+xCriticisms..
Rogic...for a player of such talent and being an ex- futsal player, his first touch is not very good. He obviously knows this because when a ball comes to him he usually throws a feint ,or directs his first touch away from his opposition player (and he does that well)...however his actual touch is woeful, in that it often ends up a metre away from him. I can never understand why professional players who have a ball at their feet so much every day don't improve their ball control.
This is a problem with most of our team.
Unfortunately , if you wish to compete with the speed of passing of Brazil,Spain ,Germany etc you have to be able to control the ball very quickly and keep it very close.
This show us up even against teams like Saudi Arabia who were tactically inferior to us but technically far better.
We struggle when playing against technically superior sides because they can control and pass quicker.
Passing.....Ange was renowned at the Roar for insisting they pass rather than run the ball.This worked well for him and the Roar.
Now with the national team they get a ball and run with it for a few metres ( at least ) before passing.
This slows up the whole game and allows oppositions to reset themselves.
It also shows that players are receiving the ball without knowing what they are going to do with it next .
We need to cut the time on the ball and speed up ball movement around the field.
The old adage "let the ball do the work" has never been more relevant than in today's game...and in tournaments conditions it saves legs from tiring doing pointless running .
Speed up the passing and save your legs .
Sorry for the length of this post but I needed to make these points for my own sanity
I thought there was pretty decent one and two touch passing building up under considerable time and space pressure in defence and midfield at times.
The huge difference against the teams in the last few weeks, starting with Brazil, is that there is so much less time and space on the ball due to far more intensive squeezing within the modes of pressing.
In Asia, I've virtually stopped doing Socceroo stats. This is because the Socceroo defence, and sometimes midfield, have so much easy, uncontested ball against so many Asian opponents who defend deep and try to hit us on the break.
Conversely, the last three opponents have had a real go at winning the ball high up the pitch. Our players have had to play out under a lot more pressure.
Playing long balls is often easy to defend against. Joachim Low, the German coach, stated how much harder it was play against Ange's Socceroos. Pim's 2010 Socceroos played so many more long balls that were easy to defend against.
Our opponents have most players who experience closer to this off the ball intensity on a weekly basis in their club football. They also seem to be able to anticipate our play better and are used to faster handling speed in club football than our players.
Small technical factors like handling speed (the amount of time taken to receive and pass the ball on to the next player), both footedness and off the ball speed of movement and thought in opening viable passing lanes for teammates, are more likely to break down against the world class opposition we've faced in the last three games.
Let us not kid ourselves, in leagues like the English Championship, probably Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Turkey, Switzerland, and China, where most of our best players play club football overseas, they will rarely have encountered teams anywhere near as good as Germany, Brazil, Chile, and probably Cameroon, in terms of technical qualities, athleticism and off the ball intensity.