Tam Rogic

Here we go, If this team beat this team, and this team beat this team doesn't that mean my team is better than the other team. Just a bunch of crap. The fact that Australia finished 3rd behind Saudi Arabia in the qualifying group stages tell you all you need to know. Scotland and Australia play tomorrow and I know who my money is on, and it isn't the team that plays a 38 year old up front by himself. The World Cup is hardly the world cup if the best teams aren't in it yet countries like yours get a free pass because of the location. This talk of expanding the world cup is even more crap because they are only going to expand the European spots to 3 more yet places like Asia get an extra 8?! How easier will they make it for you to qualify against 3rd world countries?

Anyway this doesn't excuse how your media (sbs) are so poor at reporting on anything other than the english premier league. How this plonker can say Rogic has hardly improved his game since coming here just sums up how poor most Australian football "experts" are.

 

The point I'm making is that the Asian federation gets a bad wrap and while some points are valid, I don't think yours are.

The fact that we finished 3rd behind Saudi Arabia tells us what exactly? We had Postecoglou as manager for the entire qualification period who tried playing formations that didn't fit the style of our players and said players were played out of position subsequently. We then brought in van Marwijk (fresh off qualification with Saudi Arabia, in fact) who took a look at the squad, made the changes he needed to make and have a look at what happened at the cup. We took the eventual world champs the entire 90 minutes, and it took a lucky deflection for them to come away with a win, before we drew against Denmark (Scotland beat Denmark 1-0 in a friendly back in 2016, as a comparison). The Peru game was pish, i'll admit.

We certainly have far from a free pass. We go through just as many qualification games as European sides, including arguably the longest away trips in world football to far off places like the middle East. Even Japan is further than most European trips. If you had it your way, it would just be 24 teams from Europe and 8 from South America competing in the World Cup. They already have those competitions mate they're called the Euros and the Copa America. WORLD cup. If your country isn't in the top 20 on the continent why do they deserve a spot over another country in the top 3 of their continent?

I do agree with you about the SBS reporter. Proper *. But like i said, its the 5th most popular sport in this country and the coverage and quality of journalism reflects that.

 

[/QUOTE]But like i said, its the 5th most popular sport in this country and the coverage and quality of journalism reflects that.[/QUOTE]

Football was the most played sport in Australia in 2017 beating aussie rules, basketball, cricket- https://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/football-australia-s-most-played-sport-with-1-1m-participants

The fact that Asia is full of 3rd world countries does not help your case into why Australia qualifying is such a big achievement. Japan and South Korea I would say are the only opponents where it is acceptable to lose against. I could just imagine what facilities some of these teams you come up against use compared to Australia. I think you're also forgetting that Syria (3rd world country) took you into extra time in the first stage play offs.


Aussies need to start taking a look in their own backyard when asking themselves why Australian football is going backwards not by slagging off a league the other side of the world that they know nothing about because they relied too much on certain individuals (Rogic and Mooy) How about they focus on their own league ? Turning down Usain Bolt and giving a young 17 year an opportunity in their own league should be a start.

 

Football is, or at least was, the sport with the highest participation numbers, and am not disputing that either. But you have to consider that in context. Some states, such as Victoria, South Australia etc, are very much AFL states, where AFL is by far the most popular sport. In others, such as QLD and NSW, it's the NRL that dominates the sporting landscape. So when taking those participation numbers being across the country there would be a lot of places where football is the 3rd or even 4th most popular participation sport, but also those figures would reflect low AFL participation in NRL states and visa versa.

And that goes for the TV coverage and revenues are likewise broken down into those types of regions. SBS, where that article originated, was the one channel that was dedicated to showcasing football. In fact, purely because of the content that used to be shown on that channel when I was a kid growing up it used to be nicknamed '* Between Soccer', because of the high content of football and foreign language films that contained no shortage of skin... lets just say that * were definitely not something you would see on the ABC or Channels 7,9 or 10.

I do disagree with the writer's opinions, because so much attention in Australia is given to the EPL, and just as Chris Sutton was saying just the other night ahead of the Aberdeen v Burnley game on 5Live, criticizing journalists, writers and pundits down south who are really critical of the game up here, while remaining fairly ignorant of it also, the same could be said of that writer's opinions of the Socttish game and Rogic's development while here. So I am skeptical of that particular opinion it does not mean that SBS should be disregarded as a credible source even if their world view of the World Game is somewhat skewed. Idek if SBS still do carry the football, in the pay TV era. Probably FOX now? No idea. I've not lived there for 20+ yrs.

As for 'looking after their own backyard', think that is a little bit of an unfair comment that you've made here. 20-odd years ago the football comptitoin was the NSL, which was comprised of teams such as Marconi, Sydney Croatia, Melbourne Olympic and so forth. Which as you can guess was not exactly ideal, as it made for the teams very much ethnic based followings, and didnt half hurt the reputation of the game as being 'wogball', and any time that there was large coverage of the game would only really happen when there was crowd troubles. Which hurt the image of the game and also meant that anyone with any sort of desire to have a career in football had to do it here in Europe. Craig Johnson is a prime example of this.

By reforming into the A-league and having city wide based teams made it more attractive to people to follow the national league, which has grown quite impressively compared to the NSL days, and taken advantage of other sports actions - the super league war in the mid 90's in rugby league and its aftermath opened opportunities that football was able to seize upon, moving into territories otherwise being neglected and downright disregarded. This also meant that in the twilight of their years, the likes of Kewell, Viduka, Cahill etc could return to Australia to lend their experience to teams and younger guys developing.

At a national level this co-incided with the emergence of a National team that was capable of compting on the World stage. Australia had not qualified for a World Cup for more than 30years prior to 2006, which was the one and only time in which, under the former set up, Australia would go from aying against the likes of Samoa and Fiji, whee NZ was the biggest competiotn thy had, and really in all of those games, there were so few times Australia needed a full strength team and could do all of that with just the locally based players. All of a sudden they would then be confronted with a play off against the likes of Argentina or Uruguay. All of a sudden they would need to recall all of the best players from Europe, throw them together and hope over 2 games they could gel to try and get a result against teams from South America or Europe that had been through a far more thorough and rigoured test of 10-12 games of football of a higher quality and standard, than the domestically based Socceroos beating American Samoa 32-0. It was a joke.

By contrast, since joining Asia, Australia have qualified for the 2010, 2014 and 2018 World Cups, while various Australian club sides have either made or won the Final of the Asian Champions League. So it cannot be said that Australian football has been more or less heading in the right direction.

But let's be honest, the money on offer in Australia is not huge. The TV money is much more divided between AFL and NRL based territories, the A-league playing when the Finals Series to the NRL and AFL seaosns are taking place, before having to compete with cricket etc, that were really much more nationally followed and coverage given to that. Whiole articipation numbers reflect those playing the game during the more traditional 'football' seaosn of April-Sept, the A-League isn't active at that time of year.

The structure of the A-League ensures that it is and remains largely financially viable, by implementing a salary cap that is the same for all of the teams, no matter if they are in big cities or regional centres that are far less populated. The exception being that the clubs can have a seperate 'marquee' signing that does not need to adhere to the salary cap. So again the best players and those that have aspirations of achieving success at this level, have to follow in the footsteps of Kewell, Cahill, and yes, Rogic, in heading over to clubs here in Europe.

That is not to say that the Australian game is perfect, not by any means, but let's not kid ourselves, that the Scottish game is exactly in a great state either. While Celtic have definitely been able to look after ourselves given the environment and situation we find ourselves in, doesn't mean that our club's potential could be so much higher under the right circumstances, the governing body here in Scotland is a joke, the national team has not qualified for a major tournament in over 20years now, and it is down to the clubs themselves to get their own situation improved, and the likes of Aberdeen, Hibs, Hearts, Killie etc should be commended for this, far more than the SMSM or the SFA do, who seem far more interested in a return to the duopoly that existed when EBT FC were still alive and kicking.

 

* sake man,that has to be one of the longest posts in TC's history.

 

LOL, I've written some doozies mate, haha. Don't always post a lot, but if have something to say try to make it worth while, lol

 

Brilliant mate ,keep them coming

 

Far too stoned to understand any of that

 

Although i will say the comment abouts Rogic not progressing at celtic is one of the most ignorant comments ive ever heard. its so stupid i can hardly get my head around it.Lets just look at the facts about Rogic.He is currently one of the best players at one of the biggest clubs in the world in terms of history,support and success. He hass 8 honours to his name and along with Moy is clearly a level or two above anyone else in the Australia team. The strikers Austrlia have were shoking at the world cup, i honestly think that if leagh griffths was Australian they would have made it past the groups,with rogic constantly assiting him.

 

Decent post and food for thought.

 

I agree taz about the a-league being a lot better than the old nsl days (apart from making it harder for younger players to break through professionally). But just as I say that you get the 50-60 year olds who are at the top levels of football in australia saying 'oh how we miss the nsl days of proper football players and supporters' yet the attendances were so poor back then compared to now.

We are going to have to agree to disagree on how much of an achievement it is for Australia to qualify for the world cup due to the amount of third world country teams that they play in order to qualify. The fact that they finished 3rd behind Saudi Arabia yet still get to play in a play-off type scenario is quite baffling considering Slovakia didn't qualify even though they finished 2nd in their group through the European qualifiers. You could say like other poster 'but we were experimenting with different tactics' but the fact is how many European teams have the luxury of doing this?

I just find it amusing how this old guy on the other side of the world who's getting paid to write these articles probably watches 1 spfl game a season (celtic v rangers) has a go at the state of our league and is hinting that our league is holding Australian football back. Maybe have a look at your own league first where a club is considering signing Usain Bolt rather than giving a youth player an opportunity to gain experience. Or how an overweight Ross McCormack went there and tore the league up before heading back to Aston Villa where he has played 0 minutes.

Totally agree with your last point about the governing body is Scotland, it is absolutely mental some of the decisions they make. Gordan Strachan couldn't get us to a World Cup, so who do we hire? Alex * McLeish. The fact that they scraped the Reserve League back in 2009 was another big mistake, took them 9 years to realise that the players actually benefited from it. Now the youth players don't have to be released at the end of every season like they currently are since the development league only currently allow 5 players over the age of 20 to compete.

On my last point do you think the salary cap is really a good thing or is it holding the league back? I know the a-league has a rule where you are only allowed I think 3-4 foreign players a squad which is great, but then limiting teams to pick from a heap of underwhelming overseas players rather than let the clubs choose who they want seems a bit silly and if anything is stopping the league from progressing further.

 

Dunno why watching him makes me laugh. Especially against sevco as it's so effortless how he goes past people or does something sublime. Wonderful player.

 

Philip Micallef is definitely one of the more useless knobheads in the Australian football media. That said there are plenty of others that have their doubts about the SPL for the development of Australian players, mainly because of the quality of the sides outside the top handful. What they don't appreciate is that Rogic (and maybe Arzani) of course gets to train in great facilities with a top notch coach with very good team mates. He also gets to play in Europe.

 

You're a star, Crow x

 

Fkn * that post I got to 'Football is' and gave up.

Anyway, slap Chocolate Hammy in the coupon take his number 10 off him and grace this fkn genius Wizard with it.

 

Didier Rogic.