Traditional Socceroos farewell now unlikely

THERE is no guarantee the Socceroos will play on home soil before the World Cup, with Football Federation Australia putting the customary farewell match in doubt.

In previous World Cups, Australia has played a tune-up friendly, against Greece in 2006 at the MCG, New Zealand in 2010 at the same venue and in 2014 at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium. Despite drawing big crowds and revenue, such an event is no certainty ahead of Russia 2018, after the revelation new coach Bert van Marwijk wants to prioritise training over friendly matches.

Two friendlies are scheduled in the March international window — against Norway in Oslo and Colombia in London.

But Van Marwijk’s opinion prompted FFA chief executive David Gallop to admit nothing was set in stone for a home fix- ture around May. “We’ve had some reasonably preliminary discussions with Bert about that,” Gallop said.

“We do have some options for a farewell game in Australia, but we’re in no way locked into anything. We will work through that over the next few weeks. It would be wonderful to have a big farewell game back on home soil, but we would need to have the kind of commercial return for it to make sense.” Gallop said a hefty challenge was luring opposition of a high-enough calibre to make it worthwhile. Another consideration was the logistics of transporting the bulk of Australia’s squad from Europe for a few days before flying straight back to Russia.

At his first media conference on Thursday in Sydney, van Marwijk voiced a clear preference for training so he could learn as much as possible about his team in the four short months before the Socceroos face France, Denmark and Peru in the World Cup finals group stage.

“Training is very important for me,” van Marwijk said.

“I like to train because then you can improve the team and the players. A lot of countries play a lot of friendly games. When I can make a decision, I would not play a lot of friendly games — I’d train more.”