Dear Kevin
No, I haven’t
played the game at professional level, so I don’t know first
hand the situations you face every week in the A-League or the top
leagues in England and Scotland, but I have watched your career
since you were an Under-9 at Green Gully and later at Sunshine George
Cross. You have marvellous talents and you can play a bit, but when
you were young I thought you were a thug and a very bad influence
on a youngster from Geelong who also could play the game, when you
were in under-age representative sides in Victoria. Your skill and
commitment and strength of mind led good coaches to select you for
the Young Socceroos and the Olyroos when you were younger than all
the other players. They could see in you something they needed for
their teams, for they were not romantics but hard-headed winners
like yourself.
It was a similar
story at Milwall, Glasgow Rangers and for the Socceroos. Talent
and refusal to accept defeat was written on your face and your body
in every game you played. Yet when you try to explain and excuse
your conduct in your
column in the sports section of the Sunday Age,
you show that you have never been able to distinguish commitment
and sacrifice on behalf of the team from violent conduct as defined
by the Laws of the Game.
Soccer has always
had its hard men who could play, like Roy Keane, Denis Wise, Billy
Bremner, Tommy Smith, Norman Hunter and Dave Mackay. Coaches and
managers have always been delighted to have these players in their
sides and at the end of their careers their exploits have been glossed
over or romanticised. But they did awful damage to other players
along the way, sometimes they would claim, as you do, accidentally
but on other occasions with malice or at least recklessness of the
consequences.
Some of the
work you have done for the Melbourne Victory under Ernie Merrick
deserves the highest praise. You have been the very public face
of the game in Victoria, have put in countless hours in promotion
of the game at all levels and are now engaged in training yourself
as a coach. In games, other A-League teams know that they are never
safely in control of a match while you are on the field. Yet like
many of those who follow this code in Australia and want desperately
for it to succeed, not in toppling Australian Rules or anything
like that, but just to become a normal part of the sporting scene
in this country, I fear that your behaviour is dangerously counter-productive
in one key respect.
It is not only
your propensity to launch the most violent tackles on opponents,
often from behind, but the snarling refusal to accept decisions
which go against you and the browbeating of officials and opponents
which sets an appalling example. Others believe if Muscat can get
away with it, so can I. If that conduct is allowed to persist the
skilful players will be driven out of the game. Juninho, the little
Brazilian magician playing for Sydney FC, has already made clear
his fears about the way the game is played in this country by a
few players like yourself.
I
am not in the slightest concerned about your kicking an advertising
hoarding. It is fascinating, and symptomatic of the modern game,
that your immediate apology was to the sponsor for the off-field
incident and not to the thousands of others you have let down for
the on-field behaviour.
Nor am I convinced
by you and your coach pointing to the disciplinary record of other
clubs as if it was their propensity to commit fouls which determined
their places on the A-League ladder. I found your attempt on television
to defend some of the crude tackling by some of Juninho’s
team-mates in the exhibition match against LA Galaxy hard to take
as well. I know this is a contact sport and if it becomes basketball
we will all be the poorer. But the kind of tackling which injures
others in the name of winning matches is something we can do without,
particularly if we want to succeed in Asian competition. I want
to see Australian teams which match others for skill, not physicality,
and I just wish you could curb your occasional but violent assaults
on your fellow players for the greater good of the game.
Yours in sorrow
more than anger,
Roy
Hay
