By Vince Rugari
For the first but hopefully not the last time, Kusini Yengi has led the way for Australian soccer this week. In the midst of his ongoing audition to become the Socceroos’ new go-to striker, Yengi was front and centre of the win that ended Portsmouth’s seven-year stint in England’s League One and the raucous celebrations that followed.
After scoring their opening goal in a 3-2 victory over Barnsley to clinch the title, Yengi was crowd surfing in the middle of Fratton Park, waving around an inflatable kangaroo as thousands of fans who had invaded the pitch for the third time that evening held him aloft, as if he was the trophy. Then he was leading chants with supporters who congregated inside pubs and on the streets. It’s the stuff that any Australian kid yearns to experience in Europe when they make the leap.
Up Pompey: Kusini Yengi and Portsmouth are going up.Credit: Getty
This season has been Yengi’s first outside the A-League, and thus his first experience of the emotional roller coaster that comes with promotion and relegation – a system Australia has long yearned for but does not have, for reasons so voluminous and contestable that an entire newspaper of its own would be required to go through all sides of the argument.
It is what it is, but Yengi is loving it.
“You notice it straight away,” he said.
“From the fans and the atmosphere, and in the city itself – when I’m just going around the shops and whatnot, and people recognise me, the first thing to talk about is promotion, and how much it means to them. You see it in the fans, you hear it. It’s crazy. I don’t know if it’s just Pompey itself, or if that’s just how it is everywhere with promotion and relegation and so much at stake, but it’s awesome.”
‘No one wants to play second league football. You play second league football for that opportunity to push yourself into the highest level.’
Socceroos midfielder Jackson Irvine, captain of St Pauli
With any luck, a whole bunch of others will go one better in the coming weeks.
While Yengi has lifted himself into England’s second tier, putting Portsmouth one step away from their first season in the Premier League since 2009-10, some of his Socceroos teammates could conceivably end up in one of the “big five” European competitions next season.
It has been a while since any Aussies played regularly in the Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, the German Bundesliga or France’s Ligue 1. There are exactly zero Socceroos doing so – but if things go well, there could be a few next season.
Just as Yengi and Portsmouth arrive in the Championship, three Australians are vying for the exit. Socceroos defender Cameron Burgess and midfielder Massimo Luongo, who recently retired from international duty, are part of an Ipswich Town side that has led the division for most of the season. With three games left to play they are locked in a four-way battle for the two automatic promotion spots, along with Leicester City (where Burgess’ occasional centre-back partner for Australia, Harry Souttar, has been frozen out of first-team action for months), Leeds United and Southampton.
Jackson Irvine, who plays with fellow Socceroo Connor Metcalfe at St Pauli, is desperate for a chance to play in Germany’s top flight.Credit: Getty
In the 2.Bundesliga, Jackson Irvine and Connor Metcalfe are on track for automatic promotion with St Pauli, provided there are no major slip-ups on their run home. Irvine, the club’s captain, has never played top-division football outside Scotland, and was reluctant to jinx the prospect of finally reaching the top flight by talking about it out loud after near misses in recent years.
“No one wants to play second league football,” he said. “You play second league football for that opportunity to push yourself into the highest level, to test yourself every week against the very best, and I’ve been lucky enough to do it in international football, but I’ve never had that chance to do it domestically. It would mean the world to me to have that opportunity.”
In Serie B, there’s Alessandro Circati at Parma, for whom the title is theirs to lose – and thus a place among Italy’s elite clubs, even as Cristian Volpato’s Sassuolo look likely to head in the opposite direction.
And then there are some sub-categories. Nestory Irankunda, for instance, is joining Bayern Munich next season, and despite his publicly debated shortcomings, it is not inconceivable that he could be playing alongside the likes of Harry Kane and Leroy Sane in months, if not weeks, from now.
Alessandro Circati in action with Parma, who are on track to be promoted to Italy’s top tier.Credit: Getty
There are also some incumbents already on the books of clubs in those major competitions but whose careers exist on the first-team margins: such as Joe Gauci, the third-choice goalkeeper at Aston Villa, or Brighton and Hove Albion’s Cameron Peupion, who has made two FA Cup appearances this season and is also still developing. Denis Genreau, who has been at Ligue 1 side Toulouse for three years, has had stints of regular football in France’s top tier but has been consistently derailed by injury.
Young guns Alex Robertson (Manchester City) and Garang Kuol (Newcastle United) are contracted to high-profile clubs, but have spent this season out on loan, to varied success. Kuol’s struggles at Volendam have been largely the consequence of external factors, while Robertson has been playing with Yengi at Portsmouth and had established himself as one of League One’s top midfielders before a hamstring injury ended his season. While Kuol will probably be loaned out again, sources close to Robertson say he is likely to seek a permanent move away from City this summer in search of senior minutes – probably to a team in the Championship, and quite possibly to Portsmouth.
Irvine is fully aware of what this raft of possible promotions could do for the Socceroos in the short term, exposing players like himself to a higher level – as well as how individual successes in club football can change how the Australian game is seen, at home and abroad, having grown up in an era when the country probably took for granted the luxury of seeing Socceroos everywhere in Europe.
“What it would mean for Australian football, to see guys competing at the very top level again – there’s no denying that that pushes us,” he said.
“Just in the way you’re perceived … it changes everything completely. We just want that individual success for each other as well – especially players like myself and Cam [Burgess], who have spent most of our careers at a certain level, and Mass [Luongo] as well, and looking at having that opportunity to finally break that ceiling is obviously really exciting.”
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