Asian Cup: Socceroos star Trent Sainsbury on standby for baby birth
The deeper the Socceroos advance into the Asian Cup, the more likely Trent Sainsbury is to have someone manning his phone on the bench.
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The deeper the Socceroos advance into the Asian Cup the more likely Trent Sainsbury is to have someone manning his phone on the bench.
Because each successful knockout match in the United Arab Emirates will not only increase Australia’s prospects of retaining the trophy, it also shortens the odds of his first baby arriving.
Sainsbury’s heavily pregnant wife Elissa is due on February 11 — 10 days after the final — and he has every intention of racing straight back to the Netherlands if the call comes a little early.
“I’ll have someone on the bench keeping an eye on my phone because it’s getting so close,” Sainsbury tells The Sunday Telegraph.
“Obviously I’ll have to fly back straight away … I’ve spoken to a few of the boys and they’ve all told me I have to go back — these are the boys with kids.
“The boys who don’t have them are like ‘nah we need to win the trophy’. But I don’t know if I have a choice if I want to have a wife when I get home.”
There’s rather less chance the new bub’s grandfather will be able to take off too, given he’s also the man in the Socceroos dugout.
Several years ago it would have been nigh on impossible to predict Graham Arnold would one day coach the former Central Coast Mariners defender who married his daughter at national-team level.
Perth-born Sainsbury met Elissa after moving to Gosford from the AIS as a rat’s-tailed teenager in 2010.
Not that Arnold knew about the blossoming relationship.
The story of how it all unfolded is a little different depending who tells it.
“There’s a few versions,” Sainsbury says, before relaying “the PG version”.
“It started off with my roommate Marc Warren who was playing with the Mariners at the time.
“I didn’t have a car so he was driving me around and I started seeing Elissa.
“He knew about it and word sort of spread, because some of the boys saw us at the cinema and stuff like that.
“I kept getting asked, ‘are you going to tell him?’ and I really didn’t know how to approach it.”
By then everyone knew except Arnold, though he soon realised something was up during one particular training session.
“All the boys knew and at training one day Arnie was like ‘yes Trent, good pass my son’, and most of the boys just started giggling. He was like ‘what’s going on?’,” Sainsbury says.
That Arnold has previously recalled uttering something more along the lines of ‘for f***’s sake son’ after Sainsbury kept making mistakes is perhaps one for debate around the dinner table.
What they both agree on is that Arnold’s wife Sarah then took her husband to the Crowne Plaza in Terrigal and plied him with beer after beer “to lighten the load” before breaking the news.
“He gave me the father speech in the changing room after one of the games when no one was in there,” Sainsbury says.
“He said ‘if you hurt her feelings I’ll break your legs’ or something like that. He said as well ‘you can’t help who you like’. It’s been good since then.
“I think for him also having three daughters, it’s nice to have a guy who can speak to him about sport and football and other things.
“I don’t think he was pissed off, he was more upset we didn’t come to him in the first place, but I just really didn’t know how to approach it — I mean, the head coach’s daughter.
“And I wasn’t playing at the time either so some of the older boys joked that it would either work wonders for me or my contract would be ripped up.
“It’s all fun and games looking back at it now.”
His contract wasn’t torn up, and Sainsbury’s time at the Mariners became a springboard for a career that’s since taken him and Elissa to the Netherlands with PEC Zwolle, followed by a hugely lucrative transfer to Chinese Super League club Jiangsu Suning and loan stints with Inter Milan and Swiss Super League side Grasshoppers Zurich before last year’s post-World Cup move to Eredivisie powerhouse PSV Eindhoven.
That chance came on the back of sparkling form for the Socceroos in Russia.
And after hovering around the edges of Mark van Bommel’s first team for months, the 27-year-old got two 90-minute shifts in December including in the Champions League against Inter.
“It’s taken a little while but that’s to be expected,” Sainsbury says.
“New club, new surroundings, new people. Just getting used to the swing of things.
“Coming from where I was in the past jumping from club to club didn’t help. But now I’ve settled. Happy wife, happy life. She’s enjoying it.”
The Asian Cup is Arnold’s first major tournament since taking up the post last July, and it doubles as a new challenge for two family men navigating a working relationship under the spotlight.
“We’ve sort of taken it upon ourselves to keep our distance and keep it professional because we don’t want people getting the wrong idea,” Sainsbury says.
“Especially for myself. If I start having a bad patch in the national team a lot of questions are going to be asked of myself and if I deserve to be playing because I’m dating the coach’s daughter basically.
“I don’t want it to ever get to that position. You’ve got to micromanage it I guess. At the same time it’s worked in a way that I have to keep my standards as high as possible so I don’t give them the opportunity to say those things.
“Obviously a lot of media is going to bring it up because it is a point people want to hear about.
“We had a talk about it, we knew it was going to come up, and just said we’d keep it professional.”
In truth, there haven’t really been any accusations of nepotism.
Sainsbury cemented his spot as a regular starter under Ange Postecoglou years before Arnold’s appointment, and short-term coach Bert van Marwijk even handed him his first armband in a pre-World Cup friendly against Czech Republic.
Arnold has given Mark Milligan the permanent captaincy, at least until the veteran retires.
Whenever it becomes vacant again, there remains an awareness of its potential to “add fuel to the fire”.
“So it’s another thing to manage,” he says.
“I try not to give anyone any ammunition to fire at us.”
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Originally published as Asian Cup: Socceroos star Trent Sainsbury on standby for baby birth
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