MARTIN FLANAGAN
June 19, 2010
LIFE'S lonely at the top but it can't get much lonelier for Pim Verbeek right now. There is no position in Australian sport which corresponds to his, certainly no coaching position. No AFL coach answers to the nation. And, in AFL, where you come from as a coach isn't an issue. This week, more than once, the tactics of the Dutchman were damned as un-Australian.

AFL coaches hide behind footy speak. Coaching staffs of AFL clubs are like a Masonic code. They speak their own language. Australian football's like the global debt crisis. I'm not sure anyone knows what's really going on. The whole thing's too fast-moving, too complex. But it's not like that in the simple game. It's, well, simple - you either have a 4-4-2 formation or you don't. In Australian football nothing stays as it is for more than a few minutes. We rotate like crazy. The round-ball game has the same 11 on the field unless the coach makes a change, which is usually a big thing to do. Who can judge whether an AFL rotation is well done, whether it gives an advantage? Well, the whole of Australia is judging Verbeek.

I will always think of Verbeek as a man who refused to surrender to male fad and shave his head after baldness set in. Verbeek's pate is like the semi-arid land. It takes a certain sort of character to hold with such a hair arrangement, but I suppose one of the questions now is: exactly what sort of character?

Against Germany, Verbeek left Tim Cahill on his own up front. Cahill is Australian soccer's first popular idol. Harry Kewell was a star before him but Cahill has gone beyond the confines of his sport. If I had to pick a dozen people who personify Australia today, I'd think about naming Cahill. One version of last Monday's game is that Cahill became frustrated by Verbeek's formation, slid late into a German and was red-carded. Australia lost 4-0 and its best player.

Verbeek had changed his formation for the game. Generals who change their plans on the eve of battle need to win; if they fail, they will be accused of loss of nerve and fumbling. Not only that, the young German team, in addition to crushing the Australians, made them look old. Responsible for the implementation of an off-side trap, Lucas Neill and Craig Moore looked like men trying to herd wild brumbies on foot.

I find the relationship between the manager of the English team and that country's sporting public a rich source of comedy. Last time around, the lead comic role was played in an impassive Buster Keaton sort of way by Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson The English team looked like each player had brought his own hairdresser and the papers were full of stories about wives and girlfriends. The sport-as-entertainment industry had discovered WAGs. The tone of the English sports writing concerning Sven could be measured, like soil, for its acidity. But I must admit I thought - wrongly, it seems - that we differed from the English in this respect.

At the end of Monday's game, the SBS camera almost swallowed Verbeek. He strikes me as a fairly phlegmatic fellow and he must have known what was coming but, even so, he swayed back when the camera came at him, then finally looked away. The camera had come to capture his soul or, rather, an image of it, to be flashed back home in the name of instant sports coverage.

And that was just the start. Before the match, commentator Craig Foster had written: "As an Australian, I refuse to believe anything other than that we will.'' He sounded like a French general on the eve of World War I. By Wednesday, a lot had been written and said by others, but even so, Foster managed to make himself memorable. He wanted Verbeek sacked, and called for the national coach to be henceforth subordinate to a committee of former captains. By then, the story of dissent in the Australian camp had broken and a public spat had erupted between Harry Kewell and one of the country's leading soccer writers, Fairfax's Michael Cockerill.

But hang on, we've only lost one game. I trawled blog sites and found this post which I thought was remarkable for its reasonable tone. It came from Germany. The author's name was Andreas Welke: "Hi folks, greetings from Berlin/Germany. It's not hard to understand how much it hurts when you lose instead to [sic] win. But never give up, it was only the first game for your team. It's not over. Did you see the first minutes, what can happen when your team is playing forwards? To be honest, my heart began to race when I saw what's goin' on in our penalty box. Every team what reaches the world cup deserves to be not underestimated. Fans must be the twelfth man, standing like a wall behind the team. Good luck for the next two challenges. It's not too late to go through.''

Australia has to be some chance to beat Ghana, even if that result is unlikely. Imagine if the Socceroos win. Will the people who have vented so much bile take a good, hard look in the mirror as Verbeek was told to do this week? Almost certainly not. And, who knows, if a miracle occurs and Australia makes the final 16, the country could be swept by a new male hair fashion.

http://www.smh.com.au/world-cup-2010/world-cup-news/its-a-hairy-situation-for-unaustralian-verbeek-20100618-ymv5.html