Mark Bosnich has turned a flamethrower on Australian football after the Socceroos were left outclassed by France in their World Cup opener on Wednesday morning.
The manner of the defeat has triggered an avalanche of criticism towards the Socceroos and coach Graham Arnold, however, Bosnich says the finger of blame should be pointed elsewhere.
There are several factors that made the Socceroos’ task almost impossible — but the most important remains that Arnold simply doesn’t have the cattle to compete against the world’s best.
Australia has never got it right with its production line of young talent — something that is brutally exposed every four years.
It is exactly what former Socceroos coach Ange Postecoglou warned about before the 2018 World Cup in Russia and exactly what Socceroos legend Craig Foster said four years ago after Australia’s loss to Peru in Russia.
Four years later, nothing has changed.
The most important thing to remember is that Arnold and his players have a chance to make us all look like fools and their campaign is very much alive, despite the 4-1 loss to the reigning world champions.
Australia next plays Tunisia on Saturday night before taking on Denmark in the final Group D match at 2am on Thursday, December 1 and two results could be enough for Australia to qualify for the group stages.
It would be the perfect way for Arnold to silence his critics after such a storm of condemnation for his tactics and style against France.
Australia’s failure to push up the pitch and put pressure on France was widely criticised by commentators after the game. With Australia siting back and letting the star-studded French attack run at them was a disaster and the three-goal defeat could easily have become an embarrassing scoreline if France had finished off some other golden opportunities.
The most cutting criticism has focused on the manner of the defeat with the Socceroos seemingly too shy to take the game on.
Australia enjoyed just 35 per cent of possession and allowed France to have 44 touches inside the penalty area. It was not exactly the Australian way.
It’s not hard to see why when the Australian World Cup squad is valued at about $59m and France’s squad is worth about $1.6 billion, according to transfermarkt.
Bosnich said the result exposes what little Australia has learned about its junior talent pathways — compared to France’s own system of junior academies that went through a dramatic overhaul following the country’s failure to qualify for the 1990 World Cup.
“The biggest question there is you’re seeing the result of people in France way back when they missed out in 1990 and they sat down and put together a massive plan.
“You are seeing the results of that now, and you see the difference in the class and the quality.
“That’s the biggest question here. What is Australian football going to do in the future to see our players be like that one day.
“Five world cup appearances all well and good, but what? But what? One last 16 place in over 100 years. So what are you going to do about that? That’s the biggest question.”
Arnold produced a minor miracle in guiding Australia to the World Cup finals with a squad referred to by some as the weakest Socceroos squad in decades.
The lack of world class players coming off the production line is exactly what Foster bemoaned four years ago when saying Australia had learned nothing from its campaign at the Brazil 2014 World Cup.
“In my view, we haven’t learnt from the last four years and we’ve come here and … according to the style of play, the guys executed it extremely well, but Australia’s capable of more,” he said in 2018.
“We’re capable of much more against Denmark and the real problem for Australia is that if we’d actually won this game and gone through … I would have preferred that France won, so that we can feel more pain right now.
“Otherwise it is just another moment where everyone feels we almost got there. We walk away. We dust ourselves off and learn very little, if anything, and then move on to the next campaign.”
The spectre of Postecoglou and his brutal prediction looms large as Australia struggled in its campaign opener on Wednesday.
However, it is also undeniable that Australia’s problems run deeper than that — as Postecoglou made clear when he walked out on the team before Russia 2018.
He famously said he wanted to play with an aggressive style that he believed could compete with the best teams in the world — but that philosophy was thrown out by his replacement Bert van Marwijk on the eve of the 2018 World Cup.
Graham Arnold has worked tirelessly to bring back an Australian identity into the Socceroos program in his four years in-charge — but Australian football’s path ahead appears to be unclear and a mixture of the two styles.
Postecoglou saw Wednesday morning’s result coming a mile off. He said in 2018: “In terms of development I think we’re going backwards to be honest,” he said of his previous 11 years with Australian teams at various levels.
“Unfortunately, from my days as national coach we’re going backwards – in terms of we don’t see it as an investment, we see it as an expense. We just have too short-term thinking, there just aren’t enough people with a broader vision as to how we can actually we can make Australia a force in world football.“
At the moment, it’s still about this World Cup or the next tournament, and eventually that will catch up with us. I think we’re going to find it really hard to compete in Asia. We’re already finding it difficult at youth and under age levels.
“The challenge even in the future to qualify for senior World Cups will become more difficult because more and more Asian countries put money into their youth, and we don’t. If anything, we’re going the other way.”
