Farewell, Harry Kewell, and thanks

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

Pim Verbeek finally shows he has balls by criticising mess he left

Former Socceroos coach Pim Verbeek has been quoted in Qatari media as saying Australian football faces a bleak period as the brightest stars in Australian football history are slowly extinguished.

Well, you'd know, Pim.

His Aussie tenure was marked by Viking-style honesty. Did you ever meet someone so honest that every conversation you had with them ended up revolving around your faults? That's honesty to a fault, and that's Pim Verbeek. And despite their limitations, players like Danny Allsopp and Archie Thompson were hardly likely to produce positive results after such brutal “encouragement”.

How's that "promotion" to Morocco's U-21s working out, Pim?
Courtesy dohasportsplusqatar.com

While his latest assertions verge towards the correct – developing Australian footballers aren't of the same quality as those of fifteen years hence – Australia should still qualify for Brazil if their squad is managed adeptly.

Part of the blame for this dearth of top-end talent can be laid at Verbeek's size twelves. The Dutchman controlled Australia for three years, culminating in a morbid showing in the group of terminal illness at the Big Dance in 2010. During that time, he was relentless in his beliefs: not living in Australia, playing defensive formations and deploying far-flung experience at the expense of A-League promise.

The defining moment of his tenure in Australia wasn't a match, result or player evolution but a formation. In the Socceroos' ignominious defeat to Germany in their first match in South Africa, the team lined up in a 4-6-0 with untested Richard Garcia leading the line from the centre of midfield (and playing hideously out of position).

The Green and Gold Army was not only content but joyful at his departure. His time at the top left football in Australia without a legacy; in a period in which Australian soccer should have been building on the wonderful success of their 2006 World Cup campaign, his refusal to integrate local youth into an aging team was not only short-sighted but almost wilfully negligent.

His half-hidden attempt to parlay short-term Socceroo success into a bigger job was hardly surprising, but still disappointing because he was bequeathed a good team with a chance to establish something of real substance.

Perhaps Verbeek now feels able to comment because he recognises some of the same traits in Australian football as he, it's one-time figurehead, displayed as boss.  Yes, the country's footballing stocks are going through a changing phase, but as a smaller football nation that's the norm.  It's also a phase that was delayed nearly four years during his time in charge.

Michael Ballack retires

Earlier this week, former Germany captain Michael Ballack retired from all professional football. The most stylish and (sometimes brutally) effective German player of his generation leaves the game permanently at age 36.

Ballack had both the fortune and misfortune of being born five years too late. To look at it another way, he was born five years too early. He could have been a precocious youngster alongside Lothar Matthäus, Jurgen Klinsmann and the greatest years of Oliver Kahn, but was born as the seventies turned. Born half a decade later and he wouldn't have just nurtured the startling Germany team of the home World Cup in 2006 but championed it. Instead, he scraped into the tail of one wonderful era and was moved on before the second blossomed.

In hindsight, this may actually have suited him. As the best player in the country, Ballack enjoyed starring roles at Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich and for Die Mannschaft; after the success of 2006, he moved to Chelsea before concluding his career at Leverkusen. A man betraying precious little self-doubt, the spotlight rests easily on him. He was Germany: it wasn't a burden, just the way things were.

Courtesy: heraldsun.com.au

His polished – if not definitive – turn as an analyst for ESPN over the 2012 European Championships only highlighted his readiness to step away from the centre of midfield.

Michael Ballack rarely took a backwards step. And in a weird kind of way, that could be why his mooted move to Toronto FC or the fledgling Western Sydney Wanderers never really made it off the ground. Wage demands might have played a part, but had he wanted to keep playing the monetary terms could have been arranged. Some men are made to be ambassadors, but Michael Ballack just isn't one of them.

Sydney FC signee Alessandro Del Piero will be crucial to the A-League and football's growth in Australia. Without question, he is the best player to ever play in the Antipodes. Ballack is two years younger and fit a role which doesn't necessarily depend on speed. He could have owned the A-League; if Christian Tiffert makes such an impact in Seattle, how deadly would Michael Ballack be? However, doing so – even for reported millions – may have felt like a backward step. At 36, once usefulness at the very top level has been exhausted, the best players must accept a reduced role - one of venerable sage, goodwill ambassador or even figurehead.

Some athletes are engineered to keep going; Del Piero joins his English contemporary David Beckham as the most obvious examples. Ballack probably isn't wired that way, and that's fine – not many have the combination of talent, temperament and stamina to do so. The ultimate cost/benefit analysis all footballers face contrasts desire and depreciation. When that ratio dips too low, it's time to enter the tunnel for the final time.

Michael Ballack leaves the game on his own terms. It couldn't really have happened any other way. However, his luxuriant bouffant and measured analysis on ESPN suggests we will see a lot more of him in the future.