3 hours ago
4
Seattle: Tony Popovic is a famously meticulous guy. On his watch, the Socceroos have done everything they possibly could to prepare for this World Cup.
No detail, however small, has been overlooked - they spent weeks training in Florida to get used to the summer heat, they played a warm-up match against Mexico to understand how it feels to play a tournament co-host, and they played another friendly at midday, like this match was, just so they knew precisely how to structure their morning.
But you can run all the dress rehearsals you want. How much can they actually prepare you for the visceral truth of the real thing; the moment you’ve been building to for months and have been thinking about for every waking moment?
It’s one thing to do the preparation, but it’s another to be ready. For this, the Socceroos just weren’t. Under the midday sun in Seattle, against a team that was, they melted.
After one of the great Australian World Cup victories, this was a brutal comedown. The Americans were too strong, too quick, too committed, too clever, too much, too everything.
The Socceroos, meanwhile, were not enough anything - at least not in the bitterly disappointing first half that lost them the game.
As a soccer nation, we envy the United States, or at least we should. We face so many of the same challenges - a domestic league competing for attention against bigger sports, a national team trying to earn more respect from the rest of the world - but they are further along in identifying and implementing solutions. We would love to host a World Cup like them, to be able to turbocharge the growth of the game, like this tournament will surely do.
Our capacity to match their rate of improvement is limited by resources, and one of those resources is time. Their best players are where we would like our best to be in four years from. If nothing else, this was an experience that will lead to growth - or at least we can only hope it was, because otherwise, what was there to take from this?
Read Vince Rugari’s analysis in full here.
