How a dying mum gave Socceroos coach Graham Arnold the kick he needed

On a Monday afternoon in Sydney in July, over several hours and as many craft beers, Socceroos coach Graham Arnold discloses the most intimate and harrowing parts of his life to me like he’s talking to his accountant.

We talk about the 59-year-old’s impoverished upbringing living with his parents and older brother in a converted garage underneath his grandmother’s house in Sylvania in Sydney’s south. We talk about his alcoholic and abusive father who would make him walk home from soccer matches when he was eight years old if he didn’t score enough goals.

We talk about his mother’s heartbreaking cancer diagnosis before she passed away when Arnold was 20. We talk about him “just giving up”, overwhelmed with grief and how, even then, his father wouldn’t give an inch, wouldn’t say “he loved me or was proud of me” before he, too, was gone after suffering a heart attack when Arnold was 25.

We talk in detail about how “she was so soft, and he was so hard” but not once, at any point, did Arnold wrestle with his emotions. He talks with the clarity of someone who many years ago scooped up all his childhood trauma and sadness, put it in a shoebox and placed it in the back of a cupboard alongside years of tax returns.

Then I ask Arnold to take me through the Socceroos’ penalty shootout against Peru at the Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium in Doha, Qatar, in June – the result of which would simultaneously confirm Australia’s qualification at this month’s FIFA World Cup finals and save him from being sacked.

He goes to speak but no words come out. His eyes fill with tears before he bows his head and turns away so I can’t see.

“Yep,” he says. “Sorry –” A long pause.

“Sorry, mate.”

Take your time.

“I’m sorry.”

It’s okay.

“Thank f… this isn’t on video.”

For 1008 days, across 20 matches, in 10 countries, the Socceroos had walked a qualification tightrope, grappling with COVID-19 restrictions, lockdowns, quarantines and border closures. Arnold, who caught the virus twice, was the man responsible for making sure his side didn’t face-plant.

When neither Peru or Australia had scored after 120 minutes of play and the match went to a penalty shootout, the result fell on 33-year-old goalkeeper Andrew Redmayne, otherwise known as the “Grey Wiggle” because of the grey jersey he wears and his proclivity for waving his long limbs and arms to distract the penalty-taker. As the players linked arms, and the coaching staff huddled on the sideline, and bleary-eyed Socceroos fans watched on in the early hours of the morning in Australia, Arnold sat on the bench looking skyward and whispered to himself: “Please, mum.”

“We needed help,” he recalls. “If ever the universe was going to pay me back, that was it.”

The World Cup trophy is 36.8-centimetres high and is made of 18-carat gold. It depicts two figures holding the world above their heads and, every four years, teams from 32 countries come together in a tournament that holds the planet’s gaze like no other code. If sport has a holy grail, this is it.

Australia and the World Cup have an uneasy history, bringing great pleasure but mostly pain. The finals were first held in 1930 but the Socceroos, our
national football team, didn’t make their first appearance until 1974, under the command of coach Rale Rasic and led by heroes such as captain Peter Wilson and the late Johnny Warren.

It took the Socceroos 32 years to reach the finals again, our collective hearts broken every four years as they regularly stumbled in the final match of qualification. That changed on November 16, 2005, when Australia met Uruguay at Sydney’s Olympic Stadium. Football Australia had convinced Dutch master-coach Guus Hiddink to guide the Socceroos, glistening with stars like Harry Kewell, Tim Cahill and Mark Schwarzer, through the final stages of qualification. John Aloisi slotted the penalty that secured Australia a place in the finals in Germany the next year.

Few people are better placed to understand Australia’s paradoxical relationship with the World Cup than Graham Arnold. As a player – an aggressive striker – he was part of four failed campaigns, his last coming in 1997 when he came on late against Iran at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Arnold had three legitimate chances to score the match-winner, the last coming in the seventh minute of stoppage time when his outstretched boot was inches away from connecting with a long ball from Craig Foster in front of goal. “I always tell him he missed a sitter,” jokes Robbie Slater, his former Socceroos teammate and close friend who was also on the field that night. “That one hurt the most – because it was our last chance.”

As an assistant coach to Frank Farina in 2001, Arnold felt further pain when Australia was thumped 3-0 against Uruguay before a hostile crowd in Montevideo. “Do you think it might be you?” his lifelong friend Glenn Holloway joked after Arnold arrived back in Sydney.

Four years later, Arnold stood alongside Hiddink when Aloisi scored. “It was like all those lost years, for all the Socceroos who failed, were part of that penalty kick,” says Slater.

Aloisi’s historic strike might have shrugged a sizeable gorilla off the Socceroos’ back, but it set a new benchmark for every coach who followed Hiddink. Australia has been expected to reach the finals since, something Arnold’s predecessors have achieved, Pim Verbeek in 2010, Ange Postecoglou in 2014 and 2017.

Coaching the Socceroos is a thankless job – Postecoglou quit soon after qualifying the second time – yet few have faced the same challenges as Arnold, who took over as coach in 2018. COVID meant many of the World Cup qualifiers had to be played abroad because teams, including some of his own players, weren’t prepared to sit in a 14-day hotel quarantine in Australia.

Arnold keeps his inner circle tight. He lives in Sydney’s inner west with his wife, Sarah, whom he married seven years ago. He has three daughters, Kirstie, 33, Elissa, 31, and Danielle, 27, by his first wife, and three grandchildren. He left them behind and lived out of a suitcase for seven months from May 2021 as he pieced together the jigsaw of border restrictions, scant international flights and a disparate squad playing at clubs in different corners of the world, while trying to win football matches.

He often coached via Zoom meetings or had just one session with a full squad the day before matches. Once, a player phoned and said, “Arnie, I’ve got COVID – I can’t breathe.” He made sure the caller received the necessary medical support.

“I had conversations when I was genuinely worried about him,” Robbie Slater says of Arnold. “He was under pressure; he was on his own. Then came the criticism.”

The toughest match was against Japan in Sydney in March, when nine players and Arnold were forced to isolate until the day of the game after testing positive to COVID-19. Arnold was coaching via laptop from his then-home on the northern beaches.

“Football people in this country are weird. That’s why the game is continually in a state of disarray, full of small people with self-interest.”

Four days before the match, a member of the public spotted him and Sarah walking their dog in North Narrabeen and contacted 2GB radio host Ray Hadley, who broadcast the sighting. Football Australia fined Arnold $25,000 and rumours swirled about him getting sacked. “That’s the only time I thought about walking away,” he says. “But the players said to me, ‘If you go, we’ll walk too.’ ” Japan won the match 2-0, consigning Australia to a tougher route to the finals.

Arnold’s critics pounced. All sports elicit fervent, often aggressive debate from those who played it and especially those who follow it. The rise of social media means any old issue can be whipped into something larger than it usually is. The rise of television magazine programs with panels filled with former players spices the narrative.

Soccer, though, engenders something deeper than just a difference of opinion. For decades, the game had battled for relevance in Australia with cricket, AFL and the rugby codes. When former players criticise their former teammates, as many have with Arnold, it feels like an attack from within.

“Maybe it’s just me,” Arnold laughs when I ask him why this is so, although Slater has another theory: “Football people in this country are weird. That’s why the game is continually in a state of disarray, full of small people with self-interest. Mark Schwarzer, Scott Chipperfield, Craig Moore, Tom Cahill, Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka … They’re some of our greatest players. That generation should be running the game. But none of them are, because they come back from overseas and get shitted on. If you’ve had success overseas, they don’t like you.”

In the case of Socceroos goalkeeper Mark Bosnich – who had a successful overseas career plagued with tabloid scandal – it feels like something different. Bosnich had played with Arnold. When he started offering
unfettered opinion on television, radio and on social media, it struck a raw nerve because they had been through so much together, as teammates and friends.

“This comes down to the manager,” Bosnich, a regular panellist on Stan FC, told SEN Radio after a 2-2 draw with Oman in February. “I have known Graham Arnold since I was 14, we have had good and bad moments. I really do think that Football Australia need to have a serious think, if we go into the play-off, if Graham Arnold is the right man to lead us into those play-off games.”

By the time the Socceroos were playing their death-or-glory match against Peru, the pressure on Arnold was intense. Few gave Australia hope against Peru and fewer still thought Arnold would retain his job.

Just as in 2005 against Uruguay, a place at the World Cup party would be determined by penalties against an opponent from South America, where soccer is a religion. In the final minute of extra time, Arnold made a stunning decision to replace goalkeeper Mat Ryan, who had played in 19 of the last 20 matches. Commentators were aghast. Twitter caught fire. Bosnich was sitting at his Sydney home with his phone exploding with messages, all of them with the same tone: “What is Arnold doing?!”

Bosnich knew. Arnold was reading from the Hiddink playbook about always confusing the opposition with your tactics. In 2005, Hiddink had planned to replace Schwarzer with second-choice goalkeeper Zeljko Kalac, but injuries in extra time prevented it from happening. Arnold decided to roll the dice against Peru. What did he have to lose? “Everything,” he says. When he told Ryan about his plan, the keeper walked directly over to Redmayne and hugged him. “This is your time,” he said.

So, here it was. Peru’s Alex Valera on the penalty spot, looking at Redmayne, whose limbs are flailing about like The Wiggles’ Hot Potato that’s playing in his mind. He stabs at the ball with his left foot, aiming low and to the left of the goal. Redmayne reads it like a book and bats it away with both hands before standing up, hands on hips, mouth agape, waiting to be swamped by his delirious teammates.

Much like that night at Stadium Australia in 2005, the penalty captures the absurdity of sport, in which careers and lives are either made or ruined by a singular moment. As Arnold told Holloway over a quiet beer when he returned home: “I was one kick away from being Australia’s most hated man.”

Arnold often uses humour to deflect criticism. In 2017, he was coaching Sydney FC in a match against Western Sydney Wanderers when Wanderers supporters produced an enormous banner depicting him performing oral sex. The club was fined $20,000 and 14 fans from the team’s Red and Black Bloc supporter group were banned for 18 months. Arnold spoke publicly about the effect the incident had on his family and how he didn’t accept the Wanderers’ belated apology because he didn’t think the club meant it. Privately, though, his response was different. “The whole thing left a bitter taste in my mouth,” he joked at the time.

Bosnich has often told me his criticism of Arnold comes from a sincere place; that it’s his job, as a pundit, to offer an opinion. Slater rejects this: “Bozza got personal with him. That’s ordinary. He said on TV that it wasn’t personal. As soon as you say that, it is personal. I’m Arnie’s best mate and I can say he did deserve criticism at times. But we were in exactly the same position as Ange in 2017, and he had a stronger squad.”

Arnold doesn’t name Bosnich specifically when asked about the criticism coming from former players. He tosses up the prosaic line about only caring about the opinion of his family and friends but does offer this: “You’d think some ex-teammates would know better. The biggest thing was the players felt a complete lack of support from the nation. All the players do social media. They were saying to me, ‘Arnie, Australia doesn’t want us to qualify. They’re not supporting us.’ People wanted us to fail. I honestly feel I can’t do anything right in this country any longer.”

“The biggest thing was the players felt a complete lack of support from the nation. People wanted us to fail. I honestly feel I can’t do anything right in this country any longer.”

When Arnold returned to Australia two days after the Peru victory, he collapsed onto the couch at home. “I wanted to watch the shootout on YouTube,” he recalls. “I still hadn’t seen it.” I ask him what it felt like in that moment. Once again, he tries to speak, but he can’t get the words out.

Graham Arnold’s last game of football was more than 20 years ago: an over-35s match at Brookvale Oval on Sydney’s northern beaches. He went to head the ball and a collision with an opponent left him with a broken nose and rib. Career officially over.

In person, he still looks fit enough to play. His lean, wiry frame resembles a footballer’s, but the balding grey hair gives away his current profession.

“Coaching does that to you,” he smiles, narrowing his steel-blue eyes.

His hairline betrays the past. In the late 1980s, Arnold had one of the finest curly mullets Australian sport has seen. A dubious moustache completed the look of a cult figure revered by supporters of his team, Sydney Croatia, and loathed by all others in the rowdy, ethnically charged days of the National Soccer League, when players left matches in paddy wagons before being dropped off at the team bus a kilometre or so down the road.

On the night of March 12, 1989, Australian fans were unified in their love of Arnold as he scored two goals in the Socceroos’ 4-1 win over New Zealand in the World Cup qualifier at the Sydney Football Stadium. The following morning, Arnold called his father, Barry.

“Hey Dad, were you at the game?” Arnold asked.

“Yeah,” Barry grumbled.

“What’d you think?”

“You’re a f…ing embarrassment.”

“Oh yeah, why’s that?”

“What about the two you missed?”

Barry then hung up.

“I didn’t speak to him for a long time after that,” Arnold says. “As a kid, I hated him. When I scored, and we won and I played well, he was nice to me. Other than that, he was just really hard. That was my life from the age of six.”

For 23 years, Arnold lived with his father, mother Faye and older brother Colin in a renovated double garage under his maternal grandmother’s home in Sylvania. The workshop was turned into a bedroom in which the boys slept.

“We never went on a family holiday, ever,” Arnold recalls. “We never went out for a family dinner, ever. My dad was at the pub every day, every night. I could count on one hand how many times all four of us sat around the dining room table together.”

“My dad was at the pub every day, every night. I could count on one hand how many times all four of us sat around the dining room table together.”

He took solace in sport, mostly cricket and soccer. He was a talented wicketkeeper-batsman, and quickly rose through the representative ranks in the Sutherland Shire alongside future Test player Steve Rixon, but soccer was his calling.

The nondescript field at nearby Gwawley Bay Football Club is where he shaped his skills, but whatever he did was rarely enough to satisfy his father. He recalls playing a representative match for Sutherland at Kirrawee when he was eight years old and noticing his parents’ car driving away with five minutes remaining, leaving Arnold with a five-kilometre walk home. If his team lost, and Barry took off to the pub, Faye would tell her son to be in bed before he got home. “He was a perfectionist who drove me into the ground,” Arnold says.

“I don’t know where it came from: he was a cab driver.”

Barry became club president, with Faye serving as secretary. In time, though, the surname conspired against Arnold’s representative ambitions. First, he was told he was too small. Then he was told he wasn’t good enough. Eventually, someone told him the truth: “You’re Barry Arnold’s son.” Barry was known to get into brawls with people who didn’t agree with him.

When Arnold was 16, his father dragged him out of class at Sylvania High with shattering news: Faye had been diagnosed with breast cancer and been given three months to live. She’d felt ill for some time but hadn’t seen a doctor because she didn’t want to know what was wrong, let alone how much an operation might cost to fix it.

After having her breast removed and starting chemotherapy, she was placed in care at the palliative Calvary hospital at Kogarah. Arnold struggled to cope. He abandoned soccer and cricket, he says, and when he wasn’t at her bedside he was out partying with his mates, numbing the pain.

Faye eventually came home. She reached three months. Then six months. Then a year. “They’ve made a mistake,” Arnold told Colin. “She’s as good as ever.”

“You’ve got something special. Make the most of it. Don’t be a bum like your mates.”

One morning, she slipped on a crack on the cement patio. Her back snapped, causing paraplegia. Scans revealed her body was riddled with cancer. Arnold was holding her hand when she passed away in the early hours of the morning of January 15, 1984. He was 20 years old. A few days prior, he’d been sitting with her when she’d grabbed his hand and eyeballed him. Faye may have been seriously ill but never underestimate a mother’s ability to know what’s happening in a son’s life. Arnold had left school early and become an apprentice carpenter and part-time drinker. “You’ve got something special,” she told him. “Make the most of it. Don’t be a bum like your mates.” At that point, Arnold was barely playing at all.

He gave up alcohol and carpentry and became a professional footballer. Within two years, he’d made his debut for the Socceroos. Within six years, he was picked up by Roda JC in the Dutch league, playing in the European Cup (now known as the Champions League) before joining clubs in Belgium and Japan. When he eventually retired, in 2000 aged 36, he’d scored 161 goals in a career that spanned 453 senior appearances. He played 56 matches for this country.

The great pity of it is his mother never got to see it. And Barry only saw part of it: he died of a heart attack five years after Faye passed away. At the soccer fields at Gwawley Bay, a plaque recognises his parents’ contribution to the club. “I reconciled with my father … but I could never do enough,” Arnold says. “It didn’t matter what I did. That’s the way he brought me up.”

Minutes after the Socceroos beat Peru, Arnold was interviewed on the pitch. “I want to dedicate this one to my brother, Colin,” he said. “When my parents died when I was young, I didn’t have anyone to support me; my older brother has been there with me my whole life, he’s the number one.”

You can hear the emotion in Colin’s voice when I ask what that meant. “I didn’t realise I was as big a support as he said I was,” says Colin, 64, who lives in Bangor in the Sutherland Shire and talks to his brother regularly. He’s already got his ticket to the World Cup.

“I had that many people say, ‘How’d you get through COVID? How do you handle all the pressure? How do you do it?’ It’s been like that since I was six years of age.”

Faye’s illness didn’t stop Barry from berating his family until, one day, Colin had had enough. At 187 centimetres Barry was a big man, but he was too caught up in the booze and his anger to notice his eldest son had grown. Sixteen-year-old Colin rose to his feet, looked Barry in the eye, and said, “If you touch her or us again, I’ll knock you out.”

“That was the day he backed down,” Arnold says, before adding: “I look at it in a different way now, though. It took me a while to understand why he was the way he was. I honestly have to say he had a huge role in making me the person I am.

“There was a method to his madness in those days. That’s how fathers were. He saw that I had a talent. He saw that I had something that I could achieve in my life. And he drove me really hard at a young age to be tough, and not to worry about people. I had that many people say, ‘How’d you get through COVID? How do you handle all the pressure? How do you do it?’ It’s been like that since I was six years of age.”

So, in an odd way, he can thank his father for his resilience? “No,” he says firmly. “I got my resilience from my mum.”

Heavy rain has soaked Brisbane all day but now, on this night in late September, just before kick-off in the Socceroos’ friendly against New Zealand, the skies have cleared – good news for the 25,392 souls dotted around Suncorp Stadium.

I’ve been given an all-access pass, so I can sit directly behind the Australian team’s dugout. It soon becomes clear that the loudest person in the stadium during this match will be Graham Arnold. He prowls the sideline like a hungry lion, roaring at his players, his coaching staff and the match officials. “Get up! Get up! Get up!” he bellows repeatedly, as the ball moves downfield towards the New Zealand goal. He singles out forward Martin Boyle: “Marty! Switch on!” Australia blows several goal-scoring opportunities before Awer Mabil finds himself unmarked with no defenders near him and threads his shot past the visiting keeper in the 32nd minute with a wonderful strike. “See how easy it can be?” Arnold tells his players as they make their way back for the restart.

There’s one person at whom he doesn’t bellow on this night, and that’s the 75-year-old man who looks like an oversized teddy bear sitting inside the dugout, his arms folded in deep concentration. Most people call Guus Hiddink “Boss”, including Arnold, and it’s a sign of respect for a true giant of world football. “He’s a father figure to Graham,” Colin Arnold says.

I’d met Hiddink earlier that day at the W hotel in Brisbane’s CBD. Arnold had invited him to be an assistant coach for the two matches against New Zealand – one in Brisbane, another in Auckland – in late September, and Hiddink obliged. “I’m proud of him,” says Hiddink, who has coached football powerhouses such as Chelsea, Real Madrid and PSV Eindhoven, as well South Korea, Russia and his native Netherlands at the World Cup.

Arnold learnt from Hiddink that tactics are secondary to how you manage people. Before the opening match of the 2006 tournament against Japan, Hiddink gave Arnold, then assistant coach, the job of telling Tim Cahill – the side’s best player at the time – that he’d be on the bench. Cahill was furious, but came on in the second half and scored two goals in five minutes to secure an upset victory.

“You work with people, not machines,” Hiddink explains. “After that World Cup, Arnie said to me, ‘Is coaching my job? Is it what I should do?’ I said, ‘Of course it is.’ He has developed himself perfectly.”

By his own admission, it’s taken Arnold time to understand what Hiddink was talking about. COVID made coaching problematic, but it also made him softer. “Normally you pick a squad and they turn up,” he says. “With COVID, with the complications of quarantining, of players being away from their wives and kids … I had to talk individually to 40 players every camp and check in and make sure they were okay.”

Arnold is coaching players who are different to the player he once was. Weeks after our last interview, the Socceroos released a video highlighting the human rights record of Qatar, the host nation, and the death and serious injuries suffered by migrant workers who built World Cup stadiums. It was considered admirable by some, dismissed as “virtue signalling” by others. Arnold, curiously, would not comment on the initiative.

As we sipped our last craft beer, Arnold asked me if I’d watched Ted Lasso, the American comedy-drama in which a US football coach is hired by an English soccer team. What coach Lasso lacks in football knowledge he makes up with optimism and humanity and seemingly mawkish remarks that somehow resonate with his jaded playing group.

I told him I hadn’t got around to watching the series but that I’d start that night. A few hours later, Arnold sent me a text: “So do you now believe that Ted Lasso is the way to go in coaching?” I told him I did. I’m a believer.

“Haha,” he replied. “No matter the sport, it’s all about getting the best of people.”

And when you put people first, the results usually follow.

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