Time to change our old style

Let’s get this straight: Australia’s maiden participation in the AFC Asian Cup has been an unmitigated disaster. We got our bums kicked in a big way, no question about that.

The Socceroos’ delusions of grandeur were exposed as a classic case of arrogance borne out of ignorance by a number of teams that showed us they can play modern, all-purpose football with a rich blend of flair, smartness, control and humility.

The cumbersome Australians unfortunately had none of these qualities as they stumbled from one mishap to another before crashing in the quarter-finals.

Asia has been a reality check for our football and we found out to our cost that in many facets of the game we are well behind times. The World Cup in Germany seems a million years away now.

"The Asian Cup has been a learning experience for Australia," Korea Republic’s Dutch coach Pim Verbeek told me after his side had knocked out Iran on penalties to reach the semi-finals.

"And if you think conditions at the Asian Cup were hard, wait until you have to play teams like Uzbekistan where an away match means a 20-hour trip each way. Mark my words, Asian football is not easy."

This is not a complaint about Graham Arnold, Mark Viduka or Harry Kewell or whoever was involved in this Asian pipedream. This is all about our football culture centred on an antiquated Anglicised mentality that has not moved ahead like the rest of the world has.

Australia can justifiably claim that the conditions at the Asian Cup were not conducive to enterprising football, that it showed at times against Thailand that it was capable of putting on some decent stuff and that it only went out of the tournament on penalties to holder Japan after playing for almost an hour with 10 men following Vinnie Grella’s harsh expulsion.

But to dwell on these matters is to miss the point, which is that Australia and its stars were found wanting when it came to pure skills and tactics. The Socceroos were simply outplayed by three of the four teams it met.

Oman never deserved to be pegged back by Tim Cahill's late equalising goal, Iraq gave us a lesson in football technique and Japan were the better team even before Grella's red card.

So why did the same players who have made headway in some of the world's toughest leagues and put on such a fine show at the 2006 World Cup fail to leave their mark on Asian football?

Perhaps this is because our stars cannot express themselves to the best of their ability in the green and gold jersey because they are bogged down by an old-fashioned system that turns them from artists to artisans and has more to do with physique than technique.

If Australia is smart enough it should take a good look at itself and the way it plays its football...which is a poor man’s English game that at best is simply naive and inadequate for modern times and at worst predictable, rugged and ugly.

Asia is going to be a huge challenge for Australia in the next few years but our ‘English’ approach to football will get us nowhere because it is not the way to go in this day and age. Nobody else plays that way anymore.

English football realised this long ago after a failure too many and the unimaginative, long-ball game is history is far as the national team is concerned.

One might argue that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with the Australian game if it reaches the same level of English football.

But England is a giant of the world game and has a much bigger population than ours and can produce far more quality players.

So it could afford to be reluctant to change its one-dimensional ways because it knew that generally it had enough stars to turn a match in a split second.

Australia does not have this luxury yet it still persists with an essentially physical game designed to stifle the life out of the opposition.

This is why we should take a leaf out of Guus Hiddink’s style and try to adopt his ways right down to grassroots level.

It’s either that or our historic entry in to the AFC will have achieved nothing. We might as well have stayed in Oceania.

We’ll win a few games here and there but we will never become a strong football nation with a proper base to match.

The Asian Cup has shown us our limitations and what needs to be done.

We do not have to aim to become a Brazil, Italy or Germany.

If we can emulate the likes of Japan, Iran, Korea or Iraq, that would be enough.

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