Olympic failure means it’s time to put Plan B into operation

SO the Olympic qualifiers are over, the Rio dream is gone and the U23 players now ask themselves, ‘what’s next?’

Fox Sports presenter and Sunday Daily Telegraph columnist Robbie Slater

SO the Olympic qualifiers are over, the Rio dream is gone and the U23 players now ask themselves, ‘what’s next?’

Well, the answer is not much. A pat on the back, good luck for the future and off you go.

The players are back at their clubs, a few of them might get selected somewhere down the track for the Socceroos, while others could pick up something overseas, but for the majority all they have to look forward is trying to forge a career in the A-League.

It happened after the U23’s failed to qualify for the London Olympics and it’s going to happen again if something isn’t done.

Last week I wrote about the failure of the Dutch era, criticism of the youth structure and the need for change. That all still applies and it’s a massive job, but there is one immediate solution for the FFA.

Nothing was done after London 2012 and that cannot be allowed to happen again. The FFA would have budgeted for qualification for Rio, so there’s no reason why that budget can’t still be used for the team’s much-needed development.

My idea would be to make this U23 team a Socceroos B team. It really would be quite simple and has been done in the past. How do I know? Well, I was a beneficiary of it.

Before there was football at the Olympics in the 1980s, then Socceroos coach Frank Arok and his assistant Eddie Thomson, in their madness, came up with the idea of a B team, where young players and older players who they wanted to have a look at were selected.

They then held tournaments here in Australia where both the A and B teams played. My debut, believe it or not, came against Rangers in 1984 for the B team.

Robbie Slater’s development benefited from playing B internationals.

Why club teams? Well, in those days Australia didn’t have the respect internationally that we do now.

Having played in three World Cups we don’t play club teams anymore, in fact we have club teams that come over here and play our club teams — it’s a different era. But back then we had to.

We travelled overseas many times to play club teams and a host of different players got their opportunity in what were called B internationals.

The theory of B team players was that they then had some experience before stepping up to the first team. All the players that took part in this B team all benefited from it.

For example, I played 16 B games before I made my debut for the A team in 1988 against Brazil in what was called the Gold Cup tournament.

The interesting thing is this — a large part of our B team made up the team that eventually qualified for the very first time for the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

This idea has been suggested before. After Beijing in 2008 — the last Olympic Games the Olyroos qualified for — Graham Arnold, then the team’s coach, wrote a paper to the FFA suggesting they implement a B team because he felt that, even though they’d been to the Olympics, his team didn’t have the experience that was needed. It didn’t happen then, but surely now the time has come.

So instead of making the players feel like it’s all over following their Olympic failure, send them off to Europe or South America at the end of the A-League season to get some international experience.

Arguably missing out on London 2012 has already affected the Socceroos and there will be no doubting the effect on the national team if something isn’t done now.

Originally published as Olympic failure means it’s time to put Plan B into operation