LIVING THE DREAM
Aaron Mooy left Australia at 15 with sun-bleached locks and a burning desire. The hair has gone now but he’s...
The Pennines above huddersfield are shrouded in snow and the temperature gauge reads just four degrees at training ground level. Aaron Mooy really is a very long way from Sydney, the place he once called home.
he is so much a part of the fittings of this place that no one blinks an eye when we sit down to talk in the bar which manager David Wagner’s squad share with members of a local crown green bowls club. Australia is not a Mooy preoccupation. The 26-year- old did not watch any of the Ashes because he is not really inclined towards cricket, and clearly has a very limited batting repertoire.
‘I can only hit it one way. I can only hook it,’ he says, demonstrating a technique which even calls that claim into some question.
huddersfield’s best and most expensive player has been a football nomad for nearly a decade. Though the Australian nation will doubtless be offended by the suggestion, he is — in a football sense — virtually British, given how much time he has spent trying to make it in the Premier League.
Last August, as he finally stepped out into the top flight, he tweeted pictures of himself both now and as a teenager with sun-bleached blond hair, heading out of Sydney in a first pursuit of the big time.
‘Me leaving home at 15 to chase my dream and me 11 years later making my PL debut,’ he wrote. ‘Never give up on your dreams.’
A little more than two years ago he began to believe that all hope had gone. he had wound up back home at Western Sydney Wanderers, having struggled to o make it beyond Bolton Wanderers s reserves, where he was plagued d by a knee injury after signing g professional terms, or at t St Mirren, where he faced a battle - against relegation and injury.
One of the top players in the Premier League will tell you all about the difficulties of making it at St Mirren. Leicester City’s Riyad Mahrez revealed to Sportsmail in December how he had sought a breakthrough at the club, got nowhere near the team, and borrowed a bike to retrieve his boots from the training ground, ahead of a moonlit flit.
‘Ah yes, I heard about Riyad and ththe bike,’bik’ grinsi Mooy,M andd though th h he did get his chance at the Paisley club, he can relate to Mahrez’s recollections of the bitter cold.
Boxing Day 2010 saw Mooy on an eight-hour round trip by coach to face Inverness Caledonian Thistle in the Scottish Premier League. he was a non-playing substitute in a 2-1 win.
‘Tough times but it was good and it makes you stronger,’ he reflects, tthough 10 starts in two seasons hardly represented the breakthrough he was looking for.
he returned to Australia two yyears later and, in the depths of winter 2015, with hopes of making it in europe quickly diminishing, hhe was extremely close to taking Saudi Arabian riches and signing for Al-Nassr. They were offering more than £1.1million — tthe greatest sum spent on a player bbased in Australia.
‘I was thinking about it,’ he says. ‘Because I was 25 and you start to tthink, “Are you ever going to get another chance to go to europe?” I knew if I made that move I’d never get to europe, so I decided to wait until the end of the season, and see what happened.’
It took some good fortune to see hhim on his way at last. Manchester City’s owners bought the A-League club Melbourne heart early in 2014, two weeks after he had moved there.
It was they who spotted the commercial opportunity to bring Mooy back to england, loan him out and then sell him. Mooy is not aware that City had any intention of playing him themselves.
‘They explained what they had in mind,’ he says. ‘But it was always going to be hard for me to go from Melbourne into Man City’s first team. It was always the plan to go on loan.’
The rest is history. he was an immediate hit at huddersfield in their promotion- winning Championship campaign, becoming the playmaker through which everything flowed. his permanent signing for £10m ahead of the Premier League campaign was one of the deals of the summer. HIS
initial transition to the top flight was smooth, with stand-out displays in the opening fixtures, though it was in late September, with the 4-0 home defeat by Tottenham that it became clear that Premier League success entailed something more nuanced than manager David Wagner’s high-intensity press.
‘Last year we would dominate the ball and win more games,’ says Mooy. ‘This season we don’t have the ball as much because we are playing some high-quality opposition. We have to learn. Sometimes we will go and press or sit off.’
The depths of this Pennine winter have been pretty bleak with just one win in six weeks, and that was against Bolton, in the FA Cup. With Manchester United away tomorrow, huddersfield are just one point from the drop zone.
Suddenly the advice of harry Kewell who, like Mooy, went to Sydney’s Westfield Sports high School, seems relevant. Mooy met Kewell when the former Leeds player came to give a talk to pupils. ‘he told me to always worry about myself,’ Mooy explains. ‘You have to worry about your own performances before you think about everyone else. If you play well that’s helping the team.’
Though Mooy and Co will be at the World Cup with Australia this summer, we have not seen an equivalent to the nation’s ‘golden generation’ of Kewell, Tim Cahill and Mark Viduka. In part, that is due to the allure of lucrative offers from China and the Middle east, which makes a challenge in europe less appealing to some.
‘When I first came here I didn’t know what I was doing,’ Mooy says. ‘It wasn’t until I went back to Australia that I realised how difficult a challenge it had been for me as a 15-year-old. I guess I got there in the end, even though the journey wasn’t quite like I planned.’