‘I thought he was cleaning up rubbish’: Arnold confirms street-smart Socceroos’ Danish discovery

Doha: Graham Arnold initially thought Mitchell Duke was just being a good bloke - cleaning up after others, looking after the environment - when he ran over to the Socceroos coach and handed him a scrap of paper containing tactical instructions that was discarded by their Danish opponents.

While it revealed nothing Arnold didn’t already know about Denmark’s tactics, it said plenty about the lengths his players were prepared to go to win a game at the World Cup - and how poorly prepared their opponents were.

In another blow to the long-standing perception of Australian naivety on football’s biggest stage, a viral video has emerged of Duke demonstrating the Socceroos’ street smarts during their 1-0 win over the Danes, stumbling over a handwritten note from the opposition dugout in the second half of Thursday’s (AEDT) match - a moment that harks back to Andrew Redmayne’s ruthless treatment of Peru’s penalty shootout plans in June.

Images captured by the world feed broadcast, and not beamed to SBS viewers back in Australia, showed Duke making the discovery and alerting Arnold. He, in turn, passed the note on to his assistant coach Andrew Clark, who is based in Denmark and works for FC Copenhagen as their high-performance chief.

“To be honest, Mitchell Duke brought it over to me and I thought he was just being nice, cleaning up rubbish,” Arnold said.

Danish substitute Robert Skov, who came on for winger Andreas Skov Olsen in the 69th minute of the clash, originally brought the piece of paper with him onto the field at Al Janoub Stadium and gave it to skipper Christian Eriksen.

The note is said to have contained Denmark’s plans to switch to a formation featuring two strikers up front, which Arnold said he had already figured out since Andreas Cornelius — a target man-style striker who plays with Maty Ryan at FC Copenhagen, and works closely with Clark — had come on at the same time as Skov as a replacement for Joakim Maehle.

Denmark were trailing 1-0 at the time and needed to win the match to progress, with Eriksen passing the information onto Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, who must have thrown it onto the ground instead of tucking it into his sock, as he should have done. Minutes later Arnold, Clark and Rene Meulensteen were seen reviewing it.

The Socceroos then made their own changes, injecting big-bodied defender Bailey Wright into the fray while taking off midfielder Riley McGree, as Arnold switched to a back five that was able to see out the result - although he dismissed any suggestion that the piece of paper triggered anything other than surprise at how badly organised the Danes were.

Socceroos assistants Andrew Clark and Rene Meulensteen review the scrap of paper handed to Graham Arnold by Mitchell Duke.

“[Duke] handed it to me and I didn’t even look at it. I just handed it back because I was focused on the substitution,” Arnold said.

“I knew when [Cornelius] came on that we had to go to a back five. I always have a plan A, B, C, and D or an E, for every occasion - if you’re down 1-0, or you’re up 1-0, so that we can look at what substitutions [we need to make].

“In that little way, it just showed me that they didn’t have a plan ready. It was an off-the-cuff thing, if they’re having to send notes out to players, that it’s not pre-planned beforehand.

“We pre-plan those type of things beforehand, so the players know if Bailey Wright comes on, like he did, they knew straightaway, we’re going to a back five, because we’d already done that messaging.”

Mitchell Duke stumbles over a nugget of Danish intelligence.

Duke spoke of the discovery in a social media exchange with a fan posted by the popular A-League Memes account on Twitter.

“Funny enough some of the boys on the bench pointed it out to me ... then I picked it up and ran it over to Arnie. I was too focused on the game I didn’t even open it ... was scrunched up!” Duke wrote.

If nothing else, Duke’s initiative shows how the Socceroos are prepared to leave no stone unturned, or no scrap of paper unread, in Qatar. It elicits memories of how a similar act of quick-thinking from Redmayne - underpinned by obsessive planning from Arnold’s staff to deploy the ‘Grey Wiggle’ in the first place - helped get them to the World Cup in the first place.

During June’s decisive penalty shootout at the Ahmed bin Ali Stadium, where Australia will meet Argentina on Sunday morning (AEDT), Redmayne had spotted that his Peruvian counterpart Pedro Gallese had notes regarding the Socceroos’ penalty-takers taped onto his water bottle.

He then tossed it over the advertising hoardings, robbing Gallese of any insight Peru’s research might have given him in the shootout. He went on to guess the correct direction of only one of Australia’s remaining four spot kicks, and failed to save it anyway.

“If we had notes on our drink bottle and someone saw that, it would have been thrown a long way away,” Redmayne said at the time. “I knew how much it meant to the boys and it was a ‘kill or be killed’ moment.”

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