The A-League has returned – and for all the criticism surrounding a lack of promotion ahead of the season’s launch, it appears the best marketing remains the on-pitch product. Adelaide witnessed a pulsating five-goal feast on Friday night – a match illuminated by Nikola Mileusnic’s superb free-kick, a goal on debut for youngster Al Hassan Toure, and Ryan McGowan’s dramatic late winner to sink the hopes of his hometown fans.
After three years in the wilderness Western Sydney Wanderers returned to Parramatta Stadium like heroes from the Odyssey – the introduction of safe-standing for active supporters was well-received, even if not all have returned yet to embrace Markus Babbel’s work in progress.
The Melbourne derby was a pageant of light and sound pre-game, and while there were some high-quality passages of play the caution of two newly-installed coaches slightly dulled a fixture that’s positively bristled in recent years. A sparkling return for Andrew Nabbout and Adama Traoré, league debuts for quality imports like Craig Noone, Javier Cabrera and Jakob Poulsen – perhaps even the best “non-goal celebration” the league has seen since Kerem Bulut’s – plenty to excite the 33,523 fans in attendance.
And yet the immediate rearing of world football’s bête noire, VAR, which made its presence felt keenly across the first three games of the round, again threatened to steal headlines. Kosta Barbarouses was denied an excellent goal on his Sydney debut by the width of a bee’s proboscis. The new league owners may have shelled out $150,000 to bring in Hawkeye technology but when a goal that every real-speed replay suggests is onside is adjudged off, surely the next step is to install an agreed margin of error that maintains some semblance of a benefit to the attacking side.
VAR also earned the ire of Central Coast Mariners coach Alen Stajcic, who saw his side denied a worthy point, courtesy of an 82nd minute VAR-adjudged penalty for handball. “I don’t know how that can be intentional when it deflects off a guy one yard away, at that speed,” the former Matildas coach fumed at the post-match press conference.
But lost in any VAR-related controversy was the actual story of the weekend: Toure, Joel King, Daniel Wilmering, Sam Silvera, Connor Metcalfe, and Louis D’Arrigo. Have we ever seen so many teenagers appear during the opening round of an A-League season?
“All the noise coming out of the clubs recently has been that they’re going to tone down the investment in overseas players and focus on young locals,” former A-League coach John Kosmina observed on Sunday, a point underlined by the long-overdue move to expand A-League benches, with spots now specifically earmarked for under-23 players.
Over the first three games of the opening round of the A-League 11 Australian teenagers were handed 546 minutes of competitive football. Last season, excluding the Kiwi duo of Sarpreet Singh and Liberato Cacace, the corresponding number was five minutes, with only Anthony Lesiotis coming on as a time-wasting substitute.
As Australia contemplates 12 years without Olympics qualification for its men’s Under-23 team, it’s a critically important issue – and one that’s been long deprioritised by Football Federation Australia. From a fan’s perspective it’s a no-brainer: short of watching a top-tier foreigner, an Ola Toivonen, Miloš Ninković or Diego Castro tearing up the league, the thing that makes a season that’s slipping away bearable is watching a local kid come good on the big stage.
In 2012, just 91 minutes into his fledgling A-League career, a teenage Nabbout lit up the Big Blue with a match-winning brace off the bench against Alessandro Del Piero’s Sydney FC. Despite his obvious potential, the flying winger saw just 686 minutes the rest of that season; the next year that decreased to 334; the next just 35 minutes. But for a lifeline three seasons ago from the bottom-of-the-table Newcastle Jets, the now Socceroo could have followed the path of Hagi Gligor, Anthony Kalik, Joe Caletti, Lachlan Scott or countless more talented youngsters lost to the A-League.
In earlier years clubs like Central Coast made a reputation from blooding talented youth – Mat Ryan, Tom Rogic, Trent Sainsbury – the who’s who of the present national team. What looms as a truly exciting development this season is that it’s not just so-called smaller clubs but rather those at the top showing the courage to place trust in their academies.
In an opening round of potentially negative headlines, the excitement of potential is there to be seen. In Toure’s calmly taken goal. In King’s superb assist for Barbarouses’s non-goal. In Metcalfe’s polished 90-minute Melbourne derby performance.
The 2019/20 A-League season may not have been preceded with much fanfare, but if young Australian footballers continue to be given time to flourish, it may yet prove the best promotion the game has seen.
