Who’s the best young player he’s ever coached? What was up with the goatee? And has he spoken to Craig Foster recently? Your questions answered by Ange Postecoglou.
Despite being out of the game for over six months, Ange Postecoglou still looks every bit the football manager as he poses in a three-quarter length grey coat and purple shirt for our cameraman. That might just be because coaching is in his blood.
An NSL title winner as both a player and coach at South Melbourne, he became the national youth teams coach in 2000, with victory over eventual winners Brazil in the 2003 World Youth Championship a high point.
But a series of poor recent results saw his contract lapse in February of this year and one of our brightest young coaches found himself out of football for the first time in over two and a half decades.
Which means there’s all the more time to answer your questions.
What’s your first footballing memory?
Jay Tribune, via email
Watching-wise it would be the FA Cup Final in 1974 between Fulham and West Ham. I was about eight or nine years old and my dad got me up for it. The whole Wembley thing and the mystique of the Cup completely captured my imagination and then for every Saturday night from then on there was a big match to watch and I was hooked. As for playing, I remember trying out for the school soccer team when I was six or seven and getting a real buzz about being able to play with all my mates. My dad was a huge football fan in Greece and that influenced me. I did play AFL for one year and I actually won a trophy for most improved player, but when I took it home my dad wasn’t impressed. So that’s when I decided I had to play soccer.
Was your footballing youth the typical tale of immigrant being ostracised and given shit for liking football. Any good stories from your youth?
Con Christodoulou, Melbourne
Yeah, growing up was typical of that kind of stuff. At high school the Aussie rules team was the big team and everyone loved those kids but there were a few other kids with similar backgrounds as myself and we said we wanted to have a soccer team. We organised ourselves mostly and it was my first real coaching gig. I was 12 years old and I’d had a year at South Melbourne and they said you have the most experience so you can be the coach. And we weren’t a bad side to be honest. But the biggest slap in the face came at the guernsey presentation. We were all buzzing and getting excited about what the shirt would look like, especially as our high school colours were green and gold. They presented the AFL shirts first and they had these really nice green ones and then presented ours and we were given the school’s previous year’s Aussie rules jumpers. So we played the whole season in tight footy shorts and v-neck, sleeveless woolly jumpers. It was so embarrassing. The happy ending was that we actually won the all-high school championships that year but even in the photo we look absolutely ridiculous.
What is harder – winning the NSL title as a player or a manager?
Adnan Choo, via website
That’s a tough one because it’s a different feeling. As a player you can only really control your own destiny and I was pretty fortunate that I played in good teams. I won my first NSL championship in 1984 as an 18 year-old in my first year of senior football and we had a cracking side. Every player we had was an international: Alan Davidson, Oscar Crino, Kenny Murphy and I was the youngster in the team that kind of came along for the ride. I assume that my contribution to the team was OK but it was far from significant. But as a manager you really have to put all the pieces together and there are so many ingredients you have to get right.
You were coached by the great Ferenc Puskas at South Melbourne for a couple of seasons. What are your memories of the Hungarian master?
Jo Briggs, via email
The most fantastic experience of my playing career was being coached by Ferenc Puskas. He was a good coach, not anything exceptional, but as a man I learnt so much from him. We used to call him “boss” because to us we couldn’t call him “Ferenc” because he was such a legend. We used to pester him all the time for stories from his career. We’d say, “Boss, tell us about the European Cup Final that you scored a hat-trick in. What was that like?” and he would say, “Oh yeah, it was alright. We had some good players” and he’d be the same when he spoke about beating England at Wembley or playing in a World Cup Final. He was such a humble man. And he kept us humble as a result. It was a little bit like being coached by your grandfather – if it was raining during training he would say, “Come on, lads, time to go in now. You’ll catch a cold.” The other thing I remember was how good he was in training. When we would run around the pitch warming up he would place five balls down on the edge of the box and tell the keeper where he was going to put the ball and then score all five anyway. He had a wonderful left foot even when his playing days were over.
Do you think your 1999 South Melbourne side could’ve turned over last season’s Victory side?
Frank Pienaar, via email
I get asked that a lot and I think they probably would have. We had a lot of very good players that ended up playing at a very decent level. The test of that team was when we went to the World Club Championships in Brazil in 1999. And I got a bit annoyed when they kept on pumping up the Sydney vs Urawa Reds game as the biggest game ever for an Australian club side but it pales into insignificance when you look at what South Melbourne did. We went to Brazil to play against the treble-winning Manchester United side and Vasco De Gama, who had Romario and Edmundo up front and five World Cup winners in the side. We lost 2-0 to Vasco but played really well, lost 3-0 to Necaxa and 2-0 to Man United and we held our own in every game. That was testament to how good our side was that we did so well against full-time professionals. Remember we were only semi-pro. I think the Victory last year were phenomenal but I think the strength of the A-League has yet to reach the standard of the NSL at its peak.
Considering the ethnic connections that the FFA has stayed away from, do you think South Melbourne should be the next team to have a Hyundai A-League licence?
Adam G, via email
I personally doubt they ever will.
I think the A-League was set up as a clear distinction to what went in the past, which is a bit of a shame, but that’s the direction they’ve gone. I think the next A-League licence in Melbourne will be a new entity and not an existing team. It’s been set up in a certain way and it has been a success. You can’t argue with 20,000 members and 40,000 to 50,000 people going to the games. And that’s unfortunate for South Melbourne that the baggage of the old NSL is attached to them a bit and it would take a long time, a total rejuvenation for them to get rid of that stigma. I’d love to see them in the A-League, I just don’t see it happening.Australia has many promising young strikers coming through. If we took five strikers to the 2010 World Cup, who would you choose?
David Larish, via email
I expect Nathan Burns to be a key part in the national team in the upcoming years and be playing in the next World Cup. I think the likes of Djite and Bridgey need to be doing it consistently at A-League level first before they can be considered. They’ve got to bang in the goals for two or three years before they can be considered contenders to players who are already established in the national set-up. I think for the likes of David Williams and Dario Vidosic it really depends on how much game time they get in the next few years. David Williams is a talented finisher, probably the best finisher I’ve coached. He’s quick off his right and left foot and he’s got a good head on his shoulders. If he starts playing regularly, he’s another one I expect to see come to the forefront. And then you still have the likes of Josh Kennedy and Scott McDonald who are really the next in line to get their shot. Scotty Mac is one who I think, if he does well at Celtic, will take his career on to another level. He can score goals at any level and is just a pure finisher.
Who do you think, from the young Socceroos you coached, will go on to gain 40 plus caps for the national team?
Nathan Edwards, via website
If I had to pick one now, I guess it would be Matthew Spiranovic because I see him as someone who’s going to get an opportunity fairly early with the Socceroos and I think once he’s in there he will be hard to shift. We don’t have many central defenders and I think when he makes that step up he will stay there for a long time. Defenders tend to play longer and more regularly in national team set-ups. Beyond that I think Carl Valeri will begin to kick-start his international career and he’s another one who will play a lot of football once he gets in there.
In your opinion what went wrong after the Young Socceroos beat Brazil in 2003? Shouldn’t that have been a turning point in Australian football?
Katie Narellan, via email
I think it was the most frustrating thing to happen during my seven years in charge of the youth teams. At that point so many of them just didn’t have the opportunity to go out and play and build on their success. We beat the Brazil team that went on to win the World Cup with the likes of Alex Brosque, Matty McKay, Alex Wilkinson, Michael Thwaite and we’ve come back to Australia and they had nowhere to go, nowhere to play. They had to go and play Premier League and train twice a week. It was frustrating for me because I saw that if those guys had an A-League to come back to, their careers would be so much farther ahead than what they are now. I don’t think their careers were killed because that’s too harsh, but it just made it so much harder for them. Imagine someone like Nathan Burns coming back to play for Marconi in the state league after tearing it up on international duty. That’s what we had back then.
What do you think can be done, or should be done, to fix the youth development system in this country?
Erebus, via website
It’s almost impossible to answer this question in such a brief format. We’re starting to make some steps in the right direction with the appointment of a technical director to get things organised and with the A-League there is actually a league for our young players to compete in. It requires a lot more resources, money and time to be successful. People want instant results and they are the A-League and the national team and the rest is just second or third priority. Until we make youth football an equal priority to anything else we do in football we’re always going struggle. Other nations are starting to spend more and more on young players because they realise they don’t have enough coming through. And that’s who we’re competing against, yet we seem to be spending less and less. The only positive thing we have is that we tend to produce players who are pretty resilient and it’s part of Australian sporting culture to produce competitive players.
We support our brightest players to pursue playing opportunities overseas. But why do we not encourage/support our coaches?
Dave, Sydney
That’s an interesting one. We’ve got a real problem with how we look at Australian coaches. It’s one of those professions that everyone looks at and thinks they can coach. Few people second guess their doctor, plumber or electrician but you make a substitution and you’ve got 10,000 people telling you that it’s the wrong one. You look at someone like Frank Farina who has coached in the old NSL, won a championship and then coached the national team and people are going out there and saying that he’s totally worthless as a coach. And that’s not right. He’s had an experience at that level and whether he’s been successful or not is another matter but we should still be promoting Australian coaching talent. We don’t want to be in a position where we are importing coaches willy nilly because there are plenty of bad coaches that come from France, England and Holland. It’s a real problem and it really doesn’t encourage people to get into the profession. It’s a pretty poisonous environment at times.
Have you spoken to Craig Foster since the infamous SBS interview?
Vicki James, via email
No I haven’t but then I didn’t really speak to him that much before. The thing with that whole interview was that I wasn’t disappointed with the criticism, I accept that you’re going to get criticised as a coach and I fronted that interview knowing that I was going to cop it. I’m not silly. I knew that we’d come back, we weren’t successful, I’m the coach and I’ll take responsibility for it. But the disappointing thing for me and what I see as unforgivable is that chose the forum of live TV to do it. They had the potential to destroy my entire coaching career if I’d said the wrong thing or if I reacted the wrong way. But they didn’t care about that, they were quite happy to take down another person. And in my mind that’s unforgivable. There have been plenty of people who have criticised me in the past that I still talk to – we don’t always agree but that’s part of coaching and part of football. That whole thing never sat well with me, I didn’t like the experience and didn’t think it was good telly – I know some might disagree but it did nothing for me. I was disappointed with SBS and with the FFA that they put me in that situation that I had to deal with. It’s a chapter in my career that I probably don’t want to recollect too much.
Now the dust is settled, do you agree with Fozzie’s assessment about your tenure as Australia’s youth coach? As he said, shouldn’t the coach be accountable for their team’s results?
Fitzroy Peeves, via email
The coach should be accountable and I was. In the end I didn’t keep my job. But that’s the easy part. I can sit here and say so and so should be sacked because his team isn’t doing well but football goes beyond that. You have to look at the situation people are put in and the circumstances that they coach under. You don’t expect Steve Coppell to win the Premier League with Reading but if he finishes seventh then everyone thinks he’s a good coach. If people think we should win the World Youth Cup then I’m sorry, that’s not where we are as a nation. That’s the reality of it. In 2001 we played Brazil in the round of 16 in the U20 World Cup in Argentina and we lost 4-0. I was really disappointed as I had high hopes for us and it was our first tournament and I remember thinking that although we got smashed we played alright that day. And I thought back and recalled that their two strikers that day were Kaka and Adriano and our central defence in comparison was Paddy Kisnorbo and Mark Byrnes, who played for the Victory. So we do need to have a sense of where we are as well.Let’s be honest, the A-League’s been shit so far. Do you think so?
Perry Jackson, Sydney
The last round [round three] wasn’t great, I’ve got to agree with him there. The A-League now has come to a point where it needs to take a step up. Now the expectations are that fans want to see some good football. People have experienced the razzmatazz and sat in the Dome or SFS in big crowds but now they want to see the product. This year will be an interesting year to see which clubs and players can take that next step. I think the recruiting over the first few years has been very haphazard. Teams have just picked players to fill rosters rather than actually thinking about who they should sign. And there are a few clubs who have been left short in areas because they haven’t done their homework. I think the Victory were the only club to have done it well last season and they ran away with it because they went out there and recruited a bunch of players who would do a job for them and fitted into their style of play. And some of the other teams let themselves down badly in that area. But the teams will hit their straps and the second half of the year will be better.
Do you have any ambitions to coach in the A-League?
Will Cooster, via email
Yeah I think so, if there was the opportunity. And that’s the difficulty of professional coaching in this country – you can go from a national team to… well, what’s the next stage? The good thing is that we have a professional league now but there’s only eight jobs. I want to stay in Australia for a little bit longer, I don’t want to go overseas. I’m 42 which in coaching terms is not that old and the A-League is an exciting league, especially with the Asian Champions League aspect to it. There are some real challenges to it that I would like to get into but I’ve always said with coaching, it’s not the kind of career that you can plot out what you’re going to be doing in five years time. It just doesn’t work that way. When I got into coaching I got the South Melbourne job when I was 30 and if someone told me you were going to coach South Melbourne and then the national team, I would’ve laughed because I had no idea where it was going to take me. After two weeks at South Melbourne we’d lost two games and I was almost out on my arse! So you just don’t know what opportunities will arise. Sitting here at the moment I’d love to get an opportunity with an A-League gig but then something might come from overseas that I can’t turn down.
Who is the best player you’ve coached?
Aussie Pride, via website
That’s a tough one because a lot of players had different attributes that made them great to coach. If I broke it down, the most technically gifted player I’ve coached would be [Melbourne Victory’s] Kaz Patafta. We went to a World Cup and he looked totally comfortable on the ball and I was constantly amazed with the things he could do. In terms of an all-round players, I’d say Nathan Burns, Matt Spiranovic and Carl Valeri are the other three that looked comfortable at that elite level.
Who is Australian football’s next young big thing?
Emma Turner, via email
Where we are at the moment you would have to say Nathan [Burns]. I think he’s taken to the game well and he’s got a great temperament. He’s a country boy and he doesn’t let anything faze him. He went to the U17 World Cup in Peru and he scored in the tournament which is no small thing. But again, because the emphasis was on me and the fact we failed, people just glossed over any good performances from the players. People are saying Burnsy has shot onto the scene but he didn’t – this was 2005 when he scored against Uruguay in the World Cup and I can tell you that other countries were looking at him then and saying he was a good player. You can see the way he has taken to the A-League and in the first few weeks I think he has been the league’s best player. He’s the one player I’d pay to watch at the moment. Of course there are so many obstacles that a young player has to overcome to make it but I think he has the attributes to make it. I believe that a player really has to establish themselves in a league before they go overseas. I played and coached in an era where Mark Viduka at the age of 19 was the top goalscorer and player of the year in the NSL and he dominated the league. Paul Okon dominated the league. Mark Schwarzer was outstanding as a young goalkeeper and Brett Emerton was player of the year in the old NSL. So they all dominated the league over here before they went overseas. I think if nothing else it proves to the player themselves that they’re someone. Bresh and Grella played for Carlton when they were 18, 19 years old in a team that made the Grand Final. They had that mentality in them before they went overseas. And it wasn’t just off the back of one year, they’d been playing like this for two or three years so when clubs signed them, they signed them as first team players. I really worry when players have only played one year here and haven’t dominated the competition but done OK and then dash off overseas to become squad players. I just don’t think they’re helping their careers. And it’s a pretty good indication of where you’re at as a footballer if you can dominate the A-League, and if you can’t impose your will on games then maybe it’s not your time yet.
Why did you get rid of the uber-cool David Brent goatee?
Adchopper via website
I think you’ll have to ask my wife that! The mullet and the goatee were big at one stage but I don’t know what I was thinking. It all started back in 1990 when we won the title under Puskas and we made a decision as a team that we weren’t going to shave until we won it. From there I went down the goatee path, others had the full beard – the Grand Final shot’s a cracker with 11 guys with beards, except for Paul Trimboli who couldn’t grow any kind of facial hair if he tried. And I just kept it after that. And it’s one of the major regrets of my life. But after I shaved it off, there were so many people who have known me my whole life saying “Geez Ange, you look great” that I said, “Why, if I looked so bad before, did you let me wear it for 15 or 20 years of my adult life? Why did you let me walk around like that if you thought I looked better without it?” It’s one of those things that will always come back to haunt me. I suppose the one positive was that after I shaved it off I got about fairly anonymously. It was amazing how many people didn’t recognise me.
An NSL title winner as both a player and coach at South Melbourne, he became the national youth teams coach in 2000, with victory over eventual winners Brazil in the 2003 World Youth Championship a high point.
But a series of poor recent results saw his contract lapse in February of this year and one of our brightest young coaches found himself out of football for the first time in over two and a half decades.
Which means there’s all the more time to answer your questions.
What’s your first footballing memory?
Jay Tribune, via email
Watching-wise it would be the FA Cup Final in 1974 between Fulham and West Ham. I was about eight or nine years old and my dad got me up for it. The whole Wembley thing and the mystique of the Cup completely captured my imagination and then for every Saturday night from then on there was a big match to watch and I was hooked. As for playing, I remember trying out for the school soccer team when I was six or seven and getting a real buzz about being able to play with all my mates. My dad was a huge football fan in Greece and that influenced me. I did play AFL for one year and I actually won a trophy for most improved player, but when I took it home my dad wasn’t impressed. So that’s when I decided I had to play soccer.
Was your footballing youth the typical tale of immigrant being ostracised and given shit for liking football. Any good stories from your youth?
Con Christodoulou, Melbourne
Yeah, growing up was typical of that kind of stuff. At high school the Aussie rules team was the big team and everyone loved those kids but there were a few other kids with similar backgrounds as myself and we said we wanted to have a soccer team. We organised ourselves mostly and it was my first real coaching gig. I was 12 years old and I’d had a year at South Melbourne and they said you have the most experience so you can be the coach. And we weren’t a bad side to be honest. But the biggest slap in the face came at the guernsey presentation. We were all buzzing and getting excited about what the shirt would look like, especially as our high school colours were green and gold. They presented the AFL shirts first and they had these really nice green ones and then presented ours and we were given the school’s previous year’s Aussie rules jumpers. So we played the whole season in tight footy shorts and v-neck, sleeveless woolly jumpers. It was so embarrassing. The happy ending was that we actually won the all-high school championships that year but even in the photo we look absolutely ridiculous.
What is harder – winning the NSL title as a player or a manager?
Adnan Choo, via website
That’s a tough one because it’s a different feeling. As a player you can only really control your own destiny and I was pretty fortunate that I played in good teams. I won my first NSL championship in 1984 as an 18 year-old in my first year of senior football and we had a cracking side. Every player we had was an international: Alan Davidson, Oscar Crino, Kenny Murphy and I was the youngster in the team that kind of came along for the ride. I assume that my contribution to the team was OK but it was far from significant. But as a manager you really have to put all the pieces together and there are so many ingredients you have to get right.
You were coached by the great Ferenc Puskas at South Melbourne for a couple of seasons. What are your memories of the Hungarian master?
Jo Briggs, via email
The most fantastic experience of my playing career was being coached by Ferenc Puskas. He was a good coach, not anything exceptional, but as a man I learnt so much from him. We used to call him “boss” because to us we couldn’t call him “Ferenc” because he was such a legend. We used to pester him all the time for stories from his career. We’d say, “Boss, tell us about the European Cup Final that you scored a hat-trick in. What was that like?” and he would say, “Oh yeah, it was alright. We had some good players” and he’d be the same when he spoke about beating England at Wembley or playing in a World Cup Final. He was such a humble man. And he kept us humble as a result. It was a little bit like being coached by your grandfather – if it was raining during training he would say, “Come on, lads, time to go in now. You’ll catch a cold.” The other thing I remember was how good he was in training. When we would run around the pitch warming up he would place five balls down on the edge of the box and tell the keeper where he was going to put the ball and then score all five anyway. He had a wonderful left foot even when his playing days were over.
Do you think your 1999 South Melbourne side could’ve turned over last season’s Victory side?
Frank Pienaar, via email
I get asked that a lot and I think they probably would have. We had a lot of very good players that ended up playing at a very decent level. The test of that team was when we went to the World Club Championships in Brazil in 1999. And I got a bit annoyed when they kept on pumping up the Sydney vs Urawa Reds game as the biggest game ever for an Australian club side but it pales into insignificance when you look at what South Melbourne did. We went to Brazil to play against the treble-winning Manchester United side and Vasco De Gama, who had Romario and Edmundo up front and five World Cup winners in the side. We lost 2-0 to Vasco but played really well, lost 3-0 to Necaxa and 2-0 to Man United and we held our own in every game. That was testament to how good our side was that we did so well against full-time professionals. Remember we were only semi-pro. I think the Victory last year were phenomenal but I think the strength of the A-League has yet to reach the standard of the NSL at its peak.
Considering the ethnic connections that the FFA has stayed away from, do you think South Melbourne should be the next team to have a Hyundai A-League licence?
Adam G, via email
I personally doubt they ever will.
I think the A-League was set up as a clear distinction to what went in the past, which is a bit of a shame, but that’s the direction they’ve gone. I think the next A-League licence in Melbourne will be a new entity and not an existing team. It’s been set up in a certain way and it has been a success. You can’t argue with 20,000 members and 40,000 to 50,000 people going to the games. And that’s unfortunate for South Melbourne that the baggage of the old NSL is attached to them a bit and it would take a long time, a total rejuvenation for them to get rid of that stigma. I’d love to see them in the A-League, I just don’t see it happening.Australia has many promising young strikers coming through. If we took five strikers to the 2010 World Cup, who would you choose?
David Larish, via email
I expect Nathan Burns to be a key part in the national team in the upcoming years and be playing in the next World Cup. I think the likes of Djite and Bridgey need to be doing it consistently at A-League level first before they can be considered. They’ve got to bang in the goals for two or three years before they can be considered contenders to players who are already established in the national set-up. I think for the likes of David Williams and Dario Vidosic it really depends on how much game time they get in the next few years. David Williams is a talented finisher, probably the best finisher I’ve coached. He’s quick off his right and left foot and he’s got a good head on his shoulders. If he starts playing regularly, he’s another one I expect to see come to the forefront. And then you still have the likes of Josh Kennedy and Scott McDonald who are really the next in line to get their shot. Scotty Mac is one who I think, if he does well at Celtic, will take his career on to another level. He can score goals at any level and is just a pure finisher.
Who do you think, from the young Socceroos you coached, will go on to gain 40 plus caps for the national team?
Nathan Edwards, via website
If I had to pick one now, I guess it would be Matthew Spiranovic because I see him as someone who’s going to get an opportunity fairly early with the Socceroos and I think once he’s in there he will be hard to shift. We don’t have many central defenders and I think when he makes that step up he will stay there for a long time. Defenders tend to play longer and more regularly in national team set-ups. Beyond that I think Carl Valeri will begin to kick-start his international career and he’s another one who will play a lot of football once he gets in there.
In your opinion what went wrong after the Young Socceroos beat Brazil in 2003? Shouldn’t that have been a turning point in Australian football?
Katie Narellan, via email
I think it was the most frustrating thing to happen during my seven years in charge of the youth teams. At that point so many of them just didn’t have the opportunity to go out and play and build on their success. We beat the Brazil team that went on to win the World Cup with the likes of Alex Brosque, Matty McKay, Alex Wilkinson, Michael Thwaite and we’ve come back to Australia and they had nowhere to go, nowhere to play. They had to go and play Premier League and train twice a week. It was frustrating for me because I saw that if those guys had an A-League to come back to, their careers would be so much farther ahead than what they are now. I don’t think their careers were killed because that’s too harsh, but it just made it so much harder for them. Imagine someone like Nathan Burns coming back to play for Marconi in the state league after tearing it up on international duty. That’s what we had back then.
What do you think can be done, or should be done, to fix the youth development system in this country?
Erebus, via website
It’s almost impossible to answer this question in such a brief format. We’re starting to make some steps in the right direction with the appointment of a technical director to get things organised and with the A-League there is actually a league for our young players to compete in. It requires a lot more resources, money and time to be successful. People want instant results and they are the A-League and the national team and the rest is just second or third priority. Until we make youth football an equal priority to anything else we do in football we’re always going struggle. Other nations are starting to spend more and more on young players because they realise they don’t have enough coming through. And that’s who we’re competing against, yet we seem to be spending less and less. The only positive thing we have is that we tend to produce players who are pretty resilient and it’s part of Australian sporting culture to produce competitive players.
We support our brightest players to pursue playing opportunities overseas. But why do we not encourage/support our coaches?
Dave, Sydney
That’s an interesting one. We’ve got a real problem with how we look at Australian coaches. It’s one of those professions that everyone looks at and thinks they can coach. Few people second guess their doctor, plumber or electrician but you make a substitution and you’ve got 10,000 people telling you that it’s the wrong one. You look at someone like Frank Farina who has coached in the old NSL, won a championship and then coached the national team and people are going out there and saying that he’s totally worthless as a coach. And that’s not right. He’s had an experience at that level and whether he’s been successful or not is another matter but we should still be promoting Australian coaching talent. We don’t want to be in a position where we are importing coaches willy nilly because there are plenty of bad coaches that come from France, England and Holland. It’s a real problem and it really doesn’t encourage people to get into the profession. It’s a pretty poisonous environment at times.
Have you spoken to Craig Foster since the infamous SBS interview?
Vicki James, via email
No I haven’t but then I didn’t really speak to him that much before. The thing with that whole interview was that I wasn’t disappointed with the criticism, I accept that you’re going to get criticised as a coach and I fronted that interview knowing that I was going to cop it. I’m not silly. I knew that we’d come back, we weren’t successful, I’m the coach and I’ll take responsibility for it. But the disappointing thing for me and what I see as unforgivable is that chose the forum of live TV to do it. They had the potential to destroy my entire coaching career if I’d said the wrong thing or if I reacted the wrong way. But they didn’t care about that, they were quite happy to take down another person. And in my mind that’s unforgivable. There have been plenty of people who have criticised me in the past that I still talk to – we don’t always agree but that’s part of coaching and part of football. That whole thing never sat well with me, I didn’t like the experience and didn’t think it was good telly – I know some might disagree but it did nothing for me. I was disappointed with SBS and with the FFA that they put me in that situation that I had to deal with. It’s a chapter in my career that I probably don’t want to recollect too much.
Now the dust is settled, do you agree with Fozzie’s assessment about your tenure as Australia’s youth coach? As he said, shouldn’t the coach be accountable for their team’s results?
Fitzroy Peeves, via email
The coach should be accountable and I was. In the end I didn’t keep my job. But that’s the easy part. I can sit here and say so and so should be sacked because his team isn’t doing well but football goes beyond that. You have to look at the situation people are put in and the circumstances that they coach under. You don’t expect Steve Coppell to win the Premier League with Reading but if he finishes seventh then everyone thinks he’s a good coach. If people think we should win the World Youth Cup then I’m sorry, that’s not where we are as a nation. That’s the reality of it. In 2001 we played Brazil in the round of 16 in the U20 World Cup in Argentina and we lost 4-0. I was really disappointed as I had high hopes for us and it was our first tournament and I remember thinking that although we got smashed we played alright that day. And I thought back and recalled that their two strikers that day were Kaka and Adriano and our central defence in comparison was Paddy Kisnorbo and Mark Byrnes, who played for the Victory. So we do need to have a sense of where we are as well.Let’s be honest, the A-League’s been shit so far. Do you think so?
Perry Jackson, Sydney
The last round [round three] wasn’t great, I’ve got to agree with him there. The A-League now has come to a point where it needs to take a step up. Now the expectations are that fans want to see some good football. People have experienced the razzmatazz and sat in the Dome or SFS in big crowds but now they want to see the product. This year will be an interesting year to see which clubs and players can take that next step. I think the recruiting over the first few years has been very haphazard. Teams have just picked players to fill rosters rather than actually thinking about who they should sign. And there are a few clubs who have been left short in areas because they haven’t done their homework. I think the Victory were the only club to have done it well last season and they ran away with it because they went out there and recruited a bunch of players who would do a job for them and fitted into their style of play. And some of the other teams let themselves down badly in that area. But the teams will hit their straps and the second half of the year will be better.
Do you have any ambitions to coach in the A-League?
Will Cooster, via email
Yeah I think so, if there was the opportunity. And that’s the difficulty of professional coaching in this country – you can go from a national team to… well, what’s the next stage? The good thing is that we have a professional league now but there’s only eight jobs. I want to stay in Australia for a little bit longer, I don’t want to go overseas. I’m 42 which in coaching terms is not that old and the A-League is an exciting league, especially with the Asian Champions League aspect to it. There are some real challenges to it that I would like to get into but I’ve always said with coaching, it’s not the kind of career that you can plot out what you’re going to be doing in five years time. It just doesn’t work that way. When I got into coaching I got the South Melbourne job when I was 30 and if someone told me you were going to coach South Melbourne and then the national team, I would’ve laughed because I had no idea where it was going to take me. After two weeks at South Melbourne we’d lost two games and I was almost out on my arse! So you just don’t know what opportunities will arise. Sitting here at the moment I’d love to get an opportunity with an A-League gig but then something might come from overseas that I can’t turn down.
Who is the best player you’ve coached?
Aussie Pride, via website
That’s a tough one because a lot of players had different attributes that made them great to coach. If I broke it down, the most technically gifted player I’ve coached would be [Melbourne Victory’s] Kaz Patafta. We went to a World Cup and he looked totally comfortable on the ball and I was constantly amazed with the things he could do. In terms of an all-round players, I’d say Nathan Burns, Matt Spiranovic and Carl Valeri are the other three that looked comfortable at that elite level.
Who is Australian football’s next young big thing?
Emma Turner, via email
Where we are at the moment you would have to say Nathan [Burns]. I think he’s taken to the game well and he’s got a great temperament. He’s a country boy and he doesn’t let anything faze him. He went to the U17 World Cup in Peru and he scored in the tournament which is no small thing. But again, because the emphasis was on me and the fact we failed, people just glossed over any good performances from the players. People are saying Burnsy has shot onto the scene but he didn’t – this was 2005 when he scored against Uruguay in the World Cup and I can tell you that other countries were looking at him then and saying he was a good player. You can see the way he has taken to the A-League and in the first few weeks I think he has been the league’s best player. He’s the one player I’d pay to watch at the moment. Of course there are so many obstacles that a young player has to overcome to make it but I think he has the attributes to make it. I believe that a player really has to establish themselves in a league before they go overseas. I played and coached in an era where Mark Viduka at the age of 19 was the top goalscorer and player of the year in the NSL and he dominated the league. Paul Okon dominated the league. Mark Schwarzer was outstanding as a young goalkeeper and Brett Emerton was player of the year in the old NSL. So they all dominated the league over here before they went overseas. I think if nothing else it proves to the player themselves that they’re someone. Bresh and Grella played for Carlton when they were 18, 19 years old in a team that made the Grand Final. They had that mentality in them before they went overseas. And it wasn’t just off the back of one year, they’d been playing like this for two or three years so when clubs signed them, they signed them as first team players. I really worry when players have only played one year here and haven’t dominated the competition but done OK and then dash off overseas to become squad players. I just don’t think they’re helping their careers. And it’s a pretty good indication of where you’re at as a footballer if you can dominate the A-League, and if you can’t impose your will on games then maybe it’s not your time yet.
Why did you get rid of the uber-cool David Brent goatee?
Adchopper via website
I think you’ll have to ask my wife that! The mullet and the goatee were big at one stage but I don’t know what I was thinking. It all started back in 1990 when we won the title under Puskas and we made a decision as a team that we weren’t going to shave until we won it. From there I went down the goatee path, others had the full beard – the Grand Final shot’s a cracker with 11 guys with beards, except for Paul Trimboli who couldn’t grow any kind of facial hair if he tried. And I just kept it after that. And it’s one of the major regrets of my life. But after I shaved it off, there were so many people who have known me my whole life saying “Geez Ange, you look great” that I said, “Why, if I looked so bad before, did you let me wear it for 15 or 20 years of my adult life? Why did you let me walk around like that if you thought I looked better without it?” It’s one of those things that will always come back to haunt me. I suppose the one positive was that after I shaved it off I got about fairly anonymously. It was amazing how many people didn’t recognise me.
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