The Socceroos last made it to the World Cup in 1972 and they scored no goals and made a quick exit. In fact, they went into hibernation for a long time, emerging in the 2006 World Cup after 34 years. Their debut has been spectacular, beating Japan 3-1 and giving Brazil a tough time before they prevailed 2-0.
It is not as if soccer is unpopular in Oz. It is just that cricket, Aussie rules, and rugby (also called “eggball”) is much more popular. However, soccer is now the number one sport in Australian schools.
It was not like this a few decades ago. Soccer had to fight through a number of racial prejudices and stereotypes.
Ben Rice writes while visiting Lightning Ridge, an opal mining town in New South Wales, he got into a conversation about the beautiful game with an opal miner who kept referring to it as “wogball” (Aussie slang for a person of Mediterranean descent), and seemed that the whole enterprise was upto its neck in drug dealing and mafia connections. Not only that soccer was played by, “Poofs, too, the lot of ’em, by the way. Mean bastards too. Bloody rough bunch.”
Rice goes on to add that the miner was Polish in origin but his father had been decent enough to rise him playing Australian sports, a fact for which he was extremely grateful. Otherwise, he said, he could easily have been linked to the mafia scum who were always rioting and causing trouble after wogball matches in that den of filth and corruption- Sydney.
This encounter might have been an extreme articulation of racial prejudices vis a vis soccer but these were echoed in many parts of Australia, including cities where the eggball- soccer rivalry hid deeper biases. The instigators were usually fans of Aussie Rules who badmouthed soccer in fear that it was turning the audience away from their sport. In fact, Johnny Warren, a soccer broadcaster and an activist against prejudice in soccer, when he wrote his memoir, titled it Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters.
The other problem was that Australia was never taken seriously as a soccer playing country. FiFA marginalized them in the relatively weak Oceania Zone with countries like Tonga and American Samoa. New Zealand was their only competition. In 2001 they broke the world record for the most number of goals in an international match when they beat American Samoa, 31-0. The previous week they had pulverized Tonga 22-0. Running up such aberrations in goalscores only made them fodder for stand up comics and the source of much mirth in Europe. Australia almost always became the Oceania Zone champions but they would come a cropper against the tougher opponents for the World Cup qualifiers, losing a heartbreaker against Iran in 1998. In 2002, Uruguay came in the way beating them, 3-1.
For the 2006 qualifying matches, the Oceania Confederation decided to group the weaker Oceania teams into two groups and send New Zealand and Australia to the second round automatically, thus avoiding the absurd scores seen in previous matches.
The transformation of soccer took place when Football Federation Australia hired Guus Hiddink as coach. When Australia beat the Solomon Islands 9-1 on aggregate, Hiddink felt that the Socceroos only knew how to attack, probably because they have never needed to do anything else. He immediately instilled a defensive mindset in the Socceroos. The new tactics were tested in Montevideo, when the Socceroos played their away game. They controlled the game well but lost 1-0 to the Uruguayans, perhaps being too cautious. To win the series and make it to the World Cup, they had to beat Uruguay by two goals in the home game.
Ben Rice describes the carnival like atmosphere as 83,000 fans packed Telstra Stadium in Sydney to see the match. Millions more watched it on TV. There was certainly nothing imbalanced or farcical about this contest. It was “quite the most pulsating football match ever played on Australian soil,” as one commentator described it.
The Socceroos controlled the game and fended away the waves of Alvaro Recoba attacks, through the first half, pacing themselves well and looking for goal scoring opportunities. In the 34th minute Harry Kewell miskicked his shot, fortuitously, as it turned out towards Marco Bresciano, who swept it and put it past the keeper. At 1-0, the aggregate was 1-1 and the crowd grazed on their fingernails. The match went to penalties. Mark Schwartzer, Aussie and Midldlesborough goalkeeper made two incredible saves. It was left to John Aloisi to step up and slot in the winning goal. Telstra Stadium drowned in yellow flags, burst into song: “Can you hear can you hear that thunder?” the fans yelled, as if issuing a warning to Australia’s future opponents in Germany:”You better run! You better take cover.”
A minority sport? Not anymore. The days of wogball are numbered and the proof was in the fact that Aloisi’s penalty spot was dug up, frozen and placed in a glass case, like a prize winning barramundi. Finally the Socceroos had escaped the world of magic realist football.
(Ben Rice in “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, Harper Perennial)