Onward without Carle - Les Murray


You have to hand it to Pim Verbeek. He’s the coach, the sole selector, the appointed architect and so it’s his way or the highway. The rest of us can go hang.

Which, as I have argued here before, is as it should be, or at least always will be and has been, like it or not. Why waste breath arguing the point?

Pim culled his World Cup squad from 31 to 28 following what was, in essence, not much more than a training run against New Zealand at the MCG and gave exit passes to Jade North, Scott McDonald and Nick Carle. And he gave his reasons even if he didn’t have to.

Pruning Scotty Mac, after his hard-working if fruitless presence in the qualifying run, was hard to argue with. The boy just doesn’t fit into Pim’s system so, rather than change the system to suit him, the kid had to be left off the bus.

Even sadder was the ejection of Carle whose patronage is unanimous among bloggers on this website and well beyond.

The boy is a shining light as a creative talent in the midst of the generational transition between the 2006 and 2010 Socceroos eras. He is the solo violinist if ever our football orchestra had one. Yet he will not be on the plane to South Africa.

The hard bit for us, as his big fans, is to accept it and to accept why. But accept it we must.

What is clear, two and a half years in to the Verbeek era, is that the coach will not divert from his favoured 4-2-3-1 system, the most common and popular scheme among tacticians today and which Pim has used successfully in the qualifiers.

He said as much when he justified his decision on McDonald, arguing that Scott is a two-striker player and that in his system there is no room for a two-pronged forward line where McDonald is most at home.

Carle, a classic playmaker and a glorious, traditional number 10, is surplus to requirements within the Verbeek tactical ideology also.

The fact is that within the 4-2-3-1 system there is no playmaker and therefore no room for Carle. In the attacking third there is a central striker, shadowed behind by a predatory stalker (Cahill in this case) and two wingers. In the system there is no playmaker, no orchestrator and no player who is the fulcrum of the creative stream.

In it Carle, and players of his qualities, are redundant. Not so, happily, at Sydney FC where Carle is apparently headed. There Vitezslav Lavicka plays with a midfield diamond in a 4-4-2 with the number 10 sitting at the top of it, pulling the strings for the two forwards.

So, having accepted that 4-2-3-1 is the way it will be for Australia, and the way we must like, we move on.

I am happy with the squad Verbeek has chosen, even if it would have been nice if he took a punt on the exciting teenager, Tommy Oar, and left him in his 23.

This will be, under the Verbeek scheme, the best Australian team that could have been chosen with the first eleven largely the same as in 2006.

The fear for some is that the team is four years older and therefore too old. Not so. A couple of the players – Moore and Chipperfield – are very near retirement but the rest are still of a good, competitive age.

Indeed the past four years has surely improved them. Verbeek prefers to say the players are four years more experienced rather than four years older and he has a point.

Since 2006 they have had four good years drilled at club level and additionally trekked through a precarious if not over-tough 14-match qualifying campaign, something they didn’t do pre-Germany.

I have no doubt this team will cope well in South Africa.

http://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/les-murray/blog/1003882/Onward-without-Carle