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.