Football Oz style

The rolling, and intensifying, debate over what technical direction Australian football should take has thrown up a regular question: does, or should, Australia have its own style of playing and if so what is it or what should it be?

In the first instance, of course it should. Almost all countries and cultures have a certain style of playing, whether it’s the Germans, the Italians, the Dutch, the English or the Brazilians, and so should Australia. I don’t believe there is a debate about that and those who peddle this idea as their own ought to take a pill.

What there might be a debate about is what that style actually is or should be.

I believe we can call off the search.

There is already a distinctly Australian football style and it has existed for the best part of two decades. It is very Australian, utterly reflective of our culture, a product of our social evolution and potentially lethal.

To illustrate what it is and how it evolved, we need to go back a bit.

Prior to the ‘great schism’, the 1957 administrative breakaway in football, when the migrants began to put a profound stamp on the game in Australia, football was largely amateur and suburban. And its style reflected it.

In this era teams were sent out without a playing plan, largely to try to win through grit and heart, mostly by bruising and maiming the opposition. It was a provincial time and the way our teams played was what you would have expected in the colonies.

But even then, when there was no tactical sophistication and ball skills were dreadfully minimal, our players had certain qualities that were uniquely Australian and worth fostering and holding on to.

It was their steel, their mental resolve, their proud inability to throw in the towel. Qualities which just about all Australian sportsmen and women have always had, still have, and usually in greater doses than their foreign counterparts.

When the migrants came and took hold, they changed the game. In came a sense of professionalism, teams actually started to play with tactics and game plans, and there was a serious degree of technique and showmanship on display.

These things were parts of the cultural baggage the migrants brought with them and, being migrants, they unpacked this stuff on the unsuspecting Australian sporting culture.

Of course this was a time of first generation immigrants, fresh off the boat: migrant administrators, fans, coaches, referees and players. They were essentially emigre cloned embodiments of the football cultures they had left behind and there was little that was actually Australian about them.

Then came the next wave in the process. The migrants began to have children, locally born and brought up. And therein was born the mix that gave us what we might call an Australian style.

The migrant parents, hailing from various corners of the football world, whether from southern Europe, central Europe, the Balkans, Britain or South America, were bringing up their football playing kids in their own images, or at least in the images of their own football cultures.

Intervening in this process was the fact that the kids were being brought up in Australia, in a culture where, somewhat differently to the cultures of their genetic origins, the kids were expected to put in, fight and sweat for the cause and the team, and refuse to die on the field, no matter what.

What the parents provided their kids, driven by their own values, was a sense of stylistic and technical substance. Fathers cajoled their sons into paying attention to skill, technique, elegance, poise and a sense of expression.

Working in tandem were the other influences the kids were subjected to under peer pressure. To laze and bludge on the field, to throw in the towel, to do the cry-baby bit at the end of a robust tackle, was ‘un-Australian’, and any player with those failings was deemed an outcast, not a member of the team, no matter how good he was technically and individually.

So what we had, at least potentially, was players with the mental fortitude, pride and staying power of Australians, married to the yen for skill and style passed down from immigrant parents of the 50s and 60s generation.

It’s a combination not too many football cultures around the world have, if any.

Though the 2006 Socceroos were the ultimate product of this process, such a distinctive Australian style first began to appear in the mid-1980s and then national coach Frank Arok was the first to spot it and milk it.

Arok adored what he called the ‘mad dog’ mentality of Australian players. But he was from the Balkans and knew full well that without technique and creative skill, next to the ‘mad dog’ thing, you can’t win anything, so he declined to select the skill-less workhorses, at least in the attacking positions.

It was in this era that the national team began to rely more on locals than on imports, when men like Alan Davidson, Oscar Crino, Graham Jennings, John Kosmina, David Mitchell, Charlie Yankos, Eddie Krncevic, Frank Farina, and Jimmy Patikas became the torch bearers of the Socceroos.

Later, when our players began to flow to Europe to play in high quality leagues, it got better and along came the generation of Zelic, Okon, Lazaridis, Corica, not to say the young Viduka and Kewell, all technically adept men yet very ‘Australian’ in their mental attitudes.

The culmination came in 2006 although one hopes that is not the end of it.

The majority of the heroes of Germany are sons of migrants and all have this magic mix. And the rest that are not of that genetic heritage have grown up in a culture dominated by the migrant input into our game over 40 years and it shows.

Of course this Australian style is not yet faultless and there are qualities still to be attained to make it perfectly rounded.

One of them is that technically the majority of our players are still found wanting standing next to those of the elite nations. The FFA’s Talent Development and Identification Review, due to report in the coming weeks, is set to recognise and address this.

Another, as pointed out by both Guus Hiddink and Rob Baan, is that our players are ‘not smart enough’. For that, read too innocent, too naive.

But the roots are definitely already there for a distinctly Australian style, very different from most others, and can be squarely blamed on our distinctly multicultural society.

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