The surprising and, to some, underwhelming appointment of Ian Crook as new Sydney FC coach is enjoying an early honeymoon with the media and the public.

I was among those caught by surprise. Here was the ‘bling club’ appointing a desk corporal as its general. It wasn’t exactly a brash statement from a club which, in 2005, almost had Roy Hodgson as its first coach and paid big bucks to have All Night Dwight rage to the swaying vocals of The Cove.

Not that I thought he was a lousy coach, mind you, for I knew not what kind of coach he was or is. It’s just that when you have reason to believe the club was capable of chasing some big name, you get a wee shock when the name announced is not Philippe Troussier, Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard or Sven-Goran Eriksson but Ian Crook.

When I first heard, I was assured by club staffers that 'Crookie' had the respect of all at Sydney FC, including the players, and all insiders felt relieved and happy that it was him. That was a good sign.

But then came the press conference where the new head coach was unveiled, he who once told his friends that he saw himself as a 'career assistant'.

On the podium Crook went to some lengths, without solicitation, to talk with the kind of brash his appointment didn’t reflect. He spoke, refreshingly, about bringing back the bling, about the need for entertaining football and about 'players with a bit of excitement'.

For an old football junkie like me, for whom football that doesn’t entertain is not football at all, it was music to the ears.

The Sydney Morning Herald headlined the news with Sydney put faith in Crook to bring back the bling. The Daily Telegraph went with Crook to entertain the fans.

"That never bothered me, the bling in year one," Crook was quoted saying. "Everyone thought it would be a negative, but I don't agree with that. I think we need to bring a bit of that back."

"The one thing we do need to add, and something we've been blessed with in the past, is some real crowd-pleasers.

"Dwight was a crowd-pleaser, even David Carney to be fair and then Juninho. So I think it's important what we bring needs to fit into a culture of a winning mentality but it needs to have a little bit of flair. We want to get people not only in here but up and off their seats."

What a nice way of putting it.

This is the man who expedited the rise of Joel Chianese. So we know what he means.

It’s the kind of language you would expect from the president of Real Madrid, or of FC Barcelona, not the coach of an A-League club, not even Sydney FC.

It appears that the new coach gets it, in a way that no Sydney FC coach before him, nor chairman or CEO, ever did. What Crook gets is that a football club with ambitions of true greatness, of having a regal identity, of one which can build undying fan loyalty, cannot be that without regal football.

And that goes for some other clubs too, by the way, most notably Melbourne Victory which may well have taken the right turn towards being a footballing showcase with the signing of Ange Postecoglou.

It will go for the new west Sydney club, whose fans will never tolerate ‘blue collar football’. If Tony Popovic takes it the same way we’re in for a right royal rivalry.

Ian Crook, clearly, wants to play what Ruud Gullit called 'sexy football' and has made that part of his mission. Not for him is it enough to merely win trophies and ‘grind out results’, as one of his predecessors once pledged to do. He wants to do it with style and with class.

Sydney FC, David Traktovenko, Scott Barlow, you want to be a football club of true greatness? If Ian Crook stays true to his word, you may just have got the right man to give you that.

Now make sure you give him the tools to do it.

It was the interviewer’s curious scepticism of the likely fruits borne by the 2015 Asian Cup, to be hosted by Australia, to which McGuire referred as a possible ‘lemon’.

Respected Sydney Morning Herald columnist Richard Hinds later echoed this notion.

"So disastrous was the 2022 World Cup bid, and so parlous the state of the game's finances, only partially revealed in the sanitised final version of the Smith report, there is a natural cynicism about the FFA's ability to run the event," Hinds said.

Where does this come from, this mysterious, unexplained hypothesis that Football Federation Australia is somehow incapable of organising the 2015 Asian Cup? Where is the evidence for the ‘natural cynicism’? And who says there is any?

First, Australia has an impeccable record in organising major international events. And you can include in this the football events and those mounted by this country’s football governors over the years.

The 1981 and 1993 FIFA World Youth Cups hosted by Australia, each with 16 participants like the Asian Cup, went off seamlessly. Both were organised by a governing body which is unkindly recalled by some today as a herd of donkeys.

The current regime’s only major international event so far, the FIFA Congress in Sydney in 2007, full of ceremony, pomp and protocol, went off without the most minor glitch.

Indeed, apart from the botch of the Marston Medal affair in Brisbane this year, you cannot fault much-maligned FFA for its event management.

But, in any case, let’s stop for a second and consider what will define the 2015 Asian Cup as a success.

Richard Hinds for instance asks how hard it will be to fill an Australian stadium for a match between, say, Oman and Uzbekistan. A decent question, but not entirely relevant to what the real challenges and opportunities of the tournament are.

The Asian Cup is riddled with games with small crowds and which do not excite the citizenry of the host nation. They happened in Qatar in 2011 and in the tournament before it, hosted jointly by Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Yet each tournament has been deemed to have been a success, because of the vast TV audiences it reached across the Asian continent and the brand enrichment it delivered for Asian football. And for the hosts.

This is the opportunity for Australia (if only someone would tell Eddie McGuire).

As I have argued in this space many times before, football is a major vehicle, THE major vehicle, by which Australia as a nation has an opportunity to engage with Asia in the ‘Asian century’. This is a claim no other sport can make. This is the reason why Lowy’s desire to have us host the Asian Cup is both astute and admirable.

It’s not just about football. It’s about us as a nation and about where we want to belong.

In 2015 Australia will be hosting the Asian Cup, the first time an Asian championship of any sport will be held on our soil. Think of what that will say to its audiences both in Australia and across the Asian continent.

It will tell Australians that, despite the map-makers, we are part of Asia. It will tell Asians that we are among them and want to be among them.

The audiences for the tournament will number in the hundreds of millions. Australia will be a showcase to the world’s largest continent, of which we are now inextricably part and want to be for our own survival as an economically prosperous nation.

That will be the measure of an Australia-hosted Asian Cup’s success or otherwise.

There will be the odd dull game and there might be some games where the hot dog sellers will outnumber the crowd (though I doubt it).

But a ‘lemon’ it will not be.

Why? Because Postecoglou is the first Australian coach in the A-League era who has been lured because of his excellence and success, and by an attractive offer, from one club to another.

This is a major breakthrough. It will soon be followed by another if, as rumours persist, Graham Arnold moves from Central Coast to Sydney FC.

So far in its seven seasons the A-League has employed a total of 25 coaches, not including those of the two New Zealand clubs, Knights and Phoenix. Fifteen of the 25 have been Australian-born or made, that is, not imported from abroad.

There has been some musical chairs among that 15, for instance Branko Culina, John Kosmina and Ian Ferguson, but none had moved as a result of having excited suitors by what they had done, and certainly not in mid-contract, as Postecoglou did. None was a ‘big signing’ in the European sense where pin-up coaches are pounced upon by rival clubs in order to make a splash and get immediate results.

But this has now changed with Postecoglou and with what is about to happen with Arnold. Postecoglou was made a massive offer to stay at Roar which he rejected. Arnold, similarly, will be the subject of a clamour by Mariners to keep him but he will probably move as a result of an offer which, in his view, will be a better step for his career.

These are as good times as had been had for Australian coaches in recent years. It is likely that Melbourne Heart will opt to replace John van’t Schip with either Ante Milicic or John Aloisi. There is word that Tony Popovic is being courted by those trying to launch the new club in western Sydney. Rado Vidosic, a local coaching product, will be at the helm of Brisbane Roar.

Come the new season, and assuming Sydney FC and the new western Sydney club will opt for a local, there will be not one A-League club coached by an import. Lavicka and Van’t Schip are both gone.

This is a stunning turnaround over three years when Vitezslav Lavicka was imported in the midst of a climate that suggested a need to import coaching expertise. Later came Franz Straka, Rini Coolen and John Van’t Schip as the momentum towards imported coaches continued.

Of course it was always the case that what clubs needed were good quality coaches, irrespective of nationality. Many opted for imports simply because the local coaches they had previously employed had not been up to it.

Importing coaches was never a sin or a crime provided they were of a high quality and were here to provide a legacy for budding local ones. This is what has happened with Van’t Schip at Heart, where the mission was always for him to be eventually replaced by a local he has groomed in his own image.

But the breakthrough inarguably came with Postecoglou and his stunning success at Roar. Had the trophies and the glorious football of Brisbane come under an imported coach, other clubs would now be clamouring to sign a coach from the same country or culture. Now this will not happen because Ange is Australian born and made.

If Arnold is to move to Sydney FC, the A-League’s two biggest clubs, from the country’s two biggest cities, will be coached by Australians. This has not happened since Culina and Ernie Merrick were at the helm of Sydney FC and Victory respectively.

One difference is that both Postecoglou and Arnold are what you could call new generation Australian coaches, neither of whom were in demand when the league began in 2005.

The other, even more important difference is that both will have got their new jobs purely on the basis of the success they had brought to their previous clubs, in terms of trophies as well their quality of football.

Both moves will and should excite the fans of their new clubs, Melbourne Victory in particular. For once Victory appears to have got it right in choosing its coach after its shambolic recruitment efforts of last season.

But Postecoglou’s challenge is not an easy one. He will now begin to build a technical culture the country’s biggest and most demanding club has never had. That will mean, one has to assume, a crop of some new players as Ange goes about sifting out the players that will not suit his philosophy (as he did at Roar).

Also missing from his right hand will be Ken Stead, the football fitness guru at Roar for the past two successful seasons, who has opted to stay in Brisbane. Stead’s sharp knowledge of how to get and keep players fit for a brand of football that requires optimum ball possession, sweet movement off the ball and high defensive pressing played a huge role in Roar’s successes and will be hard to replace.

If you haven’t been keeping up, both Brisbane Roar and Mariners, our two strongest teams, are languishing without a win in four games and their chances of making the next phase are somewhere between nothing and zero.

The only exception is Adelaide United which elegantly leads its group with three wins and one loss. John Kosmina, with a defensive, counterattacking game, has done a smart job tactically with the Reds.

But the broader and much better indicator of Australia’s competitive strength in Asia is what is now happening with Roar and Mariners. They are the norm. In historic terms, in terms of what our elite clubs have managed to do in the ACL since they first entered it.

So why is this? Why is it that Brisbane Roar, which we have grown to admire for the past two years for its beautiful, flowing passing game, struggles to win a match against the Japanese and the Koreans? Why is it that the losses just keep on coming, even when our teams are at home?

Actually the reasons are not that new. Those who are familiar with history or have longer memories will know about Australia’s annihilation at the hands of North Korea in the 1966 World Cup qualifiers (1-6 and 1-3 in the two games).

The Koreans were vastly superior in technique and in particular handling speed and speed of thought. And that is still the essential difference today between Australian club teams and the best in Asia, particularly Japan and Korea.

According to Australia’s national technical director, Han Berger, the consistent inability of our club teams to match it with the best from Japan and Korea is ‘confirmation that technically we still have a lot of work to do’.

After the 1965 debacle of Phnom Penh against the North Koreans of course the Australian national team grew to beat Asian opposition quite consistently, basically by out-muscling them. Later, as our players found their way to high levels of professionalism in Europe, this became even more consistent.

But where we actually are technically in comparison to the Japanese and the Koreans today is best measured by how our domestic player quality compares. This is where the Champions League is such a useful and realistic yardstick.

Berger, who coached in the J-League in 2004-05, remembers how impressed and surprised he was by the individual technical quality of Japanese players. That was eight years ago and the standard of Japanese players has even further improved since then.

Now trying to out-muscle teams from Asia is no longer enough. There has to be a more even match in technical quality. In this our role model has to be Japan and what the Japanese have done in youth development over the past 20 years.

Alfred Galustian, who has assisted Berger in tutoring the coaches for his elite junior development program, makes the point that we spend too much time thinking about how we should learn from the Spaniards, the Dutch and the Brazilians. It is, he says, from the Japanese that we should learn. It is their proven methods, as a fellow developing football country, that we should try and adopt.

Indeed other Asian countries are not resting on their laurels either and are heavily investing in technical development, in particular the Thais and the Indonesians.

Indonesia has recently turned to American youth coaching guru Tom Byer to guide its programs. According to the Jakarta Globe Byer is credited with being a driving force behind Japan’s rise to the peak of Asian football, with his technique training, network of football schools and vast media presence helping inspire hundreds of thousands of people in his adopted country.

The Indonesians also have their under 16 national squad permanently playing in the Uruguayan second division.

The Thais and the Indonesians are not yet at the standard of the Japanese and the Koreans and our teams can still physically over-power them. But even that won’t be for long.

Berger has now begun the work that is meant to set Australia on the right path and to make up for the decades of lost time, the years and years of catastrophically primitive coaching which produced athletes with ‘good engines’ but not footballers.

But it will take many more years before the fruits are borne. The elite kids under Berger’s Skillaroos program, for example, are 12 years old. Even if we get this right we can’t expect to have mature players of the right technical quality in under another ten years.

That’s a lot of AFC Champions Leagues in which our teams can be expected to consistently falter.

It’s all another one of Johnny Warren’s ‘I told you so’s. Those like him who have spent the past 30 years moaning about the poverty of our youth coaching methods have again been proven to be dead right.

I say better to bid goodbye to the big fella from Newcastle. The damage, too much of it, has been done.

With all the respect in the world to Mr Tinkler for what he tried to do for the Jets and for football in the district, are the league and the game not better off without him?

Of course FFA is far from blameless in all of this and more about that in a moment. But it's Nathan Tinkler who pulled the plug on his football club, not FFA.

It's interesting that Tinkler points the finger at FFA for failing to engage with the communities. One wonders what he has done for his beloved Hunter district community with this stunt.

We all knew that Tinkler, like his pit-bull counterpart, Clive Palmer, was not a genuine football man. But we trusted, or at least were persuaded to trust, that he believed in his club and the growth of the game.

Now we find out he has no faith at all. Instead of staying in for the struggle and the long haul, he has squibbed the challenge and has walked away from a commitment.

Is that the act of an honourable man? Was it honourable, now that we think about it, for him to sack his coach and his marquee player on the day of the season launch?

The limp-wristed, stuttering press conference given by Tinkler's CEO, Troy Palmer, failed to convince that such a draconian step – and so rudely timed – was warranted.

Tinkler jettisoned Jason Culina, an Australian World Cup hero, for daring to be injured. Now that matter is a subject of an unresolved dispute between himself and FFA, and all of a sudden is among the reasons for shutting down the Jets.

Tinkler moans about the $5 million he was asked to pay for taking ownership of the Jets and about some mysterious commission someone got for the sale.

So what's his beef? The vendor, FFA, valued the property at $5 million. Tinkler, the buyer, accepted. Now, like many buyers who would love to have second thoughts after the event, Tinkler thinks he may have paid too much. Sorry, too late. Done deal, Mr Tinkler. Maybe some better due diligence or more skilful negotiation next time.

Maybe the property Tinkler bought was not worth $5 million, given that it was a loss-maker with debts mounting and membership numbers waning. But as an established sports brand with some history and tradition and closely identified with the local community, it was certainly worth something.

The only person deserving of some sympathy after that transaction is Con Constantine, the previous Jets owner, who got nothing out of the ownership changing hands. But at least the money Tinkler paid has gone back into football and not to pay off Constantine's personal debts.

All that said, there is more to this than Tinkler's mere capacity for dummy spits.

As one football bent mate said in an SMS to me: "Billionaires are fine but not if they're infidels."

Question is why was Tinkler given a licence in the first place? Why indeed was Clive Palmer trusted with the same thing?

We all know the answer: money, the owner's capacity to pay and provide financial security.

What we now know, and FFA should have known, is that a league licence in the hands of someone who has no natural care for football guarantees no security at all.

In the hands of Palmer it languished like a living corpse. In the case of Tinkler, the big guy with money to burn turned out to be an 'Indian giver'.

But if you give a licence to a rich guy purely because he's rich, and without caring whether he loves or understands football, you also need to give him support and guidance. And most of all you need to massage his ego, something rich guys tend to have in spades, Frank Lowy among them.

FFA might choose to believe that this is just another case where a club owner turned out to be a bad dancing partner. But that argument won't do. It takes two to tango and the governing body must take some of the blame.

Tinkler is not the first, but the seventh, A-League owner to have lost or been stripped of a licence (after Perth Glory, New Zealand Knights, Adelaide United, Brisbane Roar, North Queensland Fury and Gold Coast United). Make that eighth if you include the Jets losing Constantine before Tinkler took over.

Of the founding eight clubs, only three remain (Melbourne Victory, Sydney FC and Central Coast Mariners) whose ownership did not at any time revert back to FFA.

It's a horrible look and the A-League under this FFA management is fast running out of credibility.

Now the governing body, with this damaged image, stands before its biggest challenge yet: launching a credible and lasting club in the west of Sydney.

One desperately hopes that the dire lessons have been learnt.

Among them is the shuddering Tinkler experience, which surely proves again that giving a licence to anyone with deep enough pockets to stand the losses but without any demonstrable long-term commitment to football is a disaster waiting to happen.

Even Frank Lowy shut down a football club once. And he is meant to be a lover of the game.

The reason the challenge is tough lies in the timing. Getting a club, now non-existent, ready to make a credible start in the A-League by the start of October, in less than six months, is a task even Sisyphus might dismiss as a bad idea and not at all preferable to eternally rolling boulders up a large hill.

Damian Lovelock, commenting on Sky News, said he looked upon the prospect with ‘cautious pessimism’.

Ordinarily such a project would, or should, be given a year or two, maybe three, to evolve and mature into readiness. But not this one due to the need for FFA to negotiate a scrumptious television deal, which calls for a ten-team competition, in quick time.

Such a challenge is fraught with the kind of dangers that make a football lover tremble and break out in a cold sweat.

Western Sydney, as we have been reminded for a small eternity now, is the heartland of football. Milking its potential for Australia’s showpiece national competition is an opportunity that makes all other sports palpitate and suddenly become apoplectic with envy.

If FFA stuffs this up (and it has form in stuffing things up) the damage to the game’s image may be terminal. Ben Buckley would be advised to take prolonged gardening leave from football, away and somewhere quite distant and maybe a bit less dangerous, like Somalia.

I hope Ben is busy and has cancelled all leave, for there ain’t time to waste here.

If got right the project is sweet with prospects for football. Of that there can be little doubt. Western Sydney (there goes that reminder again) is football’s biggest and most diverse population centre. It’s FFA’s biggest chance yet to re-unite ‘old soccer’ with ‘new football’, a painful division spurred by John O’Neill’s unfortunate marketing slogan in 2005.

This is where much of the football passion brought by the immigrants of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s now resides. The bulk of those immigrants first settled in Sydney’s inner suburbs. But as they assimilated, became more affluent and could afford bigger blocks of land and bigger houses, they moved west, particularly into the south-western corridor from Parramatta, through Fairfield and Liverpool to Campbelltown.

The NSW Premier league has seven clubs in Sydney’s west, five of them so-called ethnic clubs. An A-League club for them to own gives football a chance to unify the tribes, as the two Melbourne clubs have done in that city.

It’s a hungry market panting for a strong and elite football club to follow, support and be proud of.

Forget the clichés about winning hearts and minds from rival ‘codes’. That little pissing competition is for the AFL and NRL. Football has a summer season and whatever affection it draws will not come at the expense of winter spectator sports.

But there is a uniquely difficult and challenging side to this opportunity.

Sydney’s west has 90,000 registered junior players. The vast numbers in the area who have an interest in football are the real deal, the cognoscenti. Football is in their DNA: they follow it, love it, live it and are educated in it.

This is not an area where a football club can bank on a roll-up of ‘tourists’ – the trendy and curious who come to the football because it’s the ‘in’ thing to do and then evaporate as soon as they discover something more fashionable.

This club cannot be treated and marketed like a Northern Spirit or even a Sydney FC. This largely will be a club for the already converted. To engage them from the start and to treat them with respect – as supporters and not customers – is critical.

That means this cannot be some hotch-potch, emergency-driven Lego construction made from plastic rather than from real football substance.

For instance if FFA, or the club’s yet to be composed management team, think that hurriedly cobbling together a team of talented kids or nameless, journeyman players will do the job in the short term they are making a big mistake.

The core emotion that fuels club support is pride – pride in the name, the colours, the shirt and the tribal entity the club represents. That pride, in turn, can only be generated by a quality team and quality players on the park who play a brand of football of which the fans can be proud.

In this connection I am always reminded of what the Neapolitans shouted after their club signed Diego Maradona: ‘They can stuff their Gullits, Van Bastens and Platinis. We have Maradona!’

Much of Sydney’s west may be blue collar but blue collar football is not something it will accept or even tolerate. It would be an insult.

Part of this need to form a partnership with the community in Sydney’s west is inclusiveness. Which is why running a team in the W-League needs to be a priority.

Already I am hearing that running a women’s team as a function of the new club is on the back burner. ‘Maybe in a couple of years,’ or words to that effect. The same with running a youth team.

These are big mistakes and suggest that FFA just doesn’t get it, at least when it comes to why we actually need a women’s league. Hello! It’s not just about developing players for the Matildas (which in itself is justification enough) but far more about the game forming a relationship with half the population.

The cost of running a W-League team in the eastern states (where travel related costs are less than in Perth or Adelaide) is $100,000 per season. So what’s the problem? That’s less than the average wage of a senior male A-League player.

Not to engage proactively in this way with the women and girls of Sydney’s west would be a huge opportunity lost and send a horrible message to the region’s female population. This needs a serious re-think.

FFA faces probably its biggest challenge yet in mounting a club in Sydney’s bustling western suburbs. Working mercilessly against it is Father Time (or is it Mother Time these days?).

But ultimately and in how it devises the business, it should remember that it is not western Sydney that needs and A-League club. It is the A-League that needs a club in western Sydney.

That report, which suggested Perth Glory supremo Tony Sage was contemplating shutting down his club’s W-League team, was accompanied by a well-argued editorial by SMH deputy sports editor Kathryn Wicks pointing out that in the big scheme of things, and the large wad of cash club owners are losing, the cost of running a women’s team is small beans, especially when measured against the benefits a women’s league brings to the game as a whole.

Matildas coach Tom Sermanni was quick to react, saying the loss of the W-League would be a disaster for women’s football and for Australia’s growing chances of winning the World Cup.

FFA moved immediately to calm the waters, issuing a press release saying the W-League is utterly safe and there is no question of it dying a premature death.

That’s comforting. The W-League is not just critical to Australia’s need to fashion players of international competitiveness. It is also a development instrument for football as a game of social relevance, offering a way of directly engaging with half the country’s population, not to mention with the 25 per cent of Australia’s active footballers who are females.

But it is worrying that a club owner is contemplating jettisoning his women’s team as a way of shaving a thin layer of costs from his balance sheet. What statement does that make to the football playing women and girls of Perth, or indeed to the women of Perth?

Just as bad is the news that Sage is now also thinking of pulling Glory’s youth team out of the National Youth League and fielding it instead in a lower tier local State competition, again to cut costs.

It all leads one to ask where exactly does the matter of player development lie in the pecking order of Australian football, as the game continues to strive for viability, relevance and international competitiveness.

Disturbingly the country’s grassroots technical development program is also under great pressure due to a shortage of resources.

The author of the development road map (which includes the National Skills Acquisition and Skillaroos programs), national technical director Han Berger, recently expressed his worry at how slowly progress is being made precisely due to a dearth of funding.

This should worry all of us because in all of football’s broad scope of functions and activities there is nothing, nothing, more important than grassroots development. It is through quality technical education of Australia's youngest that the country can ever hope to find its way to the great dream: matching it with the best in the world.

It’s a realistic dream. But only if the right priorities are set and the dedication of resources is heavily weighted in favour of education even if that is at the expense of money spent on the more elite, sexier end of the football tree.

Australia is a developing football nation, after all, and by extension investment in development should surely be of the highest priority.

FFA spends around $10 million, or around 12 per cent of its annual budget, on grassroots development, perhaps a bit more. This does not include the National Youth League and the various junior national teams that, to be fair, can also be regarded as parts of the broad development agenda.

It doesn’t seem enough. A way needs to be found whereby much more resources flow towards educating the kids. They are our future.

This is not easy given that youth development does not attract the headlines, the sponsorship dollars or the broadcast revenues. Neither is it the cause célèbre uppermost in the public consciousness.

But the bullet has to be bitten and leadership provided.

Maybe it’s FFA, government or the corporate sector, or all three, who should begin the heavy lifting on this. But a change is needed whereby technical development and education get a larger piece of the cake.

Berger, in the relative short time he’s been here, has worked wonders to turn Australia's technical culture on its head. Complete success is not yet at hand because the age old culture of trying to coach muscular eight-year-old winners rather than real players of the future is a large and obstinate dinosaur to try and turn.

But the need to teach technique above fashioning dumb athleticism and a mindless reliance on results when bringing up the young ones is now the overriding dogma at least at FFA headquarters, all thanks to Berger.

He has also lifted the bar at the elite end whereby not just any dumb-arse who thinks he can motivate players to get stuck in can be an A-League coach. The UEFA ‘A’ Licence is now the minimum requirement and by 2015 it will be the Pro Licence, the highest level of coach accreditation even in Europe.

He deserves encouragement and support. His is the most important job in Australian football.

But the wheels he set in motion have a long way still to roll. Quality player development is at least a ten year thing. His legacy will only be felt long after he has returned to whence he came.

That is if we, all in football, recognise the importance of developing Australia's game, spend more resources and energies on it and not prune away at it whenever costs need to be cut. If we do not, the game’s future is at great risk.

The choice of just about any coach anywhere raises questions at the time the decision to employ them is made, including those of Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola or Jose Mourinho.

The reason is that appointing football coaches is not an exact science. Indeed, even at some of the world’s most elite clubs it’s usually the product of muddled minds in boardrooms filled by men who haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing.

But even by those long traditions of corporate stupidity the Magilton decision is, to put it at its kindest, puzzling.

When Magilton came in after Mehmet Durakovic's sacking, he was hired on a short-term deal - four months - one assumed in order to see what he was made of.

Now, having delivered worse results than his predecessor in his first ten games, with the team tactically bankrupt, with Magilton hollering for a player clear-out and ultimately demonstrating he is not made of much at all, he is given the gig long term.

I don’t understand this any more than I understand why men have nipples.

Those who claim to understand this are saying it’s not Magilton who is responsible for the poor results and the agricultural performances at all, it’s the players.

It’s as if the players, among whom are current Socceroos, former league top scorers, Warren medallists and a UEFA Champions League winner, have forgotten how to play football or, worse, they are lazy, treacherous vagabonds looking out only for themselves. Or both.

Get rid of them, they say. Time for a clear-out, just like there was at Newcastle Jets - so Magilton implied in one interview - after the Jets won the title in 2007 and then saw the exit of Nick Carle, Andrew Durante, Joel Griffiths, Mark Bridge, Stuart Musialik etc, since which they haven’t won a sausage. So much for mass clear-outs.

With a fair and kind heart one wants to sympathise with Magilton and give his argument fair consideration. There have been many cases where good teams have imploded and shrivelled to nothingness through internal decay.

And it’s true that Melbourne Victory stopped being the imperial force it had long been once Kevin Muscat was no longer on the field to provide his undeniable capacity to lead and organise.

But in such cases the proper course is for the coach to canvass the solutions quietly and wisely in the boardroom as opposed to blaring it publicly into microphones and TV cameras. Once a coach does that he abdicates authority and confesses to a critical weakness, to being a failed commander who has lost control of his men if indeed he ever had it in the first place.

A coach is nothing without the respect of the players, the foot soldiers on whom he relies for the results on which he will be judged. It is they who will win the games, they who will score the goals and they who will put in the crunching tackles, risking limb.

They don’t do it for the coach, by the way. They do it for the team, for the shirt and for themselves, never the coach. The suggestion that players toil and fight out of their love for the coach, or that it is their duty to be loyal to him, has always been a myth.

I say the Victory squad still has much quality, more than most. Harry Kewell, Archie Thompson and Carlos Hernandez need no introduction as proven match-winners, even at their age.

When Hernandez and Thompson can be left on the bench, as both have been under Magilton, it is either a case of having an abundance of player talent or that of the coach poking around in the dark.

Even beyond that distinguished trio, Victory's playing group is of a quality most other A-League coaches would crave for, some of whom have already steered their teams into the top six.

Of course many of the players will probably now have to go because the relationship between them and Magilton has been terminally damaged by the coach’s primitive, uncontrolled instinct to slag them publicly.

I don’t know what they teach at the course for the UEFA Pro-licence, which Magilton holds, but surely one of the cardinal rules of good professional coaching is never to create a gulf of confidence between yourself and the players by trashing their names in public. Criticising them behind closed doors is, of course, a very different thing.

What has led to this, you may well ask. The answer is simple: executive incompetence. I am not sure what the Victory board, some of whom are multi-millionaires as businessmen, thinks it’s running but a football business it is not.

From the moment the board chose Durakovic, a novice, as the coach it has been downhill. Durakovic was sacked, as was the director of football, and replaced by the assistant coach of Shamrock Rovers. It shows.

It now seems in retrospect that Magilton has wanted his own band of players from the day he came in. It was at the very beginning that he famously called for the existing players to take a look at themselves in the mirror. This is the oldest trick in the book for coaches or managers: if you don’t have the capacity to impress the players you inherited, get some new ones who have to impress you.

Of course there is often a good argument for team re-building. Ange Postecoglou did it at Brisbane Roar and with great success. But he did it with a firm plan in his mind for not just a player but a philosophical overhaul. He did it not reactively, as Magilton appears to want to do, but with a blueprint that was in his mind before he started in the job.

Indeed Postecoglou got the job at Brisbane on a mandate of rebuilding and reforming the first team culture. That’s what the board wanted him to do.

Magilton got his job only on the mandate of getting the team into the finals. He failed.

The two questions the Victory directors now face are, (1) does the first team squad need a clear-out and a rebuild, and (2) if it does, is Magilton necessarily the right man to do the rebuilding?

Given Magilton’s woeful performance till now, notwithstanding last Friday's 3-0 win over Wellington Phoenix, it is difficult to predict any improvement next season, no matter who makes up his rescuing cavalry. A pity because the A-League is poorer without a strong Melbourne Victory, the most successful, most popular and most envied of its clubs.

As such Victory has a role to lead and inspire. It did that with the signing of Harry Kewell, its only success story in this otherwise forgettable season. Beyond that the season will be remembered as the year in which the Victory’s good name had been trashed.

Melbourne Victory, by the reputation it has built for itself, has been a ‘big club’ others have looked up to and wished they could emulate. Big decisions such as the appointment of a head coach should have kept faith with that unique and enviable status. They did not ever since the current board took over. And for that the club’s governors should hang their heads in shame.

Okay, swoop might be too strong a word. We’re not in the Brazil class yet in the level of talent expatriation. But you get my drift.

Australian players have become more attractive to Asian clubs in recent years, especially since the introduction of the 3+1 rule which compels clubs in the AFC Champions League to have at least one player from an AFC nation out of their allowed quota of four foreigners.

Overall, our boys are cheap.

Rostyn Griffiths, who has suddenly gone to China, is just the latest. His former club, Central Coast Mariners, has alone lost four players to Asian clubs in the past few months.

If you want proof of this trend just take a look at Australia’s starting line-up in the recent World Cup qualifier against Saudi Arabia. No less than seven of them are now with Asian clubs: North, Neill, Ognenovski, Spiranovic, Bresciano, Milligan and Brosque.

True, three of them (Neill, Spiranovic and Bresciano) were not signed from the A-League but came in a reverse direction from Europe. But it all does indicate the measure of Asia’s growing financial power and how our own national league finds it difficult to compete with those of Asia.

Just a few years ago seven of the Socceroo eleven would have been with European clubs.

How can this be stopped? Do we want it stopped?

The first is the more difficult question to answer. So long as the salary cap exists or unless it’s lifted to a level our clubs cannot afford to pay, it is difficult to see how it can be stopped. It’s a dilemma and a half for those at Football Federation Australia looking after the market value of the A-League and the technical development of our players.

Do we want it stopped? Yes because, for one thing, it’s unlikely the players will improve by playing in Asia. The J-League apart, it is probable that all of the leagues in Asia to which these players gravitate are inferior not superior to the A-League.

We have long believed that seeing players go to good European leagues was worth the price of losing them, simply because it meant they became better players. The totally competitive team Australia had at the 2006 World Cup, which matched Croatia, Italy and, for a period, Brazil, was testimony to that.

But seeing them go to Asia is a very different thing.

Sure, the team that played Saudi Arabia was not the first choice eleven and a handful of European-based players were missing. But it remains that the lure of Asia is a growing thing and it is destined to have a major impact both on the credibility and stature of the A-League, on our player development and on the competiveness of our national team.

And it will only go on and only gather pace.

Roman found out again

I make a bold prediction: Chelsea will not win the UEFA Champions League while Roman Abramovich is its owner.

The sacking of Andre Villas-Boas, not excluding the ridiculous cost of it, is the latest in a lengthening catalogue of evidence that the Russian oligarch hasn’t the faintest idea of how to run an elite football club.

Are you amazed that that other financially bloated dilettante club owner, Clive Palmer, has blown $18 million by trying to run Gold Coast United? Well multiply that by more than 50 to get the $1 billion or thereabouts which silly Roman has sunk into Chelsea without landing the big prize he really covets.

An astute owner, one reasonably steeped in the elementary of football club governance, would know that successful, not to say great, football teams are not built in a day or even a season.

He would have seen that Chelsea was, and is, a team that has hit a phase of unavoidable transition and replenishment. He would have seen the bleeding obvious that the dominant, senior players, those who run the dressing room agenda and can dismantle a coach’s authority in an instant, are past their technical used-by date.

He would have known that the task of steering that transition, which needed to include ejecting a handful of highly reputed veterans, cannot be given to a young man barely older, or even as old, as some of those players.

He may have considered that in the tough world Chelsea inhabits – which Porto does not – there is the odd, inevitable crisis to navigate through and there are losses suffered from which an experienced coach knows how to manage recovery. He would have known, at a short glance, that AVB had never been tested in these areas.

The man with the experience and wisdom to manage this task was probably Carlo Ancelotti. Instead he was sacked and the job was given to a junior.

That done, Roman may have backed his man to accomplish what he employed him to do. But he didn’t even do that.

What is now evident is that the young man lost his battle with his senior foot soldiers who, as observed by an analyst in The Guardian went on to engage in a spot of ‘fragging’, a military term referring to cases where the soldiers kill their own commander in a quest for their own survival.

So AVB departs with his many millions in severance pay to pick up his career another day while Abramovich, the dumb dude with more money than sense, will no doubt lurch to his next astonishing disaster.

The only soothing thing about this is that Abramovich had it coming and he deserves no more than what he has got.

This is a man who bought the title deeds to a proud, 98-year old football club in 2003 and thought that with a vulgar combination of financial excess, ambition and impatience, he could quickly buy his way to all the trophies available in club football.

He managed to buy quite a few but not all and certainly not enough. Nine years on the big prizes, the European and world crowns, continue to elude him.

The one favour he did us all is to prove that club greatness is built over time, by the steady accumulation of admiration and respect, and cannot be bought.

Back in the old NSL days, when football was seen by the rump of our society as not much more than a plaything of the ethnic communities, we could barely dream of the day when a rich and credible enthusiast would come along and bankroll his own ‘soccer’ club.

While rich men had long hovered around the game without ever putting a zack of their own money in, finally, in 1995, along came Nick Tana: a self made mogul, of Italian extraction, with a passion for football deep in his heart and soul.

Importantly he appeared to understand the football business and, in particular, that his Perth Glory had to be a club for the city’s broad community, not just one cultural sector of it. Tana didn’t buy up an existing club patronised by the community of his paesani. He created a new one that would be representative of his entire city.

Tana invested his own money, taking most of the financial risk and ran a highly successful football club. To this day the Tana model of individual ownership is the best we’ve seen. Above all, his engagement with the club’s fans was real and they loved him and the club.

Sadly the Tana blueprint was not followed when it came to selecting and accepting other owners. I think it would be safe to say that no one at FFA ever picked up the phone to Nick and asked him just how he did it and how it should be done.

By far the worst case of the bad selections is Clive Palmer and those chickens have now come home to roost. Thanks largely to him and his eccentricity, football in the past two weeks has been reduced to a cesspit of juvenile name-calling and personal acrimony. The game’s image in Australia has rarely been so bloodied.

Let’s just track back a bit on how all this came about.

In mid-February, Palmer, who has long been prone to bullying his coach on team selection, insisted that a certain 17-year old be picked for an A-League game. His coach, Miron Bleiberg, opposed it. Clive, the big boss with untold riches who won’t be told, dug in and the kid was not only picked, debutant Mitch Cooper was made captain.

Bleiberg, in a goodwill gesture, attempted to make light humour out of the sheer stupidity of it. For this he was suspended by his boss. Bleiberg resigned.

Controversy raged. In a Courier Mail interview Palmer called football a ‘hopeless game’ and said he never liked it. Palmer then re-wrote the already published script, saying that Beliberg didn’t in fact resign, he was sacked (even though the sacking came many hours after the coach told the media he had quit).

To explain all this, Palmer appeared on The World Game program on SBS, where he let fly with a machine-gun volley of criticisms of FFA, the way it runs the sport and, in particular, of Frank Lowy.

His own farcical behaviour concerning the 17-year old boy and the sacking of Bleiberg, which were the nub of the story, disappeared somewhere in the ether.

Days later Palmer sent out his team for an A-League game with shirts adorning the slogan FREEDOM OF SPEECH. FFA, having got wind of it beforehand, warned Palmer that this was a breach of his participation agreement. Defiantly, Palmer refused to budge, bringing on the prospect of losing his licence.

It is still unknown if Palmer was or is actually aware that such slogans are in breach of the Laws of the Game, never mind any participation agreement. Yet it is there in black and white. Law 4 concerning player equipment clearly states that ‘the basic compulsory equipment must not contain any political, religious or personal statements’. Strictly speaking the referee should not have allowed the game to go ahead until the slogans were removed.

On the Wednesday, four days after the alleged offence, Frank Lowy held a press conference at which he announced that Clive Palmer’s licence to run an A-League club franchise would be revoked.

To many who hold dear the need to have a vibrant and prosperous national competition, this came as blessed relief. ‘About time,’ was a popular sentiment.

Palmer has been a disaster as an A-League club governor.

For the best part of three years his team, despite its inspired football, was playing to audiences that would embarrass a state league, semi-amateur outfit. Gold Coast’s ghostly, empty terraces, epically displayed on national television, have been immensely damaging to the league as a brand. The club has been a festering sore on the surface of the game. It is a wonder and a very good question why it was not shut down earlier.

Clive rambles in denial, suggesting that his paltry attendances are actually ok given the size of the Gold Coast district’s population. This is nonsense when you consider that Central Coast, with its much smaller population base, can attract eight, nine or ten thousand people to its games regularly.

And this from the man who capped his own club’s attendances at 5,000, effectively telling fans to stay away.

Clive has been demonstrably unable to engage with his market, a failure that suggests he is unfit to run a football club or any entertainment business. It is something FFA should have been wary of from the beginning, a thing for which the governing body stands condemned.

The Gold Coast experiment has been a dud, this is clear. One can only feel for the small band of fans who attended the club’s games faithfully, the innocent players and club staff. One hopes a Gold Coast A-League club will one day be re-born, untarnished and under a different, actually competent owner. Football’s potential in the area remains healthy.

There is no question that Clive Palmer’s public behaviour in the past few weeks has highlighted serious flaws in the way FFA managed its expansion program and how it responded when things slipped off the rails. That was already clear after the North Queensland Fury debacle.

Now we have the tawdry look of two of the newly added clubs having died and a third, Sydney Rovers, stillborn. This is not all the fault of Clive Palmer.

Also completely legitimate is the argument, made not just by Palmer but other owners, that the clubs should have greater control or at least a greater say in their own commercial destiny. It is not fine to say that FFA subsidises the clubs with many millions when the reality is that much of those millions are generated by the clubs themselves.

But some of the Lowy burning, newly sparked by the Palmer circus, is over the top. It was a massive error to give Palmer a club licence, to be sure. And it would also seem there was no over-arching strategy to expansion, based on sound and best business practice, that would have protected football from the eventual calamity Palmer has now brought.

He was given the car keys simply because he had the money for the car. Nobody checked whether he knew how to drive. And I suspect one reason for that was the fact that many at FFA don’t know how to drive either.

But it was not Lowy, or FFA, who screwed up and drove Gold Coast United into the ditch. It was Palmer.

Clive’s latest, the bizarre press conference he conducted when announcing his ‘Football Australia’ concept, should be treated as the poor attempt at comedy that it was. The man who self-destructed as a football club proprietor and who, by his own confession, doesn’t even like football, now creates a watchdog body intended to protect the game. The man must think we are all idiots.

Let it be a lesson. A huge ego, piles of inexhaustible cash, incompetence at running a football business, not understanding the game’s emotional assets and not having a genuine liking for the game, is a highly combustible and potentially calamitous mix for a club licensee.

It should never be allowed to happen again.

Maybe there should be an additional one erected, on the side of some lonely road approaching the Gold Coast, called ‘The Big Clive’. He’s fast heading, after all, to that kind of iconic status, a character with which we Australians are so ready to identify: a self-made rich kid, big, brash, and ready to take crap from no one.

A short while ago, when Football Federation Australia was ready and in some haste to expand the A-League, Clive stumbled into football, innocently and without any intent. Some people close to football, who were looking for a heavy hitter with a big chequebook to make an A-League club on the Gold Coast possible, found him and, probably to their surprise, found him to be willing.

Nobody cared that Palmer had no history in football nor even an obvious liking for it. Nobody cared that he had no history of managing a sports club or had any idea on how to manage a sports business.

And so now the people at FFA who gave him a club licence are in a bit of a pickle. It turns out the likeable Clive is a bit of an embarrassment. Not only that. He has become hostile to the game’s and the league’s governors, the very people who gave him the licence – for a fee Clive says was $500,000, which to him is not much more than petty cash.

Clive said in his live interview on The World Game on February 20 that there is nothing wrong with his club or the way it is run, given that all its bills are paid. Which of course is nonsense if one remembers that, as a football club owner, Clive is in the entertainment business and the first requirement for such a business being successful is actually playing to an audience.

It’s not just that Clive Palmer’s Gold Coast United is a non-viable business given that it plays at home to almost empty terraces. The sight of its sea of empty seats at Skilled Park is toxic to the broad image of a league which wants to put itself forward as a growing, sustainable concern. Goodness only knows what a prospective league sponsor, or broadcaster, thinks when seeing all that ghostly emptiness. That picture is a festering boil on the surface of an otherwise good quality, highly entertaining competition.

Clive has been quoted speaking disparagingly about football as a game, something I suspect he did in order to make the point, rather clumsily, that he is being noble and generous by splashing out on a game to which he has no emotional attachment. He was slammed for that and rightly so. But there is no doubt he enjoys being involved or at least did at the beginning. I was a personal witness to the boyish enthusiasm with which he embraced his new venture when it all began, when attending the friendly against Fulham which his team won in front of a good crowd.

Before long it all turned bad, starting with the astonishing business decision to cap the home attendances at 5000. Here was a man running an entertainment business relying on audiences, basically telling the audience to stay away. The audience did just that. It’s been all downhill ever since.

One cannot know where all this will lead. Clive Palmer is no shrinking violet. It’s clear from his appearance on TWG that he’s not about to walk and he’s unlikely to shut down the GCU venture and write it off. I suspect he’s too proud for that. If FFA tries to revoke his licence he will sue. So the head body is stuck between a rock and a hard place. This at a time when it must be desperate to get a Western Sydney franchise up, even if that means as a replacement for Gold Coast, in order to enhance its prospects of landing a sizeable broadcasting deal.

Also looming, now realistically, is a growing attitude among club owners that they should have more input into the way their businesses are run and on which they spend and lose millions. This is a more than reasonable claim and I suspect it is just a matter of time, not if, before the owners get their way. Clive Palmer is among the vocal leaders of this movement.

There is a valid argument that the trouble with Clive is not so much Clive himself but the ineptitude of those who gave him a licence and then proceeded to give him no strategic guidance or support in running a successful football club. This represents a huge efficiency flaw and probably a narrow repository of knowledge at league governance level. Clearly kicking Clive out, even if it was possible, would not be enough. FFA needs to grow some policies and mechanisms that will ensure the Gold Coast experiment failure is not repeated.

What the Clive Palmer experience has shown is that engaging club owners simply and only because they have a pile of money can be a disastrous policy. FFA should at least be prepared to learn from it.

I say it exists. And it’s potentially lethal in terms of international competitiveness.

The question of an Australian style, the need to have one and, importantly, what it should be, arose again recently amid public discussion after Melbourne Victory imported a British head coach.

It arose because we are a nation still deep in development technically and what outside forces influence us and what kind of knowledge we import, or not import, is critical to that development.

That debate will continue for some time or at least until we can be satisfied that we have learnt enough (which is probably never).

But the reality is there already is an Australian style of playing even if it is in need of further fashioning, polishing and perfecting before it becomes truly identifiable and internationally feared.

What first needs to be understood is what we actually mean by a national playing style.

National styles are products of history and are usually reflective of a country’s or region’s cultural norms, temperaments and tastes. Some such styles are still evolving and mutating while others, somewhat sadly, are being diluted or even destroyed by the forces of globalisation.

For example the famous ‘Scottish passing game’, a point of distinction between the English and Scottish games for many decades, all but disappeared more than forty years ago.

The so-called Danubian school of central Europe, so influential and powerful in the early to mid-20th century, is also just about gone.

In the more modern era national styles, notably the English, are under threat by the influx of foreign influences (players and coaches) brought by the commercial riches of their professional leagues. Some critics of the English game might applaud this as welcome but that’s beside the point. The English still have a right to their Englishness.

Brazil’s famed and admired jogo bonito is periodically threatened by pressures from within, pushing for stylistic change or ‘modernisation’ in the mistaken belief that abandoning tradition will bring better results.

When British expatriate workers spread the seeds of football around the world towards the end of the 19th century, the locals were usually quick to take up the game and then immediately mould it into their own image.

The kind of football that ultimately grew to be played in, say, Brazil, Italy or Austria, bore little resemblance to the way it was played in the game’s motherland. In many cultures the game came to be seen as a form of art and expression while in England it remained a form of sporting combat.

In Vienna football became a source of intellectual stimulus for the chattering classes in the coffee houses. In England, even though it was the bourgeois social tier who started it and exported it, football settled as the sport of the working man.

In colonies like Australia and New Zealand, populated by émigrés from the motherland and their descendants, the way football was played mirrored that of England: rugged, hard-running and governed by the sleeves-rolled-up work ethic.

Australia had no distinctive style for the first 80 years of its football history. It was played just like it was in England, only nowhere near as well.

But national styles can be fashioned, moulded and altered by migratory movements and this is what happened in Australia, beginning in the 1950s.

The immigrants from outside Britain that flooded the country during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, brought an influence that would not only change the way the game was played in Australia. That influence would conspire to finally give Australian football a stylistic and cultural identity.

The immigrants, from places like Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Poland and other parts of Europe, and later even South America, favoured a way of playing that was characterised by good ball technique, patience, expression and tactical wit, things that were quite foreign to Australians and Australian players at the time.

They injected these characteristics into Australia’s football at all levels, professional and amateur, straight after they arrived, giving it a new element of excitement and entertainment value.

But that alone didn’t give Australia a stylistic identity. That came years later when the effect of the second generation of these immigrants, kids born here, began to kick in.

Those kids, as they were growing and learning their football, were naturally influenced by their parents on how they should play their football. So they grew up knowing the importance of ball skills and the value of improvisation and expression in no smaller measure than their parents did.

But there was another element at play here influencing the kids, something that had nothing to do with their parents or their cultural heritage. This was the fact that they were born in Australia and that they were Australians.

So now we had some kind of hybrid, a very new mixture: kids fashioned by a parental heritage that demanded the child plays with skill and a sense of expression, counterbalanced by the child’s peer influences that came from being embedded within the Australian sporting culture.

That Australian culture is above all characterised by mental fortitude, self-belief and a winning ambition that is just about incomparable anywhere in the world.

In the 2006 World Cup, after Australia came from behind to beat Japan and score three goals in the last six minutes, Australia’s Dutch coach Guus Hiddink turned to his assistant, Graham Arnold, and said: “Only an Australian team could have done this. Even the Dutch would have thrown in the towel.”

And this was an Australian team that contained six players with parentage from Germany, Croatia (two) and Italy (three).

It was also this mental toughness that later wore down Croatia, led by a lion-hearted captain with Croatian blood in his veins, Mark Viduka.

This combination, this hybrid between the imported technical influences and the native Australian qualities and values related to mental toughness and a winning mentality is what now makes up what can be called an Australian style.

There is no other country or culture on earth that I know of where this formidable mix exists, at least to the same degree.

The style still needs more work and more tweaking, of course. For instance the pursuit to develop even more technically skilled players should never let-up.

But we should cherish and protect what we already have, an Australian way of playing that is unique in the world. And for which many opponents already fear us.

I'm always amused when pundits attribute poor performance to 'lack of desire'. How does one know another's desire? It's a given that any professional player who steps on the field IS and should be motivated otherwise they've no business taking the field.

Francis is spot on, although it’s not necessarily the pundits to whom this sentiment should be attributed. Most commonly the people who come out with this kind of nonsense are coaches, and usually after their team had suffered a loss.

I’m bemused by it too for I have long ago learned that coaches who blame losses on the players’ lack of character, desire, pride etc., usually do so because they are bankrupt in being able to identify the tactical or technical cause of the defeat.

They do this either because they are unable to propose a real solution to their teams’ tactical and technical problems or because they want to deflect blame from themselves onto the players. Or both.

This has happened all too commonly recently in the A-League with a number of coaches questioning their players’ character and capacity to fight for a win after a certain defeat.

Sometimes players themselves will do it because, being players, they are loath to publicly criticise their coaches’ tactics, selections and strategies. So they elect to nobly blame themselves.

Recently Terry McFlynn, the Sydney FC captain, spoke in the media blaming himself and his teammates for their lack of mental fortitude when reflecting on Sydney’s 5-2 home loss to Newcastle.

And then his CEO, Dirk Melton, got in on the act too, saying: “I was surprised, to be honest. I really would have thought they would have given more.”

It’s all bull. I saw Sydney’s loss to Newcastle, as I did the heavy losses by Adelaide United and Melbourne Victory, both to Perth Glory.

In none of those games did I see the slightest evidence that the defeated players lacked character, desire or pride. All they lacked was the tactical ability to find the way to avoid defeat.

It happens. It’s called being outplayed. That’s what happened to Sydney against the Jets. The Sky Blues were simply outplayed by a team that was better on the day.

This is not to say, of course, that character, belief and pride, don’t play a role in the outcome of football contests. The most common occasion when such qualities become relevant, and can even turn a game, is when a highly rated team meets an underdog.

In such cases the underdog tends to lift mentally, fuelled by ambition in an attempt to compensate for a lack of experience or ability, and the favoured team, which may be complacent, can end up on the wrong end of a shock result.

We have seen this in the FA Cup for a hundred years.

Neither am I saying that players are blameless when suffering losses or putting in bad performances. Of course not. It is they, after all, who do the kicking of the football.

But those who too readily claim that well paid professional footballers lack mental character and pride are mostly wrong. Those players know well that such qualities are critical in getting a result, as critical as being able to trap the ball or make an accurate pass.

The great Ferenc Puskás once told me that he was never motivated by any coach when he was a player, simply because he didn’t need to be and that it would have been an insult to him if he was.

It would have been no surprise to the players he later coached that he never tried to motivate them either. He had too much respect for them and at South Melbourne, where he coached in the early 1990s, the players loved him for it.

In my long experience as a football watcher and student of the game the most common reason for a defeat has been the simple fact that the defeated team had been outsmarted and outplayed. It happens and the losing team should accept it and move on.

The greatest team in the world today, Barcelona FC, not only plays beautiful, creative football. It is also a team manned by players with a fierce capacity to fight for a win. There are no so called prima-donnas at Barca and neither are there at most of the professional teams that I observe day to day.

It is time to stop blaming the players indiscriminately every time a team loses or at least insulting them by questioning their character by people who would be much better advised to look at themselves in the mirror.

Coaching opportunities beckon

What we now know, and thanks for having us freed from our collective miseries, is that come the end of the season there will be at least two coaching vacancies in the A-League.

Vitezslav Lavicka will leave Sydney FC and John Van’t Schip will depart the Melbourne Heart, leaving us in the cafes and pubs with something to debate, namely who will or should replace them.

And maybe there will be more. I can think of at least two more A-League coaches who have at least one foot already out the door.

I love this stuff I have to admit. Chinwagging with a mate over a coffee or a beer on what happened to the last coach and who should replace him is part of the lifeblood of football.

So let’s ponder.

In the case of Melbourne Heart, when it comes to choosing the next coach there is an issue about technical continuity. Van’t Schip has over his two years impregnated the club with the technical culture of Ajax Amsterdam.

This filters down to the youth team as evidenced by the way young Craig Goodwin slotted into the Heart method in the recent derby and the wonderful senior debut that he made.

Goodwin may have been news to you and me but at the Heart he has already been a known commodity being fashioned as a future first teamer. A successful debut was not a matter of if but when.

Van’t Schip will leave a fine cultural legacy which the club is not likely to allow to go to waste.

My guess is the Heart will replace the coach either with someone from Holland whom he recommends and who understands the technical culture, or with a deputy, like Ante Milicic, whom Van’t Schip himself has cultivated during his stay here. My preference and hope is for the latter.

Sydney FC and the matter of who will replace Lavicka is a different question.

Lavicka, for all his qualities, leaves no technical legacy. There is no identifiable technical imprint on the club he leaves behind. Under him the club won the double in 2010 but there was never any evidence of a technical legacy with which the club would want to be identified long term.

So the door is open for a new coach who, one hopes, is mandated to bring a technical culture that readily identifies with what the club wants to be: a glamorous, iconic brand synonymous with the city it represents.

The key man in the transition process is Gary Cole. It is he who will be advising the board on who the next coach should be. I can’t claim to know how Gary thinks and which way he naturally leans when trying to identify a new coach.

What we understand is that it was he who first recommended Ernie Merrick to then Melbourne Victory chairman Geoff Lord. In hindsight it can’t be claimed that it was a dumb recommendation.

There will be legitimate calls for a local appointment, perhaps the repatriation of the talented Tony Popovic, Lavicka’s former assistant now at Crystal Palace in England. Or, of course, there will be attempts to make a grab for Graham Arnold or Ange Postecoglou.

Another approach, given that Sydney FC by its own admission wants to build itself a brand associated with glamour, is to go for a glamour appointment, such as a so-called ‘big name’ from abroad.

Such a person would have to be someone whose credentials are unchallengeable, much more so than was the case with Pierre Littbarski, Terry Butcher, Rini Coolens, Franz Straka or Jim Magilton. With young Australian coaches queuing for jobs in the A-League there is simply no sense in importing mediocre coaches with mediocre track records.

Such a coach would have to be demonstrably better than anything we have here and would have to leave a legacy for his club and for Australian football as a whole.

Philippe Troussier springs to mind.

The Frenchman, who was once a candidate for the Socceroo job (which he should have got), fits the Sydney job description perfectly, including being familiar with the Asian football landscape.

Troussier is currently coaching Shenzhen Ruby in the Chinese Super League. But his long love for the notion of coaching in Australia still burns.

What the Grand Final showed, or at least showed me, is that women’s football is going places, and doing it fast.

We marvelled at the technical standard in Germany (not to say the bulging attendances), especially the glorious passing game of the Japanese who deservedly carried the world title.

But what I do confess I wasn’t prepared for was the technical standard of the young Australians we saw in that boisterous grand final at MacKellar Park.

We blokes, when talking about and praising women’s football, can often be accused of being condescending. And I apologise if that is what I seem.

Many of us veteran males can be entrapped by being inclined to compare women’s football to that played by elite men when assessing the women’s game. This is a mistake. What we should be concerned about, given the historical youth of women’s football in contrast to the men’s game, is the degree and pace of its advancement.

By that measure the news is good. Women’s football is fast blossoming as a package of wholesome entertainment. Those who missed the live experience of the W-League grand final can only regret it.

When the W-League was launched in 2008 it was, in technical terms, not a pretty sight. Most agreed that its creation was a good thing and that assuredly it would benefit the development of female players and, ultimately, the Matildas.

But its technical standard was low and difficult to enjoy as a spectacle. Many players, it appeared to me, were picked by virtue of their physical qualities. Tactically most teams were content to ping the ball long, hitting it in hope, in search of some muscular, tall, bustling forward.

This, over just four years, has now changed and radically so. In the grand final we saw two teams trying to play and mostly succeeding. The ball was played quickly, short, and on the back of some sweet off the ball movement, driven not by grunt and power but by intelligence. Many men’s teams might have benefited from watching.

On the field - and this is the thing - were mostly young players with splendid futures. Only five players out of the two squads were in Germany with the Matildas last year, and two of those were goalkeepers.

The dashing Canberra forward, Michelle Heyman, who scored two of the goals, and her brainy midfield prompter, Ashleigh Sykes, stood out among many who are sculpting a terrific future for the Matildas. Tom Sermanni, the Matildas’ gaffer, surely took note.

Jitka Klimkova, the Canberra United coach, has led her team to the title in her first season in Australia in a style that just about relegates any male coach the A-League has imported from abroad in its history.

Except probably Vitezslav Lavicka who hails from the same place.

In any case, Klimkova has made her mark. She’s a winner, she imposed a style of play on the W-League that is both winning and exemplary and one can only hope she will return. This country needs her influence.

All this has been a good thing for our football and its role in making our society more inclusive. As I wrote in a previous column, women’s football can be a powerful instrument by which women are meaningfully engaged and are swayed to embrace the game. We should celebrate this. Football is nothing unless it embraces both genders, all races and creeds.

And we should get away from instinctively comparing women’s football with men’s football, something we never do in other sports where the female gender has a high profile, like tennis, swimming or athletics. A women’s tennis match can often be as entertaining as a men’s match if not more.

The Frenchman, now 32, will be paid $13 million per season in a two year deal. Goodness. There must be a lot of moola sloshing about in China.

The only surprise is that it’s Anelka, a man entering his twilight years as a player, that has been snared. In fact it’s hardly a snare when you look at it that way.

According to France Football’s annual list of top football earners Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who is 30, earns less at AC Milan. And he’s in the world’s top 20.

At any rate, it’s a lot of money, more than many of Europe’s top clubs could afford or would be willing to pay.

According to rumours Didier Drogba will be the next big name to head east. And why not? France Football says Drogba’s base salary at Chelsea is $9.3 million, rising to $15.5 million with bonuses and endorsements. If the Anelka deal is any guide, Drogba is affordable for the Chinese.

Hong Kong-based football reporter Michael Church, analysing the rise of Chinese football’s gathering riches in World Soccer magazine, says this is a case of China’s new super-rich industrialists starting to flex their financial muscle and investing in football.

A good thing for Chinese football, you might say. Exciting times are ahead for Shanghai Shenhua and the other ambitious Chinese clubs.

But is it money entirely well spent?

The irony in all this is that while some obscenely large cheques are being waved in an effort to woo foreign stars to China, the strength of Chinese football as a national resource is languishing badly.

Corruption, match-fixing, and abysmal performances on the international stage have plunged the game’s esteem so low in China, points out Michael Church, that according to some estimates the number of registered players below the age of 18 is now under 7000. This in a country of 1.3 billion people.

This surely cannot continue, not in a country that is so proud of its sporting achievements and has invested so much in them.

China is now the most dominant nation in the summer Olympic Games after decades of investment in quality coaching. How much longer can it look the other way while its national (men’s) football team continues to perform so appallingly (ranked 74 in the world) and its playing strength goes on being third rate?

There can now be little question that the money available for football in Asia will only continue to increase in tandem with the region’s stunning and rapid economic growth. But for the sake of the continent’s self-esteem at least some of that money must go back into technical and professional development.

China stands on the brink of a fabulous football future if it manages this fabulous economic opportunity properly. And the same goes for other countries with growing economies in the region, including the vast, unexplored and untapped football market and potential of India.

They would all do well to learn from the example of Japan.

When the Japanese launched their ambitious J-League in 1993 they already knew that there was a lot more to do than merely establish a franchised professional league and import a bunch of ageing stars from Europe and South America to help make it work.

What the Japanese were about was not just to establish a league but to build a national football culture that would be able to compete with the rest of the world.

They knew then that the country’s and the league’s ultimate viability had to rely on quality home grown talent and studiously went about setting up the environment for excellence in youth development. The rewards are there to be seen now as Japan enjoys the highest football standing in the region, higher than Australia, and its player quality is broadly respected in the professional world.

That is what China should strive to achieve as it begins to spend its burgeoning millions. And so should the other countries with their tiger economies, like Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The signing of Anelka, and the looming signing of Drogba, will surely be followed by others as the centre of football’s commercial power base begins slowly to move east. Just as China is predicted to have the world’s largest economy within the next two decades, it is reasonable to suggest the region’s commercial power within global football will also dramatically increase.

That power will need to be carefully and responsibly managed if the integrity of Asian football itself is to benefit.

It proved to be no breakthrough. Seven, then an aggressive competitor for the AFL rights, appeared to quite deliberately bury the game from public view just to appease the Aussie Rules governors.

This is no idle rumour.

This suggestion came out in evidence in a 2005 court case in which Seven was suing several companies including Foxtel partners, News, Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd and Telstra. Seven claimed the parties conspired to drive its pay TV sports channel C7 out of business by ensuring it did not win bids for the NRL or AFL rights in December 2000.

During the court case it was revealed the executive in charge of C7 at the time, Steven Wise, lamented in correspondence that the AFL was not giving Seven credit that they had secured the soccer rights and suffocated the sport by not showing it on free to air television.

That was just 14 years ago. Fans of football who are still very much around today will not have forgotten it and have been loath to trust so-called mainstream commercial networks ever since.

It was probably the worst case yet of powerful forces at work in trying to sideline football as a sport of mainstream potential, and seen by the AFL as a long term threat to its market dominance.

But it wasn’t the last. Less than a couple of years ago the AFL attempted to stonewall Australia’s ambitious bid to host the World Cup by using its muscle to deny football access to major venues during the 2022 tournament. It very nearly succeeded in derailing the bid. In the words of Frank Lowy, ‘they tried to f..k us’.

I recall these things now because, it appears to me, there is a new attitude of contentment and complacency within and outside the football family by those who believe that the anti-soccer pathology prevalent in Australian society for so long has somehow gone away if it ever existed at all. It hasn’t.

Of course it is true that what drove Seven in 1998, and the AFL more than a decade later to try to ‘screw soccer’ were commercial imperatives rather than deep seated prejudice against what they call ‘the round ball game’.

But they would have been comforted by the underlying social chauvinism feeding the notion that, after all, soccer remains the ‘wogs’ game, so who cares if it dies or at least languishes on our sporting margins?

Last week I filed a column for this site in which I implied that the high editorial priority given in the media to a virgin sport called big bash or 20/20 cricket may be another case of what Johnny Warren called the ‘sheilas, wogs and poofters’ mentality. The implication was that media space for football was being suppressed further in its summer season in preference for something the editors and producers might deem to be more ‘Australian’ than soccer.

I was surprised by some of the responses. Readers accused me variously of being paranoid, insecure and of having a siege mentality. Others lectured me on commercial realities, like the high TV ratings and audiences of the Big Bash governing the volume of media space given to it.

That’s fine. Opinions are an entitlement and I welcome them. But let me respond, taking the last point first.

As a TV sports executive with long experience (I was SBS head of sport for ten years) I do know a little bit about sports television and sports media even if I don’t know jack about football. It is not that simple.

Media executives by and large are reactive people and public curiosity and popularity do naturally determine where they allot their space or airtime. But they are also responsible for driving that level of curiosity and popularity by the level of space or airtime they allot.

It then becomes a never ending circle and a vicious one from football’s standpoint.

The media, under the notion that, say, big bash cricket commands most public interest, will give a generous allotment to it. Because the media organs compete with one another in the same market, that allotment then becomes more and more generous, ballooning out disproportionately, acting as a massive promotional vehicle for that sport or event and squeezing back further and further the space and time allotted to other sports.

This in turn results in even further growth in popularity for the favoured sport and, because their exposure has shrunk, conversely reduced market appeal of other sports.

These are the laws of media nature which have been with us since the year dot.

But it shouldn’t be this way. At its peak in in the 2007-08 season the A-League averaged an attendance of just under 15,000 fans per game which was a bare whisker below what the NRL was averaging.

But did the press coverage reflect that comparison? Not in your life. The tabloids in the eastern states where NRL is king still gave five pages of daily coverage to rugby league to the A-League’s one. And you can apply the same disproportions to TV and radio.

So just ask yourself, where would the A-League’s popularity be if there was a more realistic, not to say more just distribution of media space and the league got the allotment appropriate for it? Where would it be if it got, say, four full pages of coverage per day to the NRL’s five?

But in addition to this glaring favouritism, which the editors and executive producers will explain by citing so-called commercial realities, there is the more primitive, cultural form of the ‘sheilas, wogs and poofters’ mentality which continues to linger, though in probably lower volumes than decades ago.

We have supposedly come a long way since Johnny Warren in 1969 took part in an open-top Socceroo motorcade through Sydney and, edging past a pub with beer swilling patrons spilt onto the footpath, copped a hurl of ‘dago bastards’, ‘f…ing poofters’ and ‘go back to where you came from’. This was after the team came back from tour of duty spreading Australia’s goodwill in Vietnam.

But the stigma still lives. Influential media columnists and commentators, with actually little else of substance to say, continue to try and soil the game as some kind of alien animal to which real Australians will never take because there are far too few goals, there are too many prima donna divers, there is no video refereeing and their fans are far too violent and, in any case, not like us.

‘Don’t worry, it’s only soccer,’ one of these grubs wrote after Australia lost its World Cup bid.

Every minor altercation that happens outside a Collins Street café as fans make their way to Etihad is described, no less than before, as a ‘soccer riot’ or ‘soccer brawl’.

A brawl between two sets of fans with some kind of Balkan axe to grind at the Australian Tennis Open is described by the media as ‘ethnic violence’, never tennis violence. Yet a slap and a tickle between fans at the football is invariably ‘soccer violence’.

This mentality, this deep seated prejudice still lives and breathes in our country and there is no sign it is going away anytime soon.

I hope I am wrong when I see signs that many younger fans of football, who have not lived through what us older timers have over many decades, are accepting this grimy attitude and are even offering apologias for its perpetrators.

But that is the impression I am getting, a suggestion that we in football should accept our place in Australian sporting society and live with it.

Well, I don’t accept it and neither do I have to. And the great man, who dedicated the title of his autobiography to this shameful presence in a country that brags about its sense of ‘fair go’, wouldn’t accept it either.

What a crying shame he’s still not around.

It’s enough to break my heart, but I sense that just as one may have hoped the Hyundai A-League gaining a piece of media turf, along has come a new summer sports phenomenon destined to usurp it.

At least in the short term.

Already, despite its infancy and so far of purely novelty value, the KFC T20 Big Bash League appears to be very generously treated by the metropolitan newspaper editors.

After round 14 of the A-League in the first full weekend of January, both the Sunday Telegraph and Monday’s Daily Telegraph of Sydney splashed the Big Bash on their lead sports pages.

The Sydney Morning Herald and the two Melbourne dailies didn’t quite match this (yet) but there too the T20 got far more generous space, and a far higher editorial ranking, than the A-League.

The TV and radio news bulletins all prioritised the Big Bash above the A-League. Exactly why is a mystery.

The reason this should be of some concern is that football chose to move to summer over 20 years ago with the express purpose of moving away from the seasonal competition for box office appeal provided by the other ‘football codes’.

Since then the only other major summer sporting preoccupations have been a brief Test and one-day cricket season, a couple of decent golf tournaments and the fortnight long Australian Open tennis.

Now part of that summer has been populated by the Big Bash with 32 well publicised, fabulously hyped matches over six weeks. Okay, that’s nowhere near all of the summer and it’s only a short slice of what the entire duration if the A-League entails. But it is, nonetheless, a new highly appealing product smack in the middle of the football season and one with the potential to eat into the A-League’s capacity to draw fans.

I am not privy to the T20’s crowd averages (its website seems uninterested in publishing them) or its television ratings. But I’m curious, especially to know how the Big Bash games may have impacted on the A-League box office.

I’d also be curious to know if the differences between those figures justifies the kind of sexed up media favouritism the Big Bash already enjoys in comparison to the A-League in most parts of the media.

Could it be that it’s another case of the old sheilas, wogs and poofters mentality? I think probably yes. I can smell this stuff from light years away.

In any case it should all be sounding some warning bells in Football Federation Australia’s media and marketing departments. It’s a challenge FFA cannot afford to ignore.

And it might be a good start to look at the lingering Gold Coast United problem. The empty stands at Skilled Park, proudly paraded on national television, are the biggest marketing problem the A-League now has. They’re a festering sore.

The Big Bash has just made it bigger. Imagine switching the TV channel from the raucous Big Bash, with its heaving crowds in the background, to a GCU game, to its lifelessness and its deathly quiet. Urrghh!

But then, maybe one shouldn’t get so stressed.

As one wise-head recently tweeted, ‘The danger is that [the] Big Bash is both exactly what mainstream Oz sport fans want, and everything football shouldn't be.’

Football’s real big bash

That said, FFA appears to have hit upon a good thing with the League’s round 13 marathon, the so-called Big Wednesday.

As far as football fans are concerned, this was a far bigger bash.

The day’s seven and a half hours of action, plus all the chit chat, may have seemed a bit daunting before it started but it ended up being a thrill a minute, an embodiment of the cliché: ‘too much football is not enough’.

Now FFA must grab it and schedule it for roughly the same day every January, and then persist with it.

Football fans love a good habit and good things in the game should always be made habit forming. If Big Wednesday is persisted with, soon enough it will be something the fans will expect and probably want. Its appeal will grow and so will its crowd numbers and TV ratings.

An event sponsor, which FFA unsuccessfully pursued this year, will come crashing through the door.

An excellent experiment that has paid off handsomely. Well done.

Liverpool has had it worse than this, such as when having to cope with its six-year expulsion from Europe after the Heysel tragedy.

Not to say Hillsborough and its carnage in 1989.

In fact, far from being in a tizz, Liverpool should not only condone the punishment as a measure of faith to the traditions of a noble football club, but should feel proud to be part of a football culture that is taking, it seems, some kind of international lead on not tolerating racism in the game.

England has some form in occasional forward thinking that surpasses and pre-empts the game’s most innovative thinkers (including any of those who may reside in Zurich).

It was the English who introduced three-points-for-a-win long before FIFA made it global and it was they who first punished with a red card the so-called professional foul, when, as a last resort, the last defending player brings down an attacker poised to score. At first FIFA balked at the English impertinence for bending the rules but quickly buckled and made it mandatory everywhere.

Now, I suspect, it is the English who will lead the way in stamping out on-field racism and before long FIFA will fall into line.

With Sepp Blatter’s oafish remarks about there being no on-field racism in football still ringing in the ears, Suarez cops an eight-match ban for it. Oh the irony. And the John Terry case is still to come.

Of course, Suarez continues to deny he has been racist and is appealing the sentence. His defence is predicated on the solitary claim that the name by which he called Patrice Evra, ‘negrito’ (little negro), is not a racist term in his native Uruguay.

This needs to be straightened out from the start.

It is a fact that in many parts of South America calling someone by a label that refers to their skin colour can often be, far from derogatory, a term of endearment.

I have personal experience in this.

My better half is Brazilian, with physical features that attest to an African racial heritage. From mixed parentage, she has olive skin such as you would find with a native of southern Europe or north Africa (she’s often asked if she’s Moroccan).

Soon after I met her we went for an outing to a Brazilian club in Sydney where one of her kinfolk, a big lad half snozzled on caiparinha, called her a ‘morena’.

I asked her: ‘What did he call you?’

‘Morena,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a reference to my skin colour.’

‘So why didn’t you slap him in the face?’

‘What? Why should I have done that?’

‘Because, plainly, the man’s a racist skunk.’

‘No he’s not,’ she retorted. ‘What he actually said was, hey morena, you’re a truly beautiful woman, did you know that?’

I rested my case. It’s difficult to slap someone in the face after he calls you beautiful. Especially if you’re a woman. And I couldn’t bring my sense of chivalry to the point of smacking him given that he was about eight foot tall and had all the physical attributes of Junior Baiano.

I later learned that Brazilians make a big habit of affectionately labelling people according to their skin colour, physical appearance and, of course, the region from which they hail.

For instance if your skin is white and you have blond hair, there’s a good chance of you being nicknamed ‘alemao’, which means German in Portuguese.

Garrincha used to give affection to his celebrated wife, the singer Elza Soares, by calling her ‘criula’, a reference to her skin colour. She’s black.

On referring the Suarez claim of innocence to a number of Uruguayans, I was told that indeed ‘negrito’ can be a term of endearment in that country.

One, a senior Uruguayan broadcaster whom I’ve known for 20 years, said: ‘In Uruguay it’s very common to use negrito as a term of endearment. This, for example, is the way I call my son. It’s very common for you to call your wife, negrita. Now, that depends on how you use it of course, of the context.’

Ok, so here’s the thing.

It’s not the term itself but the way and with what intent you use it. And, I am also told by my better half, it also depends on to whom you use it and under what circumstances.

You cannot, for example, do it to someone you have never met. And if you happen to be white and call a black man a ‘negrito’ in a derogative or even dismissive way, you are likely to cop a foot in the testicles, even in South America.

This is what rules out the suggestion, on which Suarez relies for his defence, that he was being nice or somehow chummy to Evra when he called him a ‘negrito, at least 10 times according to Evra.

It is doubtful if the exchange was in the context of, say, ‘Hey negrito, see you at my barbecue tomorrow.’ Or maybe, ‘By the way, negrito old chum, I’m in Paris on Wednesday. Can you recommend a good restaurant?’

I’ll leave it to you to figure out the only possible alternative context in which Suarez called Evra a ‘little negro’, addressing an opponent during a highly charged, highly competitive football match.

I’m pretty sure, in fact somewhere around 99.99 per cent certain, it could only have been a piece of blatantly racist sledging. Suarez deserves everything he gets.

There have been questions about the reason for the job’s existence, if there is a reason for it at all, and just how important the job is.

My view is that it’s very important. Cole’s is maybe the most critical appointment in the League’s recent history.

But first, let’s be clear on just what the job is.

On Twitter, one friend asked the other day: ‘Why has everyone got director of football on the brain? What are the managers employed for?’ The argument being that if one man, traditionally known as ‘the manager’, can do both jobs why employ two people?

The problem with that argument is that it’s not the one job and therefore not for one man, at least not in most parts of the world outside Britain.

In the British tradition, going back to the days of Herbert Chapman at Huddersfield and Arsenal in the 1920s and ‘30s, the manager is in charge of all things related to football at the club, including what music is played on the PA system at half time of each home match.

This concept works well while you have a brilliant manager like Chapman (who lasted ten years at Arsenal), Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger.

But in most cases it’s flawed because it cannot guarantee a club consistency in terms of football strategy, philosophy, development, technical direction and administration.

The manager, because he is head coach as well as being in charge of all those things, will get fired after four or five losses by the first team, and everything he has otherwise built goes out the window.

In the hailed book Soccernomics (HarperSport), writers Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski argue that Olympique Lyon is the ideal model on how to run a football club well. Part of the reason, say the authors, is that Lyon does not put all its hopes in the head coach but in the technical director (another term for director of football), the former French international Bernard Lacombe. He’s been in that job for over 20 years.

They write: “The typical decision-making model in English football is short-term dictatorship. At most clubs the manager is treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide everything until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor’s signings at a discount.

“Lyon never have expensive signings rotting on the bench. They never have revolutions at all. They understand that the coach is only a temp. Lyon won their seven consecutive titles with four different coaches – Jacques Santini, Paul Le Guen, Gerard Houllier and Alain Perrin – none of whom, judging by their records in Britain, is exactly a Hegelian world-historical individual.

“When a coach leaves Lyon not much changes.”

The constant of course is Lacombe. He coached Lyon between 1997 and 2000 but the club owner was so impressed with his knack for spotting the right transfer he kicked him upstairs to be TD, making sure he stayed long term at the club and wasn’t vulnerable to the sack after a few lost games.

In Australia, for the most part, we don’t have a manager system. We have head coaches or first team coaches and, separately, directors of football (like Paul Trimboli at Brisbane, Robbie Middleby at Newcastle, John Didulica at Melbourne Heart).

I find it cute when people like Harry Kewell and Mark Bosnich refer to coaches as managers, an obvious legacy of the many years they spent in England.

Harry would say: ‘Whether I’m picked for the next Socceroos’ game or not is up to the manager. He picks the team.’

Well, no. The manager of the national team is Gary Moretti and he doesn’t pick anyone. It’s Holger Osieck, the national coach, who picks the team.

It’s important to be aware of the distinction.

While the director+coach formula works well with most of Europe’s top clubs (Andoni Zubizarreta at Barca; Uli Hoeness at Bayern for example) in some cases it cannot work simply because of the coach’s insistence on autonomy, on being the old fashioned monarch.

This was the case with Jose Mourinho who simply couldn’t work with the director at Real Madrid, Jorge Valdano, and forced him out.

In Australia and in this stage of the A-League’s development, the director+coach system makes the most sense. The league needs the comfort and the consistency provided by a quality football director with a secure job, who drives the club’s vision and long term goals when it comes to its football.

The obvious challenge then is to appoint the right person for this critical job and to ensure that the position carries the right job description. There are many people in the football industry, some of them sitting in governance of football clubs, who haven’t the faintest idea what a football director is or does.

So the challenge is large for Gary Cole. Given the city his new club represents, the natural ambition the club has and its fans demand of it, he may have landed just about the most important job in the A-League.

Greg, in eight paragraphs of haughty condescension, reminds us that football (the football played with the feet and not the hands) is still an adolescent sport in this country that is a long way from being what it wants to be, "one of the big boys".

This is the sentence that caught the eye: "Australian soccer will never come of age until it stops going weak at the knees on concocted nights like this. It wants to be one of the game's big boys, but acts like [a] star-struck teenager".

And then this: "It was Australian soccer prostituting itself."

Johnny Warren would not have been surprised and now I’m not surprised. The great man used to remind me, right up until his death seven years ago, about the level of resistance to football that still exists in this country.

I’m not sure what motivated Mr Baum to write this nonsense other than an intrinsic need to slag the game…again. This, after all, is the same columnist who ingeniously found negatives even about Australian football’s, and maybe Australian sport’s, finest moment, the World Cup win over Uruguay in 2005.

What the Galaxy game was, as Mr Baum should have realised or maybe just pretended not to, was a simple commercial promotion, a business venture, an opportunity to make hay from the popularity of the world’s most famous footballer. It was nothing less, nothing more and never pretended to be anything else.

It had nothing to do with ‘soccer’ the entity to which Mr Baum refers as though it, ‘soccer’, were some kind of foreign clan or sub-culture that is struggling to find recognition and a place in Australian society.

It was not a case of ‘soccer’ trying to be one of the big boys. It was just a simple, commercial venture.

But of course Mr Baum is not foreign but a dinky-di, born in the Melbourne suburb of Boronia, so he’s eminently qualified to lecture ‘soccer’ on where its place is or should be, even if it bears no relevance to the Galaxy game and the Beckham visit.

I know. I’m an old ‘wogball’ whinger who sees an anti-football conspiracy lurking behind every comment or headline that is mildly critical of the game. But I have seen this stuff all too often before and can smell the resistance, the ill will and the prejudice a mile away.

Fact is the venture was a success. What other sport can attract 35,000 people in Melbourne to see "a half lame, if photogenic superannuant clotheshorse"? Fact is this clotheshorse is a 'soccer' clotheshorse and that is what must hurt. Fact is that Beckham, however slow, ageing and over-rated, will attract that kind of curiosity wherever he plays and Australia is no different.

In the couple of days that he was here, Beckham’s photogenic smile adorned the front and back pages, displacing for the briefest of times pictures of some equine sized ‘big boy’ from Aussie rules or the next 18-year old Dennis Lillee. Football and its global appeal got a guernsey. The ‘round ball game’ got promoted. And nobody died.

And we’ll live. Life will go on.

Why no Harry?

As a footnote, how did it happen that Harry Kewell didn’t play in this game?

Whose decision was it and how on earth were the 35,000 who came allowed to be insulted in this way?

I think it would be safe to assume that many who came, maybe the majority, were attracted by and were willing to fork out the money at the prospect of a Harry v Becks game.

The last time that happened, in 2003 at Upton Park, the Socceroos, spearheaded by Harry, took England to the cleaners. Becks played that day. The prospect of a re-match, even if not that serious, was tantalising.

Harry was fit. There was no excuse for his omission, announced just hours before kickoff.

It was daylight robbery and a disgrace.

I didn’t attend the game. But even having expended the energy of walking from the bathroom to the lounge to watch the game on the box, finding out H wasn’t even in the squad made me feel ripped off.