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Interesting Article from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Will There Still Be Messi If He Ever Moved To Australia In His Teen ?
Posted in News | October 25th, 2010
Would Lionel Messi have made it as a footballer if he lived in Australia? Seems an odd question, granted, until I read this week in a book on the diminutive genius’s life that his parents seriously considered emigrating to Australia when the world’s best player was in his early teens in order to access treatment for a growth deficiency.
Lionel Messi in the green and gold, imagine what we could do with such a player. Then again, what would we have done? Would we have treated him well and allowed him to develop into a world-class player, or would he have been mistreated and fallen by the wayside somewhere along the way?
The question is timely for two reasons. Firstly, I sat with a young man and his father this week who was told by a number of well-known youth coaches in Australia that his small stature would hinder any chances or dreams he possessed of being a great player, and that he should look elsewhere. Rejection drove the boy offshore and led him to trial at one of the world’s largest and most successful football clubs. Guess what. He made it through the trial and stayed a couple of years with a club at the very peak of world football development processes and thinking.
It’s a typical and common story here, unfortunately, and something we will have to face if we are to gain the success we crave. Time and again some of our most talented kids are told they are not big or strong enough, yet they make it through sheer commitment and drive.
One salient example for us, and one that this boy used as motivation, is our very own superstar, Tim Cahill. As a youngster it is now well known that Tim was told he would not make it, was too small, not good enough, and yet he packed his bags for England and made it through sheer bloody-mindedness and extraordinary willpower.
Fine if this is the exception, but sadly it has been the rule that players without size and strength have been overlooked, and thousands of gifted players leave the game.
But the second reason the question is worth asking is because things might, just might, be changing. Those who watched a spirited performance by the Young Socceroos last week in the final of the Asian Under 19 Championships saw a different Australia emerging, one that played with the ball, built from the back, had several players of exciting technical ability and who possess the tools to attack and take a player on.
We saw a new philosophy of Australian football starting to emerge, one in which the key qualities are skill and technique, not size and strength, or commitment and heart.
Tommy Oar played superbly, taking on the North Korean defence time and again whilst on the other wing, Mathew Leckie attacked the defenders every chance he got, and the game was controlled by the immensely talented Ben Kantarovski and Terry Antonis, two silky midfielders who are a joy to watch.
A few years after a new national philosophy was implemented, we can already see a future Socceroo team coming through with a range of abilities that have not always been valued in this country, where too many youth coaches continue to select the biggest and strongest in a bid for short-term results.
Fifteen years ago, if Lionel Messi had emigrated here, the chances are he would have been destroyed as a player and, like Cahill, told he was too small and needed to ”toughen up”. The wonderful news is that today the chances are he would be identified, and encouraged to use his marvelous individual skills. And this is a critical step forward.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
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