Socceroos World Cup -  The Post-Mortem

At the risk of sound like a classical geek I have studied Latin. Post-mortem means to look at the body after death. People are going to say, ‘You can’t do a post-mortem, there hasn’t  been a death, the body is alive, the heart is beating. We haven’t had to put a screen around like a horse at a race track and shoot it.’  But we can do an examination.

People know that I’m a half glass full kind of guy. I’m not trying to sound positive for the sake of sounding positive but I do think at the World Cup, Australia did the very best with what we had.

Anyone who has followed football for a while has known that it wasn’t exactly the greatest personnel that we’ve had. In fact we’ve had personnel in previous World Cups campaigns when we didn’t qualify that had better players in them.

I’ve got nothing at all bad to say about the team. The team was sensational, it just exposes certain things that we all have different opinions about.

But it is pretty clear we need a striker. The stats don’t lie – we didn’t score from open play at all.  So therefore we can’t feed on any confidence.

If the only goals are coming from Mile Jedinak that’s not going to create confidence in Aaron Mooy to have a shot outside or for Tom Rogic to run at players all the time.  

I know Aaron Mooy was playing deeper than where he usually does but you think: Have a ping! Do what you do in the English Premier League, have a ping from 20 metres out. We needed him to do something like that.

I know that France started off with a different plan after they played us. We were one of the few teams to give them any type of problems.

We know that we can mix it with the big boys. It is just a matter of confidence. A couple of times when our players were running at other players, even Trent Sainsbury was running forward I thought why don’t we do that more often? Why don’t we back ourselves?