Where Sydney blew it

Sydney FC’s exit game from the 2006-07 A-League campaign, its pathetic loss to Newcastle Jets in the semi finals, was a graphic sketch of all that has made the ‘bling’ experiment a failure and how rich opportunities presented in this era of new football can be squandered.

Finally, and not a moment before its time, the club board decided to act, as it surely had to. But showing the door to Terry Butcher was only part of the solution.

The Butcher problem, apparently undiagnosed by the club until that final straw at Newcastle, was not so much the man himself and his eccentric personality nor even the fact that, in the end, he had lost the dressing room. His real problem was his primordial approach to coaching and his beliefs in what makes a good football team.

A club insider, in reference to the legacy of Terry Butcher, succinctly told me: ‘He has turned us into a pub team.’ And that was no more clearly evident than it was in Butcher’s last game in charge.

Sydney, with a 2:1 lead from the first leg, played the game like a miserable underdog, intent only to fight and bruise for a lead they already held, guided against a cultured and crafty opponent by a coach bereft of ideas other than to ask his players to man the trenches.

Sydney, parading a playing squad of glitz, name and glamour, was sent out to play like a band of poorly paid provincials and act like some wretched opposition they were founded to conquer, hover over and dominate from the outset of the A-League. The notion of the ‘bling’, the suggestion that Sydney meant glamour and Rolls Royce class, had long ago been slapped aside, forgotten and, under Butcher, had become a myth, replaced by the proposition that Sydney is a club that ought to fight, rather than play, for its pre-destined place in football.

Without the kind of technical overhaul which, one can hope, has now started, Sydney would have remained a basket case of a club, rudderless and empty of purpose and invention, a visionless skeleton, facing an Asian Champions League campaign presenting massive opportunities for Australian football, but in which it was destined to miserably fail.

The club’s governors needed to act now to correct this slide and took the first step by jettisoning the coach and, it is hoped, will replace him with a Butcher antithesis.

But they can’t stop there. Next they should attempt a crash course in understanding what running a so-called glamour club is all about.

For a start this is not all Terry Butcher’s fault. He’s only the poor mug that was given the job. The fault lies with those who recommended him, appointed him and then paid him two or three times the salary that would have wooed a better coach. Benito Carbone, as a marquee player, was let slip because he was not affordable. But Butcher was. No pleasure in now guessing which would have been the better choice.

It all probably started with previous chairman Walter Bugno who, speaking at the club’s launch at Sydney’s Star City Casino in 2005 (for 40 minutes and mostly about himself), said he didn’t like the ‘glamour club’ label because the word glamour implies a lack of work ethic. It was rubbish then and it is rubbish now.

Club captain Mark Rudan was quoted earlier this season saying Sydney FC is the Real Madrid of the A-League. If only it were so. Rudan is dead right in saying that Sydney FC should be the Real Madrid of the A-League and we know that’s probably what he meant. But the sad thing is that the club’s leaders either never had that aspiration or, more probably, are clueless in how to achieve it.

Some bedside reading of what makes Real Madrid the phenomenon it is may have helped.

The Real Madrid byword, galacticos, only became fashionable in recent years. But the club’s ethos of parading the world’s best players, of serving up showpiece football, and winning everything with it, evolved half a century ago under its legendary president, Santiago Bernabéu.

That tradition is now so strong, so ingrained, that when Madrid’s fans turn up they expect not to see a game but a show. Anything less is seen by them as a betrayal of the Real Madrid culture, madridismo.

The Real Madrid formula is not rooted in rocket science: quality players + stylish football = class. They are, purely and simply, a class club. And, by natural extension, a winning club, because history shows that class teams win most things.

Some people might still foolishly believe that playing with style, putting on a show and having class, does not necessarily lead to victories. Such people should pay a visit to Madrid’s trophy room (two floors of it) at the Estadio Bernabéu, where the young lady at the door will tell you that there are around 800 trophies on display but will add that there is another 10,000 stored away for lack of room.

With the right philosophy, the right priorities, any league in the world can have its little Real Madrid, or even several Real Madrids, the teams that shine and glisten, that give their fans a genuine cause for pride as opposed to by simply sweating and toiling.

And here, in our own league, it doesn’t divinely have to be Sydney or just Sydney. Indeed, the more the merrier, and there are already other clubs in the A-League that have overtaken Sydney in charting a course towards having such a lofty identity and brand.

With such a course in mind Sydney FC would never have hired Terry Butcher, by his record a shopwindow for football mediocrity, lured here by some dimwit from a mediocre club. An astute board, conscious of what is needed to build a class club, the Real Madrid of the A-League, would have put the felt pen through his name the moment it was floated.

And they would have done so not because Butcher is British, as some, mischievously, would have us believe. Butcher’s limitations as a coach are not pre-evident necessarily because of his nationality, culture or language. I have seen many non-British coaches whose technical ideologies are as regressive as Butcher’s. He, whatever his nationality, simply never qualified to coach Sydney because, intellectually, he is a throwback to an amateur football time when muscle and grit stood alone in defining all that was admirable in the game.

Days before the fatal match against the Jets, Butcher wrote a column in the Sydney Morning Herald titled Onwards To Our Own Gates Of Fire, in which he drew some kind of analogy between the task of his charges and the Spartans’ gallant stand-off against the Persians in defence of Thermopylae in ancient Greece. If ever there was an admission by a coach of taking a defensive approach, a siege mentality, to a game this was it.

Terry just didn’t get it. A day later, after bulky new signing Jonas Salley made his training debut, Butcher was quoted: ‘I think people [watching] stood back and thought, my goodness he is a presence, and that’s what we want. He brings a bit of steel to the team, a bit of mongrel, a bit of devastation in midfield.’

In retrospect, thinking of creativity and guile in midfield rather than mongrel and devastation, might have been a better plan. Indeed, to compound his manifest confusion, Butcher went on to substitute his exemplary captain and leader, Mark Rudan, late in the game at 0:2, with Salley, the muscle-bound bruiser and ball-winner. Even when the backs were to the wall and a goal was needed to stem the loom of death, when the walls of Thermopylae were crumbling, Terry chose defensive mongrel over risk and adventure.

Go figure. Go figure how Butcher could have been appointed in the first place.

Accountable for all this are Terry Butcher and the men who appointed him, but not the players. The good news is that Sydney’s playing squad, if it stays intact, is technically a good one. A good new coach, a believer in real football (and he doesn’t need to be a fancy overseas name), can turn all this around in a matter of minutes.

But in the longer term a reality check by the club’s governors is a desperate need. A need to learn from some abject failures and miscalculations.

Whatever happens now, the bottom line is that the way Sydney FC has been run from its ambitious foundation to this day is no way to run a chicken shop, much less the Real Madrid of the A-League.

top