Harry
Kewell is soon gone and Australian football will be the poorer for it. His precocious
incision single-handedly brought about many of the supreme highlights the sport
has offered the Great Southern Land, and he was in 2012 voted
the greatest ever Australian player.
He was his nation’s great football
enigma: the most talented, technical player his land has produced, yet so
different from his peers in both aspect and attitude. No other Australian has
won both the UEFA Champions League and the FA Cup; in an era in which Australia’s
best players all performed in top leagues, Harry Kewell at Leeds United and
then Liverpool was the world’s focus point – it
was he who boasted to the world that Skippies could play this game.
As Bonita Mersiades tracks
excellently in The Guardian, Kewell began his career revered by the
Australian common man, a true underdog story that youngster capable of bedazzling
older, more cynical men. Then followed something of a symbiotic disdain between
him and the nation of his birth – he felt the nation’s expectations too great,
we (often unfairly) thought him something
of a drama queen.
Australians had never had a player
like Harry Kewell before. We’d been involved with several wonderful players – Christian Vieri, Mark
Bosnich and Craig
Johnston spring to mind – but never a truly elite Socceroo who could win
World Cup qualifiers from his own left peg. And an Australia less familiar with
the particulars of soccer didn’t exactly know what to expect from a gift
completely unlike the blunt but effective objects we were used to.
Sporting a slight British twang
that noticeably increased the longer he was in England, Harry played for
Australia, but for so long was not truly of
Australia. This verisimilitude defined Kewell as a Socceroo – an otherworldly
weapon, a blade of valyrian steel available only at great cost. Even repatriated
to the antipodean fold in his waning years, Kewell remained easily identifiable
by virtue of his talent, temperament and attitude. He remains the best player his country has produced by some margin.
Despite spending his peak years rarely
suiting up in gold (13 Australia appearances between 1998 and 2005) the Socceroos
have never looked better than when boasting Kewell on the left and Brett
Emerton on the right of midfield. Injury permitting – always the caveat with
Harry – when the games mattered, he played. And
invariably contributed.
The pairing of Kewell and Emerton
is not coincidental. The duo were reared within earshot, left Australia to play
in England at about the same time and were two of the first picked for any
Socceroo manager for over a decade. They are mirror versions of one another –
one less talented but hardworking and utterly dependable; the other more
fragile yet eminently capable of ripping open any game.
This is the defining Harry Kewell
paradox, and his legacy: Emerton, a technically inferior but hardworking player
who embraced Australia wholeheartedly wouldn’t lose you a match, is
remembered more fondly than Kewell, who would win those games for you
amidst hubbub often of his own manufacture.
Thank you, Harry Kewell, for those intricate memories that stretch from Iran to the Melbourne Rectangular Stadium. Your body has earned this break.
Socceroo @HarryKewell announces his retirement from football! #ThanksHarry pic.twitter.com/2SueCftN8P
— The Socceroos (@Socceroos) March 26, 2014
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