FIFA World Cup: How Wayne Bennett inspired Socceroos coach Graham Arnold’s rise to the top
Graham Arnold once turned to Wayne Bennett for advice. On the back of the Socceroos’ World Cup charge, Arnold deserves to be rated alongside the supercoach.
A text message that NRL super coach Wayne Bennett sent Graham Arnold 10 years ago hasn’t been deleted. Instead, it has been sprinkled all over the Socceroos, like magic dust, at an unforgettable World Cup.
How do we know? Because Andrew Devlin, the father of Socceroos defender Cameron Devlin, has pulled back the green and gold curtain in Qatar.
“The mateship, the bond, the tightness and culture that’s been created within this group of boys, it’s Arnie,’’ Devlin said.
“Cam said Arnie just builds tightness amongst them. Cam experienced it at the Olympics and he said Arnie is just all about teammates and getting together.
“That’s what he builds. It’s a great culture that he develops.
“Arnie copped heaps of criticism about going over the top with the Aussie DNA and fighting spirit, but that’s what our fight has been about.
“That Tunisia game, the way we defended, we just fought our backsides off.
“Then against Denmark, I turned to my wife (Jackie) at nil-all at half-time and said we are just hanging on here.
“But we just defended our backsides off.
“And a lot of that comes from Arnie. They (players) want to play for him.”
Which, to be fair, probably says more about Devlin’s character as a father of a son, who at the time of this column going to print, was still pushing, striving and chasing a call-up from Arnold’s reserves to play his first minute of football at a World Cup.
What Devlin has intimated is that Arnold is still clearly using the coaching advice of Bennett from 2013.
It was after Arnold steered the Central Coast Mariners to their first A-League championship success that season that he spoke of his mentorship from Bennett.
“I’m always trying to learn and learn from the best and the best in Australia is Wayne Bennett,” Arnold told reporters at the time.
“I went and had lunch with Wayne and he’s been a fantastic mentor for me over the last four weeks.
“With his experience he basically said ‘I will win you a grand final ... I’ve done it six times so I’ll tell you how to do it’.
“He was a really good shoulder that I could lean on to talk to, a guy that had a lot more experience than me.
“Even up to yesterday morning the text message that he sent me ... ‘don’t play the game today, you’re playing tomorrow. Keep them relaxed’. I can’t thank him enough.”
It’s Arnold’s final line that has been with the Socceroos from the moment they landed in Qatar.
Arnold may not be the most tactically profound coach, but what he knows is how to bring a group of men together and he knows the importance of silencing the outside noise and having fun behind closed doors.
Any number of footballers to have played under Bennett will tell you the same.
“It’s a cliche that they’re all part of the team, but they are,’’ Devlin said.
“They are a really tight bunch of blokes. There’s no dickheads amongst them.
“They’re playing table tennis, they’re playing stink pong (a game where the winner of table tennis smacks a ball into the back of their opponent).
“They’re doing a lot fun stuff. They’re having game nights, everyone gets on so well.
“That down-time is crucial to stepping away from the pressure of focusing on the next big game.’’
Devlin added that Arnold’s passion for his country and the development of football within it would be crucial to ensuring Australia’s new golden generation realise their full potential.
“We were invited to a team function the other night and I was speaking to a few of the boys about how exciting the next generation is coming through,’’ Devlin said.
“Everyone talks about the golden generation, but we’re well past that now. We’ve got this crew coming through of young blokes and it’s exciting that Cam is amongst it.
“And it’s not only the young blokes that are here.
“You’ve then got guys like Denis Genreau, Connor Metcalfe, Jake Brimmer, Nick D’Agostino, Lachie Wales.
“You’ve got all these young blokes that aren’t here, but are going to be the next wave, and Arnie has been with them at the Olympics.
“And that was his goal. To bring them through and to foster them into the Socceroos squad.’’
Devlin’s insight adds context to the magnitude of Football Australia’s ability to keep Arnold in charge.
He is yet to be offered a new contract, which speaks to the lack of foresight at FA, that has forever been undermined by egos and short-sightedness.
What is certain is, the world is not only watching a collection of generational Socceroos players, but a much-loved man manager who in one month has proven, he’s also a super coach.
KENT: HOW EVERYMAN COACH ARNIE DEFIED THE CRITICS
By Paul Kent
The mocks walk the floor wild and free at the Sackville Hotel, like zebras on the Serengeti.
John, the man Wayne Bennett once nicknamed Gadaffi, is the worst culprit, usually going the early crow at about the 200m mark — “Go and collect,” he’ll declare — often on a swooper’s track just as the swoopers are about to swoop.
Disco Dave wears T-shirts that hurt tender eyes and will pull a first four at Eagle Farm that cost him $25 for slightly over 11 per cent of the payout, then declares himself a winner when the tote pays $186.
As loud as Saturday afternoons get Big Pete, with a voice launched from somewhere down a deep well, can usually be heard over the din, cheering home the jockey rather than the horse, and usually winning.
Opposite to that is Holly, squawking like an injured bird: “Go son … go son … go son …”
Long pause, then: “F…!”
Beaten by a head bob.
And somewhere in it all Graham Arnold, currently working out of Qatar, walks in with his bulldog “Barry”, named after his father, and finds a quiet safety amid all this noisy chaos.
Arnold knows the feeling around the room, where fortunes fluctuate quickly and luck is not to be relied upon, even if he isn’t a punter.
Even now, when it is no longer fashionable, his thinking remains practical.
He understands what the rest of us call normal people and the trials they endure.
When the Socceroos missed qualifying for the World Cup 20 years ago and Arnold was assistant to Frank Farina, he grabbed Holly for an opinion on what went wrong.
“You’re a mock,” Holly said.
Sometimes, he was saying, shit happens. Get on with it.
It is the only way Arnold has been able to ride through these past months.
Just five months ago they were calling for his job, declaring that if he failed to get the Socceroos to the World Cup he simply had to go, at a time when he needed it least.
Then he got them there and they cheered him.
Then after the 4-1 loss to France in the opening game heads were again shaking, questioning whether he was up to the job and citing all kinds of reasons why.
Then early Thursday morning the Socceroos beat Denmark to create a small Australian history, the only time the Socceroos have ever won two games at a World Cup, and pushing them through to the round of 16 for only the second time, and they were singing songs about him outside the stadium in Qatar and praises by his critics.
Fluctuating fortunes …
What seems to annoy people most about Graham Arnold is that he does not behave like they want him to behave.
He is comfortable sitting in a pub with punters and desperates and people who commit the offence of being normal, talking quietly when everybody is talking loud.
Along with Barry he is happy going unnoticed in a place where the races are the dominant sport every Saturday and the winter code is the NRL.
And when it all turned south during qualifying and everybody got a little nervous Arnold again refused to act like others wanted him to act, refusing to buckle or quake or (and this might have hurt them most) respond.
He had a dozen good reasons why Australia was struggling to qualify.
You could start by arguing that, by international standards, the Socceroos are not much more than a pub team.
No players in the English Premier League, instead coming from the championship a level below or otherwise spread out in leagues across Europe, failing to hit any of the big clubs, and with an ungodly amount drawn from the A-League here in Australia.
It was hardly fertile pickings.
If the Socceroos from 2006 are the gold-standard of Australian teams, this mob, well, are not.
On top of that Covid forced the Socceroos to face more hardship than any other team during qualifying.
After a bright start that saw them win 11 straight games, a record, the impact of Covid and quarantine and home games played away began to bite.
No team travelled more than the Socceroos. Only four of the 20 qualifiers were played in Australia.
The 11-game streak ended with a 2-0 loss to Japan and, from there, the Socceroos went on a 1-5 streak that saw them miss automatic qualification and on the verge of missing the World Cup altogether, for the first time since 2002, which started the noise again.
In the end the Socceroos had to play more home games away, playing United Arab Emirates in Doha and then Peru less than a week later, needing to win both to qualify and all while a lot of observers, including old teammates and former friends, called for his job.
When they beat Peru in the qualifying final, in a penalty shootout, the noise subsided only slightly.
That he did it all with a mishmash squad, players spread out around their world, going more than 750 days without a game in Australia at one point, meant little.
Twice he caught Covid. Twice he coached the team by video.
He got on with it without fuss, as that is what he does.
When the heat picked up midway through the year and Australia lost to Saudi Arabia, leaving Australia at risk, Football Australia boss James Johnson came out and publicly backed Arnold for the job.
It was all Johnson could do, and some didn’t like that either.
It has a certain kind of irony to it, though,
Johnson might have guaranteed his job but he quite cleverly did not say for how long.
Harry Kewell turned up at Socceroos training in Qatar this week also with private ambitions for the coaching job.
Arnold had heard the rumours and, the kind of man he is, he told Kewell to go public with it.
Get it out there, be transparent, and a few days later Kewell went on the record.
Then Arnold did what he was not supposed to do and, early Thursday, his team of unfashionables, ranked 38th in the world, beat the 10th ranked Denmark to qualify for the knockout rounds.
They play Argentina at 6am Sunday.
His pub here at home, the Sackville, was renamed the Sacky-roos and most of the Saturday afternoon crew were well into their fourth dream by the time the game was being played at 2am but the pub was still full.
They were Arnie’s people. Good honest people and the odd scallywag, doing what they do, cheering one of their own.
Barry failed to make it, although Disco Dave did, dressed down out of respect for the early hour and bleary eyes.
SHORT SHOT
The old line about the more you love boxing the more you hate it is true again after Filipino referee Carlos Padilla, while being inducted into the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame, admitted to cheating to help a young Filipino boxer named Manny Pacquiao beat Australia’s Nedal “Skinny” Hussein in 2000.
Padilla should have had his induction immediately revoked, for starters.
Hussein is seeking legal action to see if he can have the result declared a no-contest even though most would be looking to have it reversed completely.
Whatever eventually happens, though, it will never fully compensate the Australian fighter for what it cost him. It was not just a loss on his record.
From this fight Pacquiao went on to remain undefeated and became one of the greatest boxers ever, earning almost $2 billion.
Hussein’s career began to stutter.
It was a sliding doors moment.
While some will want to argue the comparisons between Pacquiao and Hussein as a fighter, it is irrelevant.
Even if Hussein never became the fighter Pacquiao became he would surely have been given more and bigger opportunities that paid well above what he ultimately had to settle on.
With wins would have come more opportunities, as Pacquiao showed.
Instead his career went left when it should have gone right.
And a nitwit referee laughs about it as if it is just one of those things that go with boxing.
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