We need to handle Rogic with care

He catches us unawares and before we know it we are gobsmacked by the sheer magnificence of his game.

I'm talking about Central Coast Mariners sensation Tom Rogic, who has set the A-League alight in only four senior games.

Rogic, who hails from Canberra, was thrust into the limelight by Mariners coach Graham Arnold, who is never afraid to give promising footballers a chance to show what they're made of on the big stage.

”You never know how good they are unless you give them a chance,” Arnold said last season when asked what he thought of young Mustafa Amini's impact on the competition.

Arnold had no hesitation in giving 19-year-old Rogic his big opportunity.

Boy, didn't he take it!

In the last two rounds, Rogic struck two extravagant goals, could have scored two more that would have been equally memorable and left his mark with a cultured game one would expect from a quality No 10.

Attacking midfielder Rogic's outstanding performances understandably have thrilled many commentators and pundits.

Hype, hoopla and hyperbole have gone into overdrive.

The precocious lad has already been declared a star, been compared to another famous Canberran Ned Zelic and is already seen as a future Australia player.

For goodness sake: the kid has only played four games!

And, as he told The World Game last week, he still has a lot of things to learn and he is “definitely not the finished product”.

If we are not careful we will put so much pressure on Rogic and talk him up so much that he could buckle under the weight of massive expectation.

This is a risky approach and is what is worrying the Mariners.

The club said it has no problem with Rogic doing media work because he appears to be very comfortable with it.

But it is concerned that young players like Rogic might read too much into viewers' and readers' comments on stories that appear on television, newspapers and the internet.

The Mariners have every reason to protect their prodigy, who is on a five-month contract.

It should be remembered that for every promising player who becomes a star there are a hundred of others who fail to make it and end up playing second division football in Scandinavia or eastern Europe.

So it might just be an idea to hold our breath in terms of our appraisal of Rogic, however hard it might seem at the moment because he has the capacity to take your breath away.

By all means we should support and encourage him and recognise and rejoice in his feats because he obviously is something special and a natural if ever there was one.

But our treatment of Rogic should be handled with care and foresight because the game in Australia desperately needs crowd-pulling heroes and it simply cannot afford to let somebody like Rogic slip through our fingers and fall by the wayside.