Nix need major surgery to survive
WHAT A mess the Phoenix are in.
Before last night’s game against Sydney FC, they were bottom of the A-League with less than half the season left. Playing in front of their lowest crowds. Confidence shot to pieces. Divided on how they want to play.
If the Phoenix were a patient in a hospital, the solution to their ailments would be to put them in deep freeze for a 100 years until the doctors figure out a cure.
Come to think of it, they’d probably still be none the wiser, unless they spotted the fly that got into the icebox along with the team, the one that distracted everyone from their task of winning football matches.
The fly is all this nonsense about what style of football the Phoenix should play. The owner wants them to play more attractively. Now some of the players want to go back to the old way. You don’t choose your style, it chooses itself, based on the players you have. Barcelona, who incredibly keep getting mentioned as having the template the Phoenix should attempt to copy, have players who have the touch, quickness and vision to control the ball in tight spaces and keep possession all day long. So they play accordingly. They don’t have tall, physically aggressive strikers, so they don’t put the ball into the penalty box in the air. It’s not quantum physics. Stoke City, meanwhile, have beanpoles Peter Crouch and Kenwyn Jones up front, so they’re well advised to mostly lump high balls toward them every time they get the ball.
Asking the Phoenix players, most of whom are nearer the end of their careers than the beginning, to change their style of play is like asking a labourer to become an accountant. It can’t be done, not without years of retraining. Given that top sportsmen, according to popular belief, need 10,000 hours of training, that adds up to a lot of extra practice for Ben Sigmund and co.
Not that the big cheese Gareth Morgan was wrong to recognise that his team needs to play with
You don’t choose your style, it chooses itself, based on the players you have.
more style. While at pro level winning is what matters most, without paying customers you’ve got no team. You’ve got to pull in the fans to pay the bills. And the reality is that even when the Phoenix were grinding out enough results to creep into the top half of the table, the football was dull as ditch water and the fans were staying away.
In recent weeks, the Phoenix have attempted to play a more attractive football brand of football, but the only people entertained have been the fans of their opponents.
Proving that, without a radical change in personnel, the Phoenix are never going to become the great entertainers. The only players they’ve had who regularly made you lean forward in your seat were Marco Rojas (released), Kosta Barbarouses (released) and Paul Ifill, who is struggling to recapture the form that made him the league’s standout player two years ago and who, at 33, may not do so. Of course, goals always do the trick, and in that regard, the Phoenix have had Shane Smeltz (released), and now Jeremy Brockie, who it is hoped isn’t lured away by the promise of more money and more job satisfaction.
So how do the Phoenix build, not a Barcelona because that’s a ludicrous comparison, but a Brisbane Roar, a team who last season and the season before played attractive, winning football in the A-League?
It’s more than a matter of getting a decent result and then seeing the confidence flood back into the side. They’ve had their confidence boosters before, runs of two or three good results, but then been unable to go on with it.
No, major surgery has to be considered, and the question that must be going through the owners’ minds is whether Ricki Herbert is the man to wield the scalpel. He has guided the team for nearly six years, and apart from one run deep into the playoffs, there hasn’t been much to get feverish about.