Given his eagerness to get to Europe, this season is critical for Holland. However, setting expectations like this can be dangerous, particularly for a young player without a full season on his CV.

Much attention has been given to the possibility of second-year syndrome setting in, for Holland and the A-League’s other young stars. After a muted start for James and his Newcastle side to the A-League season, he is conscious of the danger.

“I don’t want that [second-year syndrome] happening to me. I want to train harder, work harder. It’s easy for someone to burst onto the scene but it’s harder for them to stay there.

"It’s up to me to change my game for the better, and work on things that need to be worked on. Teams and players become aware of you, and you’ve got to be conscious of it yourself so you can become a better player.”

Holland is one of Australia’s best prospects. But a human reminder of how fickle football can be trains alongside Holland every week. Kaz Patafta, once Australia’s next big thing as a youth player at Benfica, now struggles to get past the similarly-aged Holland and Jin-Hyung Song in the Newcastle midfield.

“When Kaz was younger he had the spotlight put on him,” Holland explains. “I think it’s dangerous when you do that to youngsters, obviously because they’re still young and anything can happen. You don’t want to excel so young and then sort of be forgotten.”

Holland himself excelled young too, bursting onto the A-League scene with three goals in his first half-dozen matches. Since then, he has steadied into a versatile solider in Gary van Egmond’s highly fluid midfield set-up. To claim that Holland has yet to return to the highs of that early goalscoring form would not do him justice. His age is still greater than the number of games he’s played, while he was used mostly as a holding midfield in his junior career.

Yet doubts still emerge about his progress. Van Egmond has publicly stated that Holland takes too many touches of the ball at key times. The Jets’ form this season has also been below par: in their first four A-League matches the Jets were yet to win. Holland played all but 11 minutes of those matches.

But Holland believes he has faced adversity before and he is equipped to tackle any that exists in his future.

“I suppose everyone has those moments [of self-doubt], but I’ve never said to myself that I want to throw it away. You’ve just got to remind yourself of how much training you’ve done along the way, and tell yourself you are good enough. You go out there and prove it every weekend that you can match it with the best. You’ve just got to get rid of that doubt.”