NEWS
News
Les Murray: "How we can win the World Cup"
A couple of years before his premature death, Johnny Warren, in one of his many celebrated moments, attended the inauguration of the Johnny Warren Indoor Sports Centre in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville, deep in the bowels of his beloved St George district.
Alan Jones was the MC and the large audience included an army of sporting luminaries, from Ken Rosewall to Kostya Tszyu. In his keynote speech Johnny, as usual speaking without notes and emotion fuelling his every word, was in his classic element.
It was there that he first uttered his famous words: ‘We should not just aim to qualify for the World Cup, we should aim to win the World Cup.’
In that era Australia, for nearly 30 years starved of a World Cup place, was obsessed with a truncated ambition. Merely qualifying was the sum total of our dreams, normally, and in probably every other sport, a decidedly un-Australian aspiration.
Johnny, as usual, was way ahead of the pack, instinctively knowing that fulfilling such an ambition was never going to be enough.
Since then Johnny’s other parting words. ‘I told you so’, have become even more famous and lasting. And though it’s true that many of Johnny’s leaps of faith have materialised since his death, the full meaning of his ‘I told you so’ will not be consummated until we win the World Cup.
So can Australia win the World Cup one day? Johnny, if he were here, would say yes and I will say the same. It’s not a matter of if but when.
But what Johnny would also say is that to do that we have to have a plan. A plan to win the World Cup, not just to host it.
Australia has, from what we can tell, a coherent and strategically astute plan to bring the World Cup to Australia. There is no question that such a lofty aim is achievable even in the callous and brutal world of international football politics.
But where is the plan to win it? And, more importantly, what should be in that plan?
The answer to that needs to address in turn the sixty four million dollar question: what are the failings and shortcomings which in the past have always made such dreams almost comically unrealistic?
It used to be things like part time footballers, lack of experience and a squat international pedigree. But none of these apply today.
Our top players have long since ceased to be part timers and many of them now are multi-millionaires, playing in the most taxing of the world’s professional leagues. Experience is the least they lack given the high pressure world in which they make their living. And the business of pedigree became almost irrelevant since football began to truly globalise in the 1980s.
Indeed in 2006 Australia already came desperately close to doing something truly historic before being eliminated, amid some drama, in the round of 16 of the World Cup by Italy. Had that result been the reverse Australia would have met an inexperienced, timid and thoroughly beatable Ukraine in the quarter finals. A win there would have put the Socceroos in the World Cup semi finals. So much for pedigree.
The answer to the question of what are Australia’s shortcomings, and what now needs to be addressed, lies in why we didn’t beat Italy.
We may have lost to the Italians because of a refereeing error and a presumed ‘dive’ by Fabio Grosso. But that is not why we didn’t beat them. We didn’t beat them because we didn’t know how to, because our players lacked the skill and the creative capacity to break the Italians down despite enjoying a numerical advantage for a large bulk of the game. For that we can blame neither the Italians nor the referee but ourselves. And our shortcomings.
Forever and a day Johnny Warren, in his missionary quest, spoke about our need to address the lack of skill factor in our football culture, our disdain for creativity, bemoaning the fact that we are producing muscular and gritty athletes, not men of true ability and skilful invention, elements that brought Brazil five World Cup wins and hundreds of other trophies for teams in international football besides.
It is this that it is now time for us to address. It is this that has to be at the core of the plan with which we can win the World Cup.
So, how to do it? What needs to be done to make us truly competitive and successful, long term and truly lasting?
Step one will be to admit to what we lack. Step two will be the will to correct it. And step three will be to go ahead and do it.
We are not fashioning footballers capable of winning the World Cup because our technical education at the junior level, that is below the age of 15, is inadequate and steeped in a bad culture – a culture that emphasises athleticism and the need to win at a tiny tot level, all at the expense of the cultivation of ability.
This is at the heart of what we have to fix.
A quality footballer, the world’s top coaches will tell you, takes a minimum of ten years to develop, from say the age of nine to 18, after which professional experience kicks in and takes over.
But so far we have only paid attention to the top end of this critical age scale. Elite players enter the state institute programs at the age of 15, and the AIS at the age of 17. Below that there is nothing.
These institutes probably do a very fine job. But the problem is, in terms of perfecting technique, by the age of 15 it is all too late. Skill and technique are learnt at much younger ages and if you have trouble trapping the ball or passing it accurately, or you cannot dribble, before you turn 15 you probably never will.
Take Bruce Djite as an example, a fine player, powerful and quick, intimidating and sharp around the box. He’s a future Socceroo star. But he has trouble trapping the ball. And why? Because before he turned 15, when he joined the NSWIS program, he received no coaching that drummed into him that technique is everything. Now it’s too late.
Had Djite been brought up in Argentina or Spain or Italy he’d now be endowed with the touch of a ball juggler. But he was brought up in Australia.
To correct this is no short term task. It will take ten years minimum before there are tangible outcomes. And that refers only to the tutelage of elite players. Changing the broad culture will take much longer.
But begin we must and we must begin now.
The Johnny Warren Football Foundation, set up by the NSW government on the back of the Johnny Warren dream, is finely poised to play a key role in this and fill the gap. All it needs is more funding.
Potentially the most powerful of Johnny Warren’s many legacies is the Johnny Warren Academy, the only development program in the country that is scholarship based and caters for elite players under the age of 15.
Beyond the JWA there is no other. All other elite player development programs, whether they are run by the state federations or privately, are run on a user-pay basis. In other words if you have a son who is supremely gifted, and who is ten years old, you have nowhere to send him unless you can afford hundreds, or even thousands, for his tutelage.
I know of one nine year old boy who is immensely gifted, the best I’ve seen at that age. His father, having nowhere better to go, sends him to the splendid AC Milan academy. But it costs him $4000 a year.
What this user-pay system means is that the best are not training with the best, only with those who can afford it. If a kid emerges, with the talent of a Maradona, but he’s disadvantaged and of poor parents, he is lost to the game.
Currently, because of meagre funding, the JWA caters only for 13 year old boys who undergo 40 training sessions in a given year. Though the academy does a splendid job (six of the last Joeys squad were JWA graduates), this is vastly inadequate in the grand scheme of producing players of international quality.
The age group is too narrow and the intensity too low. The age span should begin at nine and graduation should be at 14, when the child is ready to join the State academies.
The intensity needs to increase to at least 200 sessions per year, that is five sessions per week for ten months of the year, with the boys returning to their clubs to play games on weekends.
And the program should be national, expanding to a dozen centres or more around the country.
With say 30 boys at each centre, across five age groups (from 9 to 13, given that the State institutes will soon reduce their entry age to 14), 1800 young elite players would be expertly coached around Australia almost full time and, augmented by the State institutes and the AIS, our national scheme would begin to resemble the Clarefontaine system that operates in France.
It would mean that talented players would have a comprehensive national development path, at no cost to themselves, over a ten year span from age nine to 18.
The JWFF is currently undergoing a review of its academy program and will want to move in this direction but it needs a large injection of funds to make it a reality.
The JWFF operates on the remnants of a paltry $1.5 million in seed funding it was given by the NSW government in 2004. No additional government funds have been given since. The Foundations subsists on interest earned, some sponsorship and donations. It survives, barely, but it cannot afford to expand.
This is unacceptable in a country as rich, and as ambitious in football, as Australia.
Currently the AIS and the state institute programs – from age 15 to 18 – are the only ones that receive government funding. And while that money is very welcome, in a sense it is being wasted unless further funding is channeled to the younger age groups.
It is time for governments, federal and State alike, to dig further into their pockets if Australia is to retain its World Cup dreams and ambitions. The JWFF should receive additional and sustained annual funding to a level which adequately furnishes the activities for which it was created.
Of course there are many elements that go into giving a country a realistic preparedness for winning the World Cup. And it might seem simplistic to suggest that fattening up the JWFF is all we need do hold the FIFA trophy aloft in, say, ten years time.
But I make two points. One is that the area of youth development, especially below the age of 15, is our number one shortcoming if we are ever going to compete with the likes of Italy, Brazil, France, Argentina or Germany.
The other is that there is not much sense in bringing the World Cup to Australia if we don’t have a considered parallel plan to also win it.
The work must begin now.
