Adelaide United coach Carl Veart on his long road to the top job
Adelaide United coach Carl Veart says he’s not shy, he’s just misunderstood as he opens up on the long road that has led him to the top job at the Reds.
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Out on the green playing fields that mark Adelaide United’s training base at Elizabeth Grove, the team’s new coach is carefully watching his charges. Often with legs set widely apart, arms crossed over his chest, Carl Veart gives the impression of being the most relaxed man in the world. That he’s right at home, even though, at age 50, this is his first job as a head coach in the highly pressurised world of professional football.
Veart steps in now and again with a quiet word of advice to one of his young players, a shout of encouragement to another. He says he is not a “coach that stands and shouts instructions”. The loudest voice on the training field belongs to Veart’s assistant Ross Aloisi, a man the new coach describes as the “best captain I ever played with”.
Veart believes his quiet demeanour has led people to, if not underestimate him, then, at least, misunderstand him over the years.
“People from the outside would look at me, they would never have seen me as a head coach because of how I am,” Veart says. “I am quite relaxed. I don’t feel like I need to talk to people.”
Shy is a word that is often tossed around when Veart is talked about. But he dismisses the characterisation.
“I suppose I come across as a shy person but people that know me know that I’m not a shy person.”
Veart says he’s just not a big fan of idle chatter.
“I am quite relaxed. I am very different. I am not a person that feels that if I’m sat in a room with people, I don’t feel I have to talk. I am quite comfortable with silence.”
He says this helps him with his coaching. It gives him the ability to sit back, observe body language, to study people.
Veart was thrust into the job at the tail end of last season, when the A-League resumed after its necessary COVID break. Before the season stopped, Adelaide United’s season was falling apart. It had lost four games in a row, conceding 15 goals and scoring only four. When the A-League started again, its Dutch coach Gertjan Verbeek remained in Europe and Veart was in charge. The Reds were undefeated in their last five games and Veart was given the gig full time.
Veart is new in this job but has been a mainstay in the South Australian football scene for more than 30 years. He played for both Adelaide United and Adelaide City. He played in England for Sheffield United, Crystal Palace and Millwall. He played for Australia, and was in the Olympic team that made the semi-finals at the 1992 Games in Barcelona.
But he says a career in the game was not something he thought about as a youngster. Veart grew up in Whyalla. As a typical country kid, he lived his life for sport. He played soccer, Aussie rules, basketball and even played A-Grade cricket in Whyalla when he was 17. School was not much of a consideration.
“I can’t remember ever sitting down and doing homework,” he says. “As soon as I finished school I was playing sport.”
He started playing soccer when he was about four for the Croatian club in Whyalla. That was in the under-9s. But even when his age started catching up with the grade he was playing in he was always one of the smallest.
“It toughened me up,” he says.
He was 15 when he started playing senior soccer in Whyalla but his talent had gone unnoticed elsewhere, apart from once representing the state at under-13 level.
“I never played (for the state) again. Got invited for trials but was always too small.”
But his life changed when he was picked for the state’s high schools team when he was 17. He finished top scorer in the national championships and was told if he wanted to develop his game he needed to move to Adelaide. His plan at the time was to take an apprenticeship at BHP’s steelworks.
Instead, Veart moved to Adelaide and played in the state league for Salisbury United for two years before moving to Adelaide City on the national stage. Not that he was keen to make the move initially.
“I was just a typical country kid,” he says. “I was comfortable with what I was doing, enjoying what I was doing, thought why would I change?” At that point he had never even watched Adelaide City play in the national competition.
But he was persuaded to go and soon became a regular under City’s formidable coach Zoran Matic. Veart says Matic is still his biggest influence both as a player and a coach, even if not quite as strict.
Veart thrived and was playing for Australia as well. The next logical step was to move overseas. Sheffield United is a big, traditional English club and was in Division One, the step below the premiership, when Veart moved there in 1994.
It was a tough league, with tough players, who were all keen to find out what the young Australian had to offer. They would bang him about in training, dish out the verbals if he made a mistake.
What they wanted to know was: “The kid from Australia – does he hide or does he stand up?”
He stood up. That toughness learnt in Whyalla and from Matic helped. Veart had two successful seasons in Sheffield but such is the cutthroat nature of English football, when a new manager came in, it was time to move on.
“You are getting paid money and if you are not playing, it just didn’t feel right. He (the new manager) said to me I wasn’t going to be in his first 11 plans, so I moved.”
Veart’s old manager at Sheffield, Dave Bassett, was by then at the London-based Crystal Palace. Again, Veart did well and at the end of his second season Palace was promoted to the premiership, one of the best leagues in the world.
But he was on the fringes of the team. Sometimes playing, sometimes not. When an offer came in from another London club, Millwall, he took it. It was a mistake. He dropped back down a division, but admits he should have done more homework on what kind of club he was going to.
“After two training sessions I knew I shouldn’t have moved,” he says. “Just the way they trained. It was very old school. Just run, kick, fight.” In those two training sessions he didn’t kick a ball, just ran.
Veart signed for Millwall on a Friday. His first game was at Plymouth the next day, a trip that required a four-hour coach drive.
“A guy at Plymouth just followed me around the pitch and kicked me every time I got the ball. And I didn’t get the ball that much because it was going over my head. I am thinking, ‘My God, what have I done?’”
Veart’s then wife, Sam, was pregnant with their second child and had returned home to be close to family. Veart joined her in Australia at the end of the season and remained in Australia for family reasons.
Veart has two regrets. One that he left Palace. The other that he didn’t return to Millwall. But he says it wasn’t until the end of his career, almost 10 years later, that the regret kicked in.
Back in Australia he still had a long career with Adelaide City, then Adelaide United, but he still feels he missed out. Football and money exploded in England not long after he left and Veart worked as an electrician while still playing football in Adelaide.
“It was a difficult time at that time. I separated from my wife at the time as well,” he says. “That’s when it sort of hit me. I suppose (the question) for all professional sportsmen when it’s coming to the end, ‘Shit, what am I going to do next?’”
The answer was coaching. He worked with Aurelio Vidmar at Adelaide United, then took over youth coaching programs for Football SA. He knocked back chances to return to the Reds under Guillermo Amor and Marco Kurz, but when football director Bruce Djite approached him last year about working with Verbeek he thought he sensed a change of direction that would put more focus in SA youth. And he wanted to challenge himself.
“I always challenge young kids not to be comfortable,” he says. Now it was his turn. His wife Margie, with whom he has a son Ryan, challenged him. “You keep telling me you have to be out of your comfort zone.”
And here he is. He wants the Reds to be a finals team and challenge for the championship. It’s a young team, with a sprinkling of good experience. He knows football has changed since his day, not only with science and diet but with outside scrutiny. “They are under such more of the microscope with social media,” Veart says.
He says players need the capacity to wind down to avoid burnout.
“Players make a huge sacrifice to get to match day so I believe after a game, as long as you are responsible, if you want to have three, four or five beers, have three, four or five beers,” he says.
With Adelaide’s season starting on December 28, Veart is ready for the extra stresses and strains of being the man in the firing line. But ever relaxed, he suggests a walk on the beach with his two dogs is all he needs to regain any lost equanimity.
“That is my moment,” he says. “I walk and clear my head. I don’t carry the baggage. I deal with at the time then it’s gone.”
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