anyway, this event was a war and bad things happened to both sides.

Visiting Ankara earlier this year, this was certainly the tone of the Turkish government. Underneath the imposing mausoleum of Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is a grand museum celebrating the Turkish founder's life and the establishment of modern Turkey in 1923.

Ataturk had a big job creating his new nation and met many challenges, not least the complicated presence of Christian Greeks to the West and Armenians in the East, many who had lived in the region for centuries. Huge and dramatic paintings in the museum portray Christian "barbarians", including Orthodox priests, murdering babies and women. I'm not making this up. Go to the museum and check out the paintings for yourself. For an official history, it is powerful and uncompromising stuff.

So, too, was the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, shot by Turkish nationalists outside the office of his newspaper, AGOS. Dink had a reasonably balanced view of history even though he had been prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness".

The Armenian Genocide, recognised by many countries, strains much of Turkey's important international relations. Military contracts with France were cancelled last year and a move by the United States Congress to declare the 1915 events "genocide" stalled after President George Bush feared relations with a strategic ally may destabilise if the law passed.

It could be argued that all of this has nothing to do with football and if we are going to talk Turkey and Armenia then it should be all about Hasan Sas and whether Pyunik Yerevan skipper Sargis Hovsepyan will get his 100th cap for Armenia against Belgium in October.

To a point, you could be right. But international football, far and above the bloated money-driven globalisation of corporate club competition, is one of the world's great levelers.

Simply because the names of Turkey and Armenia were pulled out of a hat in a draw for a football competition, two nations with big differences are this weekend forced to look each other in the eye.

Grand opportunity has opened up and even though Turkish opposition leaders have said they'd rather "watch the game in Baku", Azerbaijan's capital, President Gul has accepted the Armenian invitation to travel to Yerevan.

About 5000 Turkish fans will join Gul after Armenia relaxed visa restrictions and opened its border for the match. Perhaps, Turks and Armenians can meet in downtown Yerevan and debate whether Hovsepyan has the guile to tame Hasan Sas. It would be a first for international dialogue.

As Armenian President Serge Sarkisian wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "Just as the people of China and the United States shared enthusiasm for ping-pong... the people of Armenia and Turkey are united in their love of football. Whatever our differences, there are certain cultural, humanitarian and sports links that our people share, even with a closed border."

• by Matthew Hall at 03:03 AM
• Comments (41)