A-Leagues All Access’ incredible footage of emotions boiling over in the Brisbane Roar dressing room was straight out of English football’s bearpit, writes Roy O’Donovan.
When Roy Keane signed me for Sunderland in 20007, I knew of his reputation for what you could call a volcanic temperament – as a player and as a manager.
You might have heard some of the stories of him telling players they were rubbish, that they had no balls – that was just the start of it. So many tactics boards got shattered during his half-time rages that I’m sure the club began to buy them in bulk.
The one thing you learnt with Roy – and with a number of other managers to be fair – was to keep your head down, even if they asked, “Does anyone have anything to say?” The safest answer was silence, your eyes to the floor, waiting for the storm to blow itself out.
In other dressing rooms I’ve seen players pinned against the wall for not marking properly at a corner; I’ve been called names myself (“arrogant” was one of the more palatable) and I’ve fired back. That’s why I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Charlie Austin laying into Connor Chapman last Friday night, in the latest episode of A-Leagues All Access – and, to be fair, seeing Connor giving it back.
To understand where Charlie was coming from, you need to understand the culture of British football. When I was a young player growing up, not far ahead of Charlie in age, the dressing room had a hierarchy, and the older players would keep the younger boys in their place.
That dressing room was a collection of egos – most of all everyone wanted to win as a team but let’s be honest, you also wanted to get your own stats up in the process, because that was how you kept your place in the team. If a team-mate was making mistakes, or not putting in from your point of view, both of those objectives were under threat.
Watch the full Charlie Austin episode here:
The one key difference is that generally it was the manager who did the shouting on game day, especially at half-time if you were losing. But if a player felt his team was flat, and there wasn’t a rocket forthcoming from the manager, sometimes one of the senior boys might almost engineer a row in order to spark the team into life. I’m sensing this might have been part of what Charlie did on Friday – Warren Moon isn’t a particularly demonstrative coach, and Charlie is maybe used to a rev-up from managers like Harry Redknapp and Sean Dyche.
It’s an interesting balance to strike though. When I first left English football and went to play in the Singapore Premier League, it took me a while to adjust to a far more even-tempered dressing room – not quite passive, as such, but a more respectful and quiet environment.
The A-League Men is somewhere between that and English football, especially with a generation of younger managers who maybe see a half-time spray – the hairdryer, as it was called when Sir Alex Ferguson was unleashing – as counterproductive when they actually want their teams to play to a plan. Generally they won’t say much to their team after a game, especially after a loss, but then give detailed feedback at the start of the next week.
That’s what I mean by an interesting balance for Charlie to find. Weekly stand-up rows simply aren’t tenable in a dressing room environment, even though we saw Charlie and Connor having made up at the end of the show. If Brisbane continue to struggle, Charlie can’t just let rip all of his frustration.
It is hard, and I know that only too well. My first season at Central Coast Mariners, in 2015-16, started with a win but then unravelled fast – fair to say, the best thing about that year was the palm tree on the shirts. Though I was scoring goals – and actually got goal of the year – my frustration at how things were unfolding just grew inside. I reacted badly to an elbow in the head and got a lengthy suspension.
How fair that was is a column for another day, but my point here is that the English dressing rooms that Charlie and I grew up in were high-octane environments, full of emotion and tempers. Usually you’d have your say, get it over with, and be mates on the same team by the next day.
As a senior pro and the marquee man, Charlie will be a big figure in setting the Roar culture. It’ll be fascinating to see how that unfolds over the coming weeks.