Читать книгу Legacy: The Autobiography of Tim Cahill - Tim Cahill - Страница 11

FOOTBALL BECAME MY WHOLE WORLD. I fell hopelessly in love with the game. The only friends I had were my footballing friends. I had mates at school, but we didn’t get together after school. I really didn’t have a spare minute. I was so engrossed in the game that I watched it and trained every day. More importantly, I was learning to respect the game.

At the age of seven, my dad took me to meet a key figure, a man who was to play a pivotal role in transforming my game. His name was Johnny Doyle. Johnny Doyle was the local guru of football, a former player turned coach, who was known for bringing out the best in players though private clinics and lessons.

Before we even met, my dad told me about Johnny Doyle’s past: born in Ireland, he came to Australia and played professionally at centre-forward for various teams like South Sydney Croatia, Pan Hellenic, APIA Leichhardt and Canterbury-Marrickville Olympic. He’d even been called up for the Australian national team in 1970. After his playing days he became a coach at a high level for football teams in Australia.

Johnny had the build of a classic No. 9—the strong centre-forward. A big dominating presence. He also had a schoolteacher’s mentality. He was a mathematics teacher at Kingsgrove North High School, where I would be enrolled a few years later.

I started doing sessions with Johnny Doyle at the age of seven and continued until I was fifteen. Meeting him for the first time, I was excited but nervous. Here was this coach who’d made dozens of good players into great ones. And, according to my dad, there were even some players who used to train with Johnny Doyle right before they went overseas to trial with professional clubs.

That was my dream. Somehow getting an overseas trial. Johnny was like the finishing act: the master trainer before any kid—any good Sydney-based player—jetted overseas. My dad’s opinion, at least, was that the only way I was going to make it as a professional footballer was under the tutelage of Johnny Doyle.

He held his lessons on the little home pitch of St George Football Club. Simple clubhouse, locker room, three pitches. We used to park the car, jump over a little fence, then walk down this pathway to where Johnny Doyle would be waiting with his sack of footballs and his equipment. We’d do private lessons, just me individually, but also small group sessions of two or three. Those were usually with my brother Sean, and with a young player named David James who in later years would become one of my closest mates.

Straightaway, I saw that Johnny was a different style of coach from any I’d met before: he stressed close ball control, quick touches, two-footed shooting—a more European or Latin American style of technical football. He changed my entire sense of touch and way of striking the ball.

But the most important characteristic of Johnny Doyle’s style was belief. He took my game to the next level because he believed in me. Long before anyone else, he saw that I might really have a future in the sport. He recognized the intangibles: the drive, the fire, the passion. He saw that I loved football more than anything in the world besides my family. Some coaches just didn’t see it. They couldn’t look past my size.

Johnny Doyle used endless repetition to develop my close-control skills. There are no shortcuts: loads of touches. Left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot. Over and over and over.

At training, we used to shoot against a brick wall. There was a small green door in the centre of the wall. We all called it the “magic door”. Hitting it meant you’d won a “golden bicycle”. Nothing fancy about these drills. Just a brick wall, a green door, and I’d shoot from fifteen or twenty metres out. We’d practise kicking against the wall over and over again, aiming for the green door.

Johnny Doyle’s objective was to make me two-footed. The drill was two touches with your left foot, pass, hit the wall, two touches, pass, and hit the wall again. Ideally you could take the touch—kill the ball completely—strike it cleanly and hit the green door, then Johnny would say you’d won a golden bicycle. If you could take the touch and hit the green with your left foot, you’d earn two golden bicycles.

A golden bicycle—man, it felt like you’d achieved something. It felt like scoring a goal in a competitive match. It was good fun, but if you were doing it with two other players there was added pressure.

Johnny Doyle would always tell me to concentrate on what I was good at: whether that was heading or my vision. To play to my strengths. As a kid, I could play in the middle and find a through-pass other players didn’t see. I always had a good sense of space and peripheral vision on the pitch.

We also worked for hours on all aspects of heading. People often say I’ve simply got an uncanny ability to jump, but it’s much more complex than that. If someone tests you and says, “Jump, Tim!” to touch the chalk line at the top of the wall, that’s a vastly different skill from jumping and heading a ball. The art of heading is leaping and being able to adjust to the ball mid-flight. Frequently, you’ll leap and, as the ball is making its cross, the spin on it will change its trajectory. It’ll dip, the wind will drop it; you’ll have to recalibrate your jump; not so high, bend over more. Heading well takes a combination of vertical leap, anticipation, intuition and a healthy dose of improvisation.

Here’s an example: take an in-swinging ball from the left. Most likely this will have been kicked by the left foot of the sender, causing it to curl into you. You don’t want to head an in-curling ball too hard because you have both the ball itself and the spin to account for. You need to let the ball touch your head and convert that natural power and spin of the cross into a directed header. If you try to make too much contact, you’re guaranteed to sky that ball right over the crossbar. You’ll have zero control. The objective is to use the force of the cross, meet the ball and gently, with control, angle it on target.

Teaching me this lesson, Doyle would say, “You don’t need power on it, Timmy. Just say good morning to the ball.”

It’s a phrase of Johnny’s that I still remember—and teach in my youth academies to this day: Say good morning to the ball.

Johnny Doyle taught emotions and attitudes as much as technical ability, physical drills, tactics and strategies on the pitch. He was the kind of football tutor who took on kids who’d been rejected for a variety of reasons, who could work with kids who didn’t even need physical training but needed only mental strengthening.

That was often my problem as a kid—I lacked the mental skills that are often crucial in determining the outcome of a match. Few men I’ve ever met in football truly understand the psychological side of the game the way Johnny Doyle did.

If I’d had a match with my club team and been tentative about shooting, Johnny would help me get inside my own thought processes.

“Tim,” he’d say, “why didn’t you take the shot? What were you afraid of? You know you can hit that green door. You hit that five times out of seven—with your right foot and your left. Now picture yourself doing it in a game. What’s the difference? The only difference is that there’s more people around you, there’s an atmosphere that you need to block out.”

Johnny Doyle understood that there was no way you can achieve success, maybe even greatness as an athlete—or anything in life, really—if you’re not mentally tough.

“Hit the door, Tim,” he’d say. “It’s a fraction of the size of a real goal. Maybe one-fifth of a proper goal. Now take that small area and hit it every single time with power.”

I took the confidence that came from earning Johnny Doyle’s golden bicycles and transferred it to my competitive match play.

And, in later years, whenever I was out on the pitch, I still aimed for Johnny Doyle’s green door. The sense of inner pride, earning that golden bicycle, was immense. When I hit that green door with my left foot, it felt as big as if I’d scored a goal for Australia in the World Cup.

It used to be in Australia that football was known as the sport of immigrants. Football—or “soccer” as it’s still generally called—wasn’t seen as a real Australian sport in the same way that cricket and rugby union were, even though we’ve produced world-class Australian footballers for decades.

This was already changing quite bit when I was a kid in the 1980s, but traditionally the sport hierarchy remained: cricket, rugby league, and Australian rules football.

They’ve been the dominant sports in the country and to this day remain the most popular. Football was seen as a game that had “flown here” with the immigrants.

This led to some ugliness over the years, and I heard about it even as a youth player. Some of the kids’ fathers who grew up in Australia would talk about how the sport used to be referred to as wogball.

Wog is a derogatory term for the immigrant Europeans—Greeks, Italians, Croatians, Serbians, Latin Americans—who were seen as the only people who played and enjoyed the sport. Fortunately, you almost never hear anyone in Australia calling it wogball any more.

Even in my youngest playing days, I got thrown into that ethnic melting pot. Sydney Olympic Football Club played a huge part in my development. They were known throughout Sydney as the Greek team. Everything associated with the club was Greek. They had some other nationalities playing in the squad, but for the supporters, the hard-core fan-base, everything was Greek: the blue and white flags, the food eaten at the matches, the songs sung in the stands. It was a club run by Greeks, backed by Greeks, with a flavour straight out of Athens. First known as the Pan Hellenic Football Club, established in 1957 in Sydney by Greek immigrants, the team soon became one of the mainstays of the National Soccer League (NSL).

Sydney Olympic’s main rivals were the Marconi Stallions, an Italian club to the core. Everywhere you looked in their stadium you’d see the tricolour flag of Italy—green, white and red. Men sported the Marconi Stallion jerseys and sometimes the famous Azzurri shirt of the Italian national team. In fact, Christian Vieri, the great Italian striker—tied for first as Italy’s record World Cup goal-scorer, along with Roberto Baggio and Paolo Rossi—lived in Sydney when he was younger and played for the Marconi Stallions.

Sydney Olympic had a well-run youth system with Under-12, Under-13, Under-14 teams, all the way up to the reserves and the first team, which competed in the NSL. All the best kids who lived close by me wanted to trial at Olympic. If you lived closer to Marconi, you trialled there. Some youth players who lived in my area felt Marconi was the better club. It was often a matter of heated debate among us kids.

The first step to becoming part of the Olympic “family” was to get invited to trials. I first made it at age eleven, playing with my brother Sean in the Under-12s. Again, my dad felt I was always ready to play up an age, but it meant I was always the smallest kid on the pitch.

When you got selected, your parents would get a letter, then you’d go round to the Sydney Olympic clubhouse and collect the tracksuits and your kit. I remember how much pride I felt in that tracksuit: cobalt-blue and white with the Olympic crest. Alongside my replica Manchester United kits, kept immaculate in my bedroom, I now added my own Sydney Olympic kit and tracksuit.

The training sessions had an air of intense competition. The place was jammed. Dads parked in all different corners of the ground, wherever they could find a spot, and each kid had to bring his own football. From the moment you arrived, fathers would have their kids stretching, kicking the ball against the back wall, practising heading.

My brother Sean and I were always together, so we’d start straightaway passing the ball back and forth, juggling, heading it. I would keep my tracksuit on as if I was warming up for the big-time professional leagues. I’d do my stretching and warm-ups, and once it was time for training I’d strip off my tracksuit bottoms, then my top, and sprint out as if it was the start of a match. That’s how serious I was at that young age and it was no different for the kids from Greek backgrounds. Sydney Olympic was the pinnacle; it was the highest level of football they could ever envisage playing.

The key was to impress the coaches. There was never a moment to slack off. Every drill, every touch, every pass, shot and dribble was scrutinized. Sydney Olympic had one youth coach, George Psaroudis, who had a lot of faith in my brother Sean as a goalkeeper. Some people said I’d only made the team because Sean was so good at that position. In fact, I think it was Coach Psaroudis who first said to Sean, “Don’t let fear hold you back,” but my brother took that phrase and made it his own.

This made every weekend a trial game for me. I was under the microscope. But I found my rhythm, was strong and creative in midfield, and made an impact pretty quickly for my club. People would start saying on the touchline: “Well, done. Young Tim Cahill’s played well.”

I started scoring a lot of goals for Olympic. If you were a youth player and you made it into the starting eleven of Sydney Olympic, Marconi Stallions or Sydney United, you were on the radar as a top prospect. No guarantees of course, but you could sense you might be on the road to making it as a professional in the NSL.

One of the best things about being in the Under-12 team was that I got a job being a ball boy for Sydney Olympic first team. There was an incredible atmosphere at every home match. In the stands behind me, the chanting would come in waves. Olympic! Olympic! It would start slow, then grow faster, with clapping in the rhythm to those syllables:

“Ohhhh-lymmm-pic!”

When the home team scored, the grounds erupted as if it was a match in Europe. Throughout the match, I’d fetch balls for the first-team players for throw-ins and corner kicks, sprinting up and down the touchline, thinking, One day I’m going to play for Olympic, in the first team, and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll score boatloads of goals for them.

It was an incredibly family-friendly atmosphere. Tons of kids in the stands with their parents. During the matches you could buy authentic Greek food like souvlakis and gyros. You could get bags of peanuts or pumpkin seeds—in fact, this brilliant little guy named Andrea—everyone called him “Mr Olympic”—would shout out the words in Greek, and the ground would be littered everywhere with discarded shells. Another guy sold DVDs of Olympic matches but also of the big clubs back home in the Greek national league.

Being the half-Samoan, half-English kid, I didn’t have a natural niche, didn’t fit into the typical ethnic divisions, but being part of Olympic, it didn’t matter; I soon became known as an “adopted Greek”. The fans and the parents of the other kids in the youth squads all talked to me in a mixture of Greek and their heavily accented English, and it got to the point that I understood some of it and could even get by with a few phrases.

Australian football has changed a lot since then. The A-League is the only thing many younger fans know today, but, for me, the old NSL was my highest aspiration. My dream was to make it into the starting eleven of Olympic and have those Greek fans waving blue and white flags and screaming when I’d score.

But even though you’re wearing the Olympic colours and crest as a youth player, it’s still a massive dream—a huge long shot—that you’re ever going to play for the starting eleven in the Olympic men’s squad.

I played with some top players at Sydney Olympic—really exceptionally talented young guys. There were players who never fulfilled the potential of that talent because of the various paths they chose. Some got a serious injury. Some met a girl and had a kid. Or the needs of family called on them to step up and work full time rather than pursuing their dream of football. And then there were those who had the talent and the drive but lacked some other advantage—they often didn’t have that one good role model in their life who believed in them.

Others, however, just didn’t have the discipline. They chose going out, having a party lifestyle, rather than the regimen of daily training. It’s a hard truth: reaching the pinnacle of anything requires not only talent, and good fortune, but also a single-mindedness towards those things you can control—if you’re disciplined enough.

It’s nearly impossible to have this combination of advantages and personal qualities, but today I tell the kids in the youth football academies I run in Australia that what matters, if you really want it, is that you devote yourself to those things you can influence. Give yourself over to your passion. Take every opportunity presented to you.

At Olympic I came up through the ranks, part of a tremendous youth system, much like the system used by Barcelona or Manchester United to develop the talent of the youngest schoolboys in their academies. I was fortunate enough to have great opportunities—and I took them.