Do We Need Craig Foster's Revolution?

Australian football honchos Frank Lowy and Craig Foster recently locked horns over the direction of the game in this country. Phill Chadwick breaks down both sides of the argument and looks closely at the core issues.

A few weeks ago SBS Football pundit Craig Foster launched a crusade to rid Australian football of the British "Mafia" and have more South American and Continental European influence in Australia's Junior development programmes.

Frank Lowy took it as a personal attack on him and on the FFA in general and came out swinging.

To me, they are both wrong.

Lowy was wrong to react that way to a well-meaning effort by Foster to stimulate debate. There is no way Foster could possibly blame the FFA for the sorry state of player development in this country. They just haven't been in the job long enough. What Lowy should have said was, OK Craig, we know that there is some way to go in that area, but the system, personnel and structure is a legacy of the old guard and we are planning to tackle it as soon as we can.

On the other side of the coin, I think Foster wants to have a Revolution where some well directed Evolution would do.

But first, lets calmly look at the issues. What is the objective here? Surely it is to equip young Australian footballers to compete on the world stage, in the best professional leagues. That is the necessary first step if we want the national team to rise up the FIFA rankings to its rightful place in or near the top 10.

Where does such success come from? Take a look at the current top ten. Brazil, Netherlands, Argentina, Czech Republic, Mexico, France, USA, Spain, Portugal and Sweden.

See any common thread there? Well I don't. We have countries ranging in size from 295 million people (USA) down to nine million (Sweden). We see rich countries (USA - GDP/capita $40,000, ranked two behind Luxemburg) and poor countries (Brazil - GDP/capita $8,100, ranked 92). We see traditional football cultures, where football is a deep part of the national psyche and the good old USofA, newly striving to compete, where football would rank well behind Baseball and American Football in the public's consciousness.

All this shows me is that success is an individual thing and that each country has achieved its high ranking in a different way. So success cannot be manufactured by copying someone else's methods because each country is different. A successful strategy has to be designed to suit both the culture and the resources of this country.

Does Foster really think that Brazil's success comes from well-structured Junior coaching systems? I think it comes more from having millions of boys, with football deeply embedded in their souls, playing football in the streets and on the beaches and dreaming of a way out.

At the other extreme, there is no way Australian football can invest the sort of resources the USA has in importing coaches and providing state of the art facilities. For heavens sake, some US High Schools and most Colleges have fully professional coaching staff and superb facilities.

Australia is, whether we like it or not, culturally a hybrid of Britain and America, with important but minor admixtures from the rest of the world. Unfortunately for football in this country, we haven't imported the British obsession with football, nor do we have the enormous resources of the Americans to simply buy what we don't already have.

But Foster and Lowy are both right, as well.

The results achieved by the current system are not good enough and change is needed. The FFA is not at fault, at least not yet, for the lack of success.

Do you remember the 1980's? In cricket, the West Indies were the Brazil of that game. They dominated the world and were almost unbeatable for many years. Why was that? They certainly didn't have a strong, centralised junior talent development process. Their young cricketers were steeped in the game from before they could walk. They succeeded by pure hard work, practice, talent and luck. It was cultural.

So did the ACB import West Indian coaches in an attempt to replicate the success? No, that would not have fitted the culture here. What they did was to build the right structure, with the right philosophy and sufficient resources. The result is, as we have seen recently, Australian dominance of world cricket. When basketball became more attractive to young West Indians, they lost that cultural edge, and are now trying to recover lost ground.

In Olympic sports, likewise, Australia was humiliated at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and set out to fix it. Hence the AIS and coaching structures that have restored Australian swimming, at least, to relative dominance on the world stage.

What lessons can the FFA learn from all this? Well, all would agree that changes have to be made. Australia has both the population and the resources to produce a football team that should be consistently ranked in the top 20. We should expect to qualify for the World Cup on a regular basis.

I would hope that Lowy, O'Neil and Co. know that, and they know that international success is vital for the long term success of the A-League. Craig Foster perhaps overstated his case deliberately to stir up debate.

My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that we should not be overly concerned about how other countries have managed to achieve success, but build a system that suits our own unique circumstances. One idea that comes to mind is to have each A-League club establish a junior football academy, adequately resourced and well coached. These Academy players would benefit by exposure to full-time professional football.

The older, more developed players could play as a Reserve grade curtain raiser to the A-League games. They also would provide injury-hit A-league squads with some extra depth.

But one point has to be made above all. Like Les Murray, I believe that it is ball skills that are fundamental to any development programme.

The youngsters can become big, strong, aerobic running machines later, but if they don't get the ball skills early on, they won't ever be world class footballers.

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