Crawley and Redmayne will break down the penalty shoot-out on Facebook live at 8pm.

Still feels good that Australia made it.  

I hope our generally incompetent governing body can get some actual domestic football mileage out of this.  

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-10936489/Mark-Schwarzer-says-Andrew-Redmaynes-tactics-new-normal-ahead-Qatar-World-Cup.html

https://images.app.goo.gl/fDyEyacCjwrL14h88

A bit of mileage was gained in 2006, with our first WC appearance in 32 years being sandwiched between the first and 2nd seasons of the A-League, and that probably even carried through to season 3.
But 4 WCs on, the days of getting mileage for the domestic league are long gone.
If anything, quite the reverse is likely.  The WC is a time for new players to come to notice to the public, invariably they play for, or are about to be snapped up by one of the big clubs or leagues, and that's where the attention will be post-WC (unless a few of the A-League players become WC heroes and stay in the A-League).

I would have thought that it would be the APL's job to get mileage out of it for the A-League.

FA might be able to keep the Socceroos flame burning based on our WC performance and with hopefully home warm ups for the Asian Cup mid June next year but domestically I expect the WWC to take most of the spotlight.  

With each WC there has been a jump in juniors trying our game and that should happen this time also, especially with the girls but we might run up against the perennial problem of lack of pitches to cater for all of the new players who want to play.

I would have thought that somewhere in the next 18 months would be ideal to kick off the NSD.

I think 2013 was our low for our national team and we've gradually improved since then. Postecoglu and Cahill managed to paper over the fact we reached a very deep low. Before then the golden generation papered over the fact that we stopped producing european quality players around 2003, a full decade of poor quality.
 
The young players we are developing have now improved to the point where it doesn't take a super coach, just a good one capable of sustained success in the a league to qualify. 

We have now finished in the top four twice in a row in u23 which is an improvement from where we were

If we can get a decent length season and a second division with mostly full time players, we can have a large crop of NC trained youth playing 100 odd games before 21 and ready for top leagues in europe, rather than going from the a league to the second teir competitions

I really, really, hope we can get some of the best nsl clubs in the second division and it happens quickly. I get football needed a reboot, but its insane to me that a club like south melbourne isn't in a professional comp when they have a 12000 strong stadium

Interesting stat for the stadium capacity when one thinks of Bournemouth is in the EPL again with their 12,500 capacity stadium. 

In 99% of the world stadium capacity is not the key factor in which clubs are allowed to play in the top division.....  Look at Australia, WU dont even need a stadium, let alone one with 12k capacity :)

.

https://youtu.be/kZbSm1Sy4ts

Such an interesting breakdown with Crawley and Redmayne. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztMVw0kMMRg

Shootout from just behind goal.

From keepers viewpoint you can see how/why they get wrong footed

too much coke and hookers

My apologies, that's what I meant. 

And take apparently in SAF book he comments on he has never seen a player have such a bad diet and play at such a high level 

i personally like Bozza he is pretty much the standard average bloke who was good at something go rich and lived it up but didnt have enough 'self control' too see how lucky he was. 

2013 was definitely our darkest point but to mine it wasn't a development issue as such as I think we had talented players coming through but I believe it was as a result of having 2 successive long stints with foreign national coaches. Both kept picking the same European players and did not bring through the next generation. Leckie and troisi for example hadn't even been capped by the time Postecoglue arrived in the job, Ryan had barely played. Behich and davidson barely played. We had that roarcelona team starting from 2010-11 Osiek didnt bring them through. Eric Paartulu, Smith, Luke Devere, Franjic, Mitch Nicholls and Matt Mckay were all on fire but the only player Osiek brought in at that time was 28 yr old McKay. All of those players should have got caps under Osiek but didn't (or barely). Rukavytsa another that barely played despite overseas success - won a bundi 2 with Hertha and had most assists in the league, barely picked. I remember we played a friendly vs South korea where holger played a lot of these young guys after a lot of criticism in the media for not playing youth, and low and behold we won. I then expected us to keep picking a lot of these guys but he only really played Oar and Kruse. Nathan Burns won greek 2nd division player of the year yet again not played as much as he should have been. Ersum Golum, won the Turkish 2nd division player of the yr award in 2009-10 yet wasn't called up by Verbeek. By the time Osiek tried calling him up in 2011 it was too late. Milligan another who barely played until around 2013. 

So there were enough good young players around but they weren't put forward enough - who knows where there careers would have gone had they been put in the spotlight earlier ...

What a morning. 

oh gosh yes what a nightmare that time was. Osiek just kept claiming the youth sucked and never gave them a shot, even off the bench to put them in the spotlight and in the end reaped what he sowed. At that time, I didn't have the confidence in the a league to back roarcelona players getting picked, still assuming foreign was always better. Ange and Arnold really changed that for me and perhaps many others

it does seem though that there has been a gradual improvement in the quality of youth from around that time though

definitely youth has improved. Put it this way we qualified for the olympics for the first time since 2008. It so happens that a lot of those players i mentioned above were in that 2008 squad but simply weren't brought through until Postecoglue in late 2013 - years after they should have been. 

For this reason we have to be careful picking overseas coaches - they have proven in the past to not develop our national playing pool. Unless they are a real maverick or visionary type, like Gus who plucked Wilkshire, MIlligan and Josh Kennedy out of nowhere who went on to be some of our greatest players. Someone like a bielsa would be good and set the national side on a long path to success as he has done in his past roles, but if its the typical mercenary type overseas coach they will not actually develop us, just pick an 11 playing at the highest level we have (see Verbeek, Osiek, BvM).  

Verbeek and osiek were complete disaters. We probably qualify with any competent coach and should have gone local

a league numbers crashed after pims snobbish comments. 

I suspect Pim and Holger were on big bonuses to make the WC so put all the most experienced eggs into their baskets.

They had zero incentive to develop the Australian game or even the Australian team beyond their own narrow windows.

Alternative world

a new budding a league is aided by a coach who encourages every fan to attend every game and scouts it for talent, bringing the best to camps and have them play alongside our golden generation.

Eurosnobs see some a league players are good enough to hold their own next to players who have made it in europe and the less skeptical get converted to a league fans. The better attendance speeds expansion and excess funds speeds the development of a second league

Yes if only. Apparently when Gus left he told the FFA that the entire team needed to rebuilt , was aging and youth needed to be brought through. Incredible that this was in 2006 and it wasn't really til the 2nd half of Osiek's reign that this started to happen, and wasn't wholesale til Ange at the end of 2013. There really was a lost generation of players from the 04 and 08 olympic sides. Players like Carle, Kisnorbo, Brosque, Bosnar and Ognenovski from the 04 gen and later Milligan, Leijer, Kilkenny, Troisi, Topo Stanley, Spira, Troisi, Burns , Djite and Ersan Golum weren't played enough (or at all) or in the case of Troisi, Spira, Milligan, Ognenovshi and Kilkenny brought through too late. Their Aussie caps would have aided their careers when they were in their ascendency, particularly milligan who i think with more national team caps would have gone on to the top level.

Hopefully we pick Popa as coach or get that visionary overseas type like Bielsa. 

Is there some re-writing of history going on here?  Verbeek handed out 22 caps, Osieck 28 caps, Ange 20 caps and Arnold 32 caps.  Each of them searched wide to put together the best squad they could and did what FFA required of them in qualifying us for the World Cup.

Interestingly 6 of our starters against Peru were capped by Osieck, 2 by Ange and 3 by Arnold.

Gus actually said that talent was light on in the immediate up and coming players and that the FFA needed to do as much as possible to improve our talent development which is why we ended up with the National Curriculum.

Thanks for this. Always good to see myths busted.

Disagree.

I  think Pim was one of our best coaches. His record showed he was one of our best coaches, post 2005. 

Pim never intended that quote to be made public - a journalist breached confidentiality.

Regarding developing  youth, after he played young players and lost to China, then  was castigated by the media, he was not going to risk them again!  

That’s just Dutch directness (granted, not every single Dutchie is direct). Dutch people are known for being rather direct.

It was frank and probably correct in terms of the standard of the A-League. It was in no a way a personal attack on any individual. Just an assessment of the league (which a NT manager needs to make). Australian football should be able to tolerate that kind of criticism.

I didn’t know, as Decentric is pointing out, that the comments weren’t supposed to be for a public audience.

We lost 4 nil to Germany at the World Cup. Big deal. To put it into context (in the same tournament), Germany beat England 4-1 and Argentina 4-0.Anyway, if you judge Pim’s tenure by points gained, his team got the same number of points at the group stage as Guus’.

Decent effort and unlucky not to progress to the Round of 16. Hats off to Pim, I say. We miss you, you were taken way too soon.