Lessons of the Sydney revolution

There can be sweetly gratifying moments in this job and this is one of them.

Even for the pontificating columnist and commentator, driven to build grandstands from which all that is wrong with the game has to be jeered, there are interludes and causes for rejoicing. The transformation that Sydney FC has undergone in a brief spurt of time is such a cause and such an interlude, and one hopes a long one.

It is barely six weeks ago that I wrote, for this space, a brooding but necessary article about the dark and menacing crossroad that club found itself confronting, just after it ended its ill-conceived and destructive affair with Terry Butcher.

Allow me to recall some of what I said then:

‘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.’

The antithesis, it appears, has been found in Branko Culina and the slide, it also appears, has been corrected.

Early days yet, granted, and the train could still easily be derailed.

But the suggestion is that six weeks is a long time in football. Sydney FC in this short Culina era has played just two games, not quite the sum total of swallows that make a summer. But, let us be frank, we are witnessing quite a change and in quick time.

The style, belief and bravado with which Sydney took the plunge against Shanghai Shenhua and then the Urawa Reds is the stuff that defines what should have been prescribed for such an ambitious A-League club at its roots. It is remarkable and perverse that it is only now reaching these heights, 20 months after its launch, given that it should have done so from the beginning.

The Branko treatment clearly suggests that such could have been achieved in the first weeks of the club’s existence, at a time when the squad was not so thin, when it was fat with Yorke, Ceccoli, Petrovski and a fit Timpano.

To narrate how Culina transformed Sydney FC would be a case of going over old ground already well observed elsewhere, including at the Paddington end of Aussie Stadium where the admiring and newly joyous Cove resides.

More important is to ponder what the lessons are of all this, and there are plenty of them.

The identity of the coach is the most immediately obvious. That Culina should do this in such a short time poses why he, or someone like him, was not appointed at the club’s outset. Why was Littbarski, a legendary ex-player but of moderate credentials as a coach, chosen ahead of a Culina at perhaps three times the price?

The answer, of course, lies in the steroid driven marketing mindset of the time: big-name coach, no matter how lousy, and a big-name player (Yorke), no matter how much past it, will bring a dividend of big headlines, big sponsorships and big numbers of bums.

It’s a risky business, in commercial terms, especially if it doesn’t also bring results and entertaining football. As luck would have it, the results did come as did the fans. But the price was massive, an astonishing nearly $7 million of red ink in Sydney’s first season.

The cost and the debt brought a re-think as it had to. Lowy, to stop the bleed, took a controlling interest. The pricy Littbarski and Yorke were jettisoned, as eventually was Walter Bugno, who chaired the year one regime, but not before a replacement for Littbarski was recruited in the shape of the less expensive but thoroughly incompetent ‘big name’, Terry Butcher.

It was another huge blunder as an investment and the rest is history. By the end of season two, with Sydney scraping into the four, playing football best described as muscularly suburban and with fans abandoning the club in their thousands, Butcher was sent back to Scotland and the club turned to Culina (ironically the man it first courted back in 2005 but rejected in favour of Littbarski because Branko was not a big enough name).

The bad economics of all this was one mistake. Another was the way the club took its eye off the ball of its core activity: entertainment. It forgot the business it was ultimately in. The small matter of designing a club and a team that is known for exciting and turning on the fans had never entered the club’s strategy.

If it had, neither Littbarski nor Butcher would have been employed and it is more likely that the appointment of Culina would have got the nod in the first place. Culina had been around for some time as a coach with a record of fostering showy football yet he was seen only as a moderate low-name, not enough of a big fish for a club that wanted to make a splash.

If the Culina oversight now poses as a lesson for Sydney it also does for the league as a whole.

Culina is not the first midstream coaching appointment in the A-League which has led to a shift in both entertainment value and results.

In Version 1 of the eight-team league Miron Bleiberg of the Queensland Roar stood out as the only helmsman with a self-confessed penchant for driving under the influence of the need to put on a show. The others were just content to get results, in the dullest ways possible if that was what was required.

Then came the coaching dominoes.

The dreary Richard Money was replaced by Nick Theodorakopoulos at Newcastle and he in turn by Gary Van Egmond, both aficionados of crisp, attacking, possession football, whatever the differences between their results.

Ernie Merrick at Melbourne went searching for Brazilians, did some serious tweaking of his tactics and came up with an on-field package that was sheer entertainment and thrilling success.

John Kosmina at Adelaide also had a re-think and decided that keep-ball (‘We like to knock the ball around’) was his new way. And it showed. Adelaide, for all its off the field silliness, was a far more entertaining team in Version 2 than it was in the first season. He was replaced by Aurelio Vidmar who, even more than Kosmina, wants a team that plays football and ‘the passing game’.

In Auckland the boring route-one ideologue, Paul Nevin, was replaced by local boy Ricky Herbert who figured that the small boy, underdog mentality had to go and that nothing could be won without ‘dictating play’, meaning the Knights had to keep the ball and pass it around. And the results showed he was right, no matter that they came too late.

And then came Culina at Sydney.

Now five of the eight A-League clubs are playing a professed ‘passing game’ (as opposed to only one, the Roar, doing it at the start of version one): Melbourne, Newcastle, Adelaide, Sydney and New Zealand. We await to see how the remaining three, Queensland, Central Coast and Perth, will be influenced by this trend come the new season.

It’s a massive turnaround and tantamount to a technical revolution in the fledgling A-League. The penny, it appears, has dropped. Clubs and their coaches are now realising that playing real football, ‘knocking the ball around’ rather than just hoofing it, is an avenue to both better results and swelling attendances.

May it continue.

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