“You have a tactic, you concede a goal, tactic – pfff!” Helenio Herrera
Bleary eyed, I absorbed the wisdom from the godfather of catennacio. I was re-reading Simon Kuper’s Football Against The Enemy, in particular his day with Helenio Herrera, while on a Sunday morning flight to Sydney from Melbourne’s Avalon airport.
Later that afternoon I checked my phone. I was at the Sydney Football Stadium. It was half-time. Sydney FC was leading 2-0 at home to Melbourne Heart. A tweet from a friend read:
“@ArtSapphire don’t know what you were thinking going to Heart away game”
He did have a point. The team had not won a game interstate for almost two years. That famous 4-0 win over Sydney FC on 29 December 2011 was supposed to presage an era of devastating Heart Total Football. Instead, the team had become synonymous with Total Football Disappointment.
Nevertheless, I was still lured to Sydney. The combination of a cheap flight, a bed to crash for the night, and a chance to see Del Piero and Harry Kewell on the same pitch was an opportunity too good to miss.
“When Harry met Ale” read the headline in the local press. Well, it did not quite work out the way everyone had wished on the pitch. Even still, the two legends took turns in being the dominant personalities of the game.
In the first half, Del Piero ambled about a forest of Heart midfielders and defenders lying deep behind their own halfway line.
John Aloisi brought anti-football to the SFS. The petrified coach put out a petrified team against what could hardly be called petrifying opponents.
It was the football equivalent of being put in a wrestling sleeper hold and it wasn’t only the crowd, or the people out in Pay TV land, that had trouble staying awake. Heart midfielders Migliorini and Murdocca were so dazed by the 43rd minute from football deprivation they fell on each other in pursuit of the oldest man in the A-League. The Italian with the dodgy hamstrings then lumbered into the penalty area and scored courtesy of a backpedaling defence.
To say the rapturous reaction of the crowd was orgasmic would be an exaggeration, but at least it was genuine, unlike Meg’s effort.
It only got worse for the visiting team. Heart’s metamorphosis into a petrified forest was complete as Sydney scored a second goal in just before the break.
Exit stage right: Del Piero
“You have a tactic, you concede a goal, tactic – pfff!”
A managerial career was going up in smoke.
Enter stage left: Kewell
I observed our hero rehearsing during the half-time break. He stood on the edge of the penalty area. A delicate deft chip sent the ball over the reserve goalkeeper and just under the crossbar. Poetry.
Thirty minutes later he embarrassingly fluffed his lines from the penalty spot.
Otherwise, Kewell’s performance on the park was meritorious. He and his team played like bravehearts in the second half as they launched wave upon wave of desperate attacks on a shell-shocked Sydney rearguard and exposed the host for what they really are – a pretty average team.
Heart lost 2-1 in the end. Some called it an unlucky defeat.
A scared team, with scared tactics, does not deserve any luck.
Which brings us to this weekend’s Melbourne Derby. This promises to be one the more bizarre encounters between the two intracity rivals.
Many Heart fans have already consigned John Aloisi to the managerial dustbin. They have suffered enough over the last two seasons and just can’t take any more punishment.
Step forward, Melbourne Victory manager, Kevin Muscat. Heart’s bête noir has the chance to also become Bad Santa and deliver Heart fans the gift of a derby defeat.
With Aloisi’s prolonged ailing tenure having entered the terminal stage, Muscat’s team has a chance to assist him with a final send off.
On the other hand, an unlikely Heart victory, the first of a tortuous season, will be seen by some (not all) as the first improbable sign of a miraculous recovery. And for Victory fans a defeat by will be harder to swallow than the stodgiest Christmas pudding.
But for this to happen Aloisi and his coaching staff have to do something they have struggled to do so far this season – get it right on the night. Now that would truly be a gift.
In a perverse way for Melbourne Heart fans, they just can’t lose.
“You have a tactic, you concede a goal, career – pfff!”
Will be interesting. Seems to me that Heart reserves its anger and purpose for the Derbies!