When expectations are high, but your team isn’t even in the top six halfway through the season, all eyes are on what the men in charge do next, writes Tom Smithies.
Blood and sweat is one thing but when the tears start to flow, a team knows that things are going badly wrong.
By now it’s obvious who’s doing well in the Isuzu UTE A-League this season – the ladder, as coaches like to say, doesn’t lie – and those for whom that table makes grim reading are beginning to wonder when things will ever change.
This is the point, with 13 of 26 games played by almost every team, where coaches have to hide any sense of self-doubt, and keep preaching to an increasingly questioning playing group that good times are just around the corner.
That’s if the coach even believes that themselves. After three months of an A-League pre-season to design blueprints and game plans, a team that is struggling to get anywhere near its expectations has to fight to avoid the lure of recrimination.
The decisions on whether to stick or twist – to keep to the original tactical designs or tear things up, to stay loyal to the obvious big names or give the reserves a go – can define a coach’s reputation. As the travails continue, they know it’s always easier for fans and pundits to focus on the culpability of the coach rather than a whole squad.
We’ve already seen one coach depart this season, with Dwight Yorke walking out on Macarthur on Saturday – and his team at least is in the top six, and has already won the Australia Cup.
For other coaches, the spotlight is uncomfortably hot as the Izusu UTE A-League reaches halfway. To have the champions Western United struggling in ninth spot, Sydney FC below them with the second-worst defensive record, and Melbourne Victory rock bottom, was not how this season was supposed to shape up.
Injuries, loss of form and even pitch invasions can lay waste to the best-laid plans, but now the likes of Tony Popovic and Steve Corica are running out of time to show that their roadmap is actually leading anywhere. John Aloisi had the respite of a victory at the weekend but badly needs to turn that into a a series of wins.
The problem for any coach under pressure is that none of this is happening in a vacuum, with fans and media articulating an ever-growing sense of disillusionment.
“That is probably the toughest bit, even if you want to get away from it you can’t because it’s constantly in your face,” says Stefan Mauk, the former Adelaide United, Melbourne City and Brisbane midfielder who moved back to Adelaide in the midst of the 2015-16 season – just as a team that had been rock bottom began to find form and would remarkably end up as champions.
“Adelaide being a small town and myself being an Adelaide boy, you’d have friends or family or people on the street that would come up to you and start talking about how bad United had been or how poor a performance was,” Mauk recalls
“You just have to believe in what the coach is actually doing and when you go to training, try to implement that. I think you see very quickly if players don’t believe in the coach, things keep going poorly and they won’t recover.”
There, in a sentence, is the crux of the matter. Any changes a coach makes to get his team back on track have to convince his squad that he is ahead of the game, negative results notwithstanding.
“If a coach does deviate too much from what they’ve been saying to you for so long, it can just come across as doubt,” says former Socceroo and KEEPUP columnist Robbie Cornthwaite.
“That’s why some of the best managers stick to what they know and stick to what they truly believe will work. But it’s quite a dilemma – if you lose the players with your message that can become quite difficult.
“When I was playing in Asia one thing that worked really well was to change things up in terms of the personnel – if you talk specifically about Western United, for instance, Leo Lecroix should not be playing, in my opinion, and the fact that he is I think can lose the faith of some of the other players that are not in the team.”
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Perhaps to his surprise, Mauk remembers walking into an Adelaide dressing room in 2016 that was rather more steadfast than might have been expected after so many defeats, even allowing for the fact the team had finally recorded its first wins. The key was the aura of calm being given off by Spanish coach Guillermo Amor.
“What was really clear to me in talking to the leadership group, the older players, was that when they were losing, nothing really had changed – Amor was really, really good with them in not panicking,” Mauk says.
“What unfolded really was driven by his calmness to keep things the same, and also the players really driving those high standards and making sure that we held each other accountable.
“When you’re losing games, it’s very easy to point the finger. You need to trust each other out on the training field first, and then when you go out into the match, and that’s something that they did really well.”
Mauk could see quickly that Amor’s poise extended to empowering his players to take ownership of performances. “There was a really good mix of leaders within the playing group that had been there for a long time,” he says.
“They could make small changes on the field themselves without having to wait to halftime or trying to just wait to see what the coaches said. Players like (Eugene) Galekovic, (Bruce) Djite, (Marcelo) Carrusca, (Iacopo) La Rocca would take that initiative.”
While not many teams will emulate Adelaide’s climb from bottom to champions that year, Cornthwaite emphasises how quickly a team’s fortunes can change if the conditions are right.
“Imagine if Melbourne Victory had scored with the last kick of the game against Adelaide the other weekend when Lleyton Brooks blazed over,” he says. “Suddenly you’ve come to Adelaide and won 2-1, and the table is so tight at the moment that all of a sudden you’re one win from the six, you win two or three of the next five games and you’re right back in the mix.
“You don’t look at the big picture and say, We need to get to in the top four in the next 10 games, because that just looks very daunting. You just look to the next training session, the next game, because one win can seriously change things very quickly.
“From my experiences, Popa (Tony Popovic) tends to set his teams up to peak at the back end of the season, they don’t always start all that well. Annoyed as he would be at this situation, I think he’d almost relish it and maybe use that as a sense of motivation.
“At the moment people sort of write them off and I don’t think he’d mind that too much.”
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In some situations, though, it quickly becomes evident that no motivation or self-belief will matter – precisely the sort of narrative the teams currently struggling on the A-League ladder must avoid.
Mauk learned that the hard way after his move back from Europe in 2018 to join Brisbane Roar, persuaded – like other players – to sign by then-Roar boss John Aloisi.
As questions mounted over the club’s infrastructure, negative results quickly followed and Aloisi quit three days after Christmas – leading to tears among some of the playing group.
“There were the struggles on the field, but there were a lot of struggles off the field,” recalls Mauk now. “John leaving obviously caused a lot of issues with the players, certain players maybe didn’t want to be there if John wasn’t there.
“What happens in the day-to-day impacts massively on the players and and as much as we did have a lot of experienced players then it’s very hard for them to try and turn everything around when there was so much uncertainty.
“That’s a really tough place to be in when you’re a player because you can only impact so much. There’s obviously decisions that are made way above our heads and and then it becomes a bad place to be, to be honest. It does become that blame culture where you pick on every little thing and it becomes a bad environment.”
Mauk lays bare the challenge for a coach trying to instill self-belief in any struggling team, whether due to external factors or just a collective collapse of form.
“Maybe you’re doubting yourself before you even go out onto the field as a player and then you’re not playing at your best, and it looks like you’re not trying when sometimes you’re almost trying too hard,” he says.
“That’s when individuals start to worry more about themselves rather than the entire team… if my teammate gets beat, I’m not going to go and cover him because that’ll make me look bad. I guess the exact opposite of what good teams want.
“But you can also learn a lot in those moments. In football at times it can feel like the world is crumbling around you, yet things can change very quickly and go back the other way as well.
“That’s why people love it, because one minute you’re coming last and then 12 months later, you’re maybe the champion.
“As a football fan myself, all you’re worried about is the last game or the next game, and you’re not thinking far ahead. But I try now to have a more level approach when I have a bad game or we do lose a game and the fans are unhappy.
“You know things will turn around eventually.”