Arnold's dilemma

Graham Arnold lives in an unlucky time. In days past he would have been confirmed by now as Australia’s long-term national coach (whatever long-term means in the coaching business) and may even have been given a contract spanning the next two World Cup campaigns.

Australia has a history of patience and tolerance with national coaches way beyond what is the global norm. But those days are gone.

In the beginning of our World Cup history, it’s true, successive national coaches, Tiko Jelisavcic, Joe Vlasits, Jimmy Shoulder and Rudi Gutendorf were all jettisoned after failing at their first World Cup attempts.

Even Rale Rasic got the flick after '74, but that had everything to do with his Sir Arthur George politics and nothing whatever to do with his results.

It was pretty dumb. Rasic’s team qualified for 1974 by going through Asia and there is every reason to suspect he would have engineered a similar outcome in the 1978 and 1982 campaigns, when the route was the same.

But Sir Arthur, then the Australian Soccer Federation president, had some personal issue with Rasic, got rid of him and the successor, the dreadfully inept Shoulder, flunked at the hands of Kuwait and Iran.

The campaign after that, for 1982, was also via the Oceania-Asia path, but the eccentric Rudi screwed up against New Zealand at the first hurdle (3:3 and 0:2) and was gone.

If you count 1966 and 1970, five successive World Cup campaigns took us through the Asia route and we failed in four of them. It’s reasonable to suggest that had Rasic survived his personal tiff with Sir Arthur, Australia may have qualified in three successive World Cup campaigns under him and Rale today would be hailed as a bigger hero than he already is.

The next era introduced us to a new, more unjust time, when big guns from Europe and South America were thrown in to Australia’s path. We kept failing but the coaches survived.

Frank Arok failed against Scotland (and in those days Scotland was way stronger than part-time Australia) en-route to Mexico 1986. But Arok survived to fail in the following campaign, Australia eliminated by Israel who went on to take the fall against Colombia in a play-off.

Arok’s successor, the late Eddie Thompson, failed against Argentina but was re-appointed.

Then Terry Venables blew it against Iran, another Asian opponent, but he, too, kept his job.

Next, Frank Farina’s team failed against Uruguay in the 2002 campaign but, guess what, he was given the gig again. It was only when Farina finally got found out in the 2005 Confederations Cup that the new, much more success driven boss of the game, Frank Lowy, decided to move and replace him with Guus Hiddink.

And that is the new world in which Arnold finds himself.

The Lowy world is one in which failure is not an option. No more mister nice guy. Lowy wants at least a repeat of the Guus Hiddink achievements of 2006, if not an improvement on them, and he will do what he feels he needs to get them. And, let’s be honest, that is what football expects of him.

This is not Arnold’s fault but it is the reality.

When Hiddink moved on, the search immediately began for a successor of similar ilk. No such luminary has so far been found, or at least not one who has been both available and willing. But the search continues.

In the meantime Arnold is the coach. Not an interim coach but the coach. There is no official line that says Arnold’s tenure is temporary, or that his survival is linked to any timeline or result. He is in the job on a handshake but, like any coach, faces the jury with each performance and result. If those things are good, and continue to be good, the pressure to replace him is reduced.

Nine months on from the exit of Hiddink there is no clear answer. Under Arnold the team has qualified for the 2007 Asian Cup, not in a canter but easily. The results and performances in the various friendlies have been mixed: brilliant in spasms, worrying at other times.

The test, to be fair to Arnold, will come in the Asian Cup. That is the first major, serious and competitive environment in which Australia will be tested, post-Germany.

The search to find an apt and quick replacement for Hiddink has born no fruit and, with less than three months to go to the Asian Cup, the time has run out. Arnold will stay in the job until the end of it, as he should.

And that, thankfully, makes Lowy’s mission easier and more clear cut.

If the team wins the Asian Cup, Arnold will surely keep the job and take the team in to the 2010 World Cup campaign. The FFA will look pretty odd sacking him.

But if there is failure, the process to find someone more Hiddink-like will resume. As it should. Australia made the second phase of the 2006 World Cup and anything less than that will not suffice in 2010.

If Lowy remains unsure that can be achieved under Arnold, he will resume the hunt to replace him with someone with a higher success record.

FFA chief executive Ben Buckley told SBS TV's The World Game program that what now matters is not who is the long term coach but that the incumbent, Arnold, is given every support in his current mission.

And he is correct. As Hiddink proved, a talented and thoroughly experienced coach in international football can do wonders in a very short time. So in the naked mission to get Australia to South Africa in 2010, and perform well there, there is plenty of time between next July and 2010 to bring in the ‘right man’.

That said, it’s not ideal.

The ideal would have been to bring in the ‘right man’ at the start, right after Hiddink took the exit. A good, complete and potentially successful World Cup campaign spans four years not three years or two years.

It is at the start of the four-year cycle that the coach begins to build and plan. It is then that he has the luxury to make the radical changes, to blood the younger players and to discard those who will have passed their used-by date come the end of the cycle.

Arnold didn’t have that luxury, or at least he didn’t think he did. He saw himself as a short-term man, still does, and his first instinct was to try and prove himself by getting results, to impress, whether in friendlies or in Asian Cup qualifiers.

That naturally meant a lesser tendency to gamble with the younger, fringe men. He engineered showpiece retirements for Zeljko Kalac, Tony Vidmar, Tony Popovic and Stan Lazaridis, all of whom were hell-bent on going, but worked hard to persuade others of the old guard, like Craig Moore, Mark Viduka, John Aloisi and Scott Chipperfield to hang about.

In various games, long discarded, fringe war horses, like Kasey Wehrman, Michael Petkovic and Jacob Burns, were recalled for reasons difficult to grasp other than the supposition that they were safer options than throwing in the kids. None of that three has a snow flake’s chance in hell of appearing for Australia in the 2010 World Cup.

So why include them in the grand plan for 2010? The reason is obvious. In the first instance Arnold wanted short-term results. And, secondly, it is probable that he doesn’t believe much in the new wave, fearing there is no depth to the Socceroos squad in the modern era, post-2006.

To his credit Arnold became bolder in the most recent game against China, bringing in Carl Valeri and Shane Stefanutto, brand new men in the absence of Vince Grella and Chipperfield.

Patrick Kisnorbo at the back has been getting more game time, as has Michael Thwaite, and, further up front, Brett Holman is maturing as a vibrant and intelligent link man.

Michael Beauchamp, thanks to his FC Nurnberg domicile, should mature as a regular prospect and Arnold has even brought Nick Carle back in to the stable.

And then there is Matthew Spiranovic, a kid rejected by the A-League but good enough for both Nurnberg and Croatia. He should be blooded immediately, not just to secure him for Australia, but to increase options in the centre-back area where the next tier is not deep.

Maybe not all is lost. The backbone of the 2010 team, Lucas Neill, Brett Emerton, Grella, Jason Culina, Mark Bresciano, Tim Cahill, Harry Kewell and Mile Sterjovski, eight players, all of whom were prolific in Germany, will still be young enough and will carry most of the burden.

There will be some vacancies: a safe goalkeeper (and Mark Schwarzer shows no intentions of not going on), a commanding centre-back to replace Moore, a left-back to replace Chipperfield, and at centre forward, someone to take the place of the gifted, regal and intelligent Viduka.

Big holes to fill but not impossible. What is required is some belief and some serious willingness to try newcomers.

Will Arnold oblige in forthcoming games and the Asian Cup? We shall see, but it won’t be easy for him. On the one hand he will want to perform in the Asian Cup (i.e. win it) in order to keep his job – and that will mean minimal experimentation – and on the other he will be expected to look beyond and use the Cup as a building tool for the World Cup.

Maybe the words of the old fox, ex-Socceroos coach Frank Arok, can be the right advice. He used to tell younger coaches: 'Work as though you will have the job for the next hundred years, but expect to be sacked tomorrow.'

top