Excellent article - and the 1st to raise it as a question and encourage debate. This debate is too often couched in terms of is the 433 mandate the right thing from the kids clinics up to the Socceroos, but this was never the intention of the Football Development Plan. The key word here is "development" and the adoption of a national 433 framework was alway intended in a development context.

My understanding of this is that in a development context 433 requires a level of technical; and tactical dicipline and creaticity that other systems don't. When Australia is a developing nation in football terms it makes a lot of sense to mandate such a framework - in effect focusing limited resources on a national approach to ensure consistency and facilitate performance measurement and [hopefuly] immprovement.

Australia is not Asia and it is not Europe or the UK - it is Australia and it is developing in its own cultural and historical context. I, for one. think the FFA have the policy right - but with so much they have done, got the communication all wrong.


What do you think about the FourFourTwo blog Is There An Australian Style of Football??
In 1606, Dutch sailors made their first landfall on Australian shores. They had relied on information from the Portuguese and Spanish, who were the only Europeans to venture into the Pacific during th...

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