The Away Game

By Matthew Hall

Written with a genuine passion for the game, 'The Away Game' gets beyond the usual stories and takes us to the should of Australians plying their trade overseas as professional footballers from the English Premier League to the Bundesliga, and from Serie A to Wollongong. Hall travelled around the world for more than a year meeting everyone from

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fair Play Publishing
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781925914207

Matthew Hall

Matthew Hall is a screenwriter and producer and former criminal barrister, a profession he left due to a constitutional inability to prosecute. Educated at Hereford Cathedral School and Worcester College, Oxford, he lives in the Wye Valley in Monmouthshire with his wife, journalist Patricia Carswell, and two sons. Aside from writing, his main passion is the preservation and planting of woodland. In his spare moments, he is mostly to be found amongst trees. His books in the Coroner Jenny Cooper series include The Coroner, The Disappeared, The Redeemed, The Flight, The Chosen Dead, The Burning and A Life to Kill.

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THE AWAY GAME

MATTHEW HALL

First Edition published in 2000 by Harper Collins

Second Edition published in 2006 by Hardie Grant

Third Edition published in 2020 by Fair Play Publishing,

PO Box 4101, Balgwowlah Heights NSW 2093 Australia.

www.fairplaypublishing.com.au

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-925914-19-1

ISBN: 978-1-925914-20-7 (ePUB)

© Matthew Hall 2000, 2006, 2018, 2020

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

Cover image: Australia’s Bruce Djite warms-up during half-time for the World Cup qualifying match between Qatar and Australia at Jassim bin Hammad Stadium, Doha, in 2008. (Photo: Matthew Hall).

Other images: Luis Bagu (Getty Images), Shaun Botterill (Allsport), Duncan Miller Gallery, Matthew Hall, Bonita Mersiades, Craig Moore, Laurie Schwab Collection.

All inquiries should be made to the Publisher via [e-mail]

A catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

Every effort has been made to incorporate correct information and statistics. The author and publisher regret any errors and omissions and invite readers to contribute up-to-date or additional relevant information.

Still for Kevin Christopher (1962–2002)

Who really did tell us so …

Acknowledgments

This book would have been extremely difficult to write without input, formal or otherwise, from many people for this and the first edition.

I am indebted to Greg Stock, Andrew Howe, and Thomas Esamie, whose tireless research into Australian soccer history appears on the website www.ozfootball.net.

Thanks also to Mike Koslowski, Tony Harper, James Carey (RIP), and Peter Gearin at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald for allowing me time and space and not panicking when copy from some ridiculous corner of the world did not come through. Thank to previous publishers of The Away Game at HarperCollins and Hardie Grant.

Thanks to all the players, agents, managers, coaches and supporters interviewed, few whom blinked when I explained, often vaguely, what I was attempting to do; Bonita Mersiades, Brendan Schwab, and Jason Van Blerk, Steve Corica, Kevin Muscat, Sasa Illic, Richard Johnson and Ljubo Milicevic, for providing valuable insights into the lives of professional footballers.

Thanks also to Chris and Lila, Greg Slavierio and Laure De Sousa in Paris and Aix, Andre and Sabine, Leo Karis, Alice Springs, Dzung in Nha Trang, Analîa, Isabella and Delphi, Lance and Joanna, Luisa in Montevideo for sending my phone back, Chris Haskett, my lawyers at Cappelutti and Associates, Sam Pilger, Del and Mel, Astrud in Argentina, Leo for that taxi ride through Buenos Aires, and the staff at Denny’s on Church and the jukebox at Sharlene’s.

CONTENTS

A Note on the 2020 Edition: Everything Is Upside Down

Introduction to the 2006 Edition: Rocks For Goalposts

Mark Schwarzer: And Schwarzer Saves!

Joe Marston: The Band Played ‘Waltzing Matilda’

Mark Viduka: Truth and Consequences

Lucas Neill: This is What it Feels Like in Brazil

Adrian Alston: A Prawn Cocktail and a Schooner of New

Peter Wilson & Andre Krueger: At Night He Dreams of Kembla Heights

Vince Grella & Mark Bresciano: How Much Do You Want It?

Andrew Bernal: Wembley, with Stanley Kowalski at Right-Back

Zeljko Kalac: The Life You Choose

John Brady: Career Advice

Harry Kewell: Deconstructing Harry

Craig Johnston: A Tiger by the Tail

Brett Emerton: The Boy Most Likely

Josip Skoko & John Filan: Beached on Wigan Pier

Steve Horvat: Bruce Springsteen and the Croatian Question

Craig Foster: Brokedown Palace

Paul Okon: Last Tango in Cyprus

Stan Lazaridis: Removing the Spoon

Tony Vidmar & Craig Moore: Now They Want To Kill You

Aurelio Vidmar: So Close, So Far Away

Robbie Slater: I Think of You as a Brother

Bernie Mandic: Despicable Scumbags

Ned Zelic: There is Geometry, There is Picasso

Mark Bosnich: This is Your Goalkeeper on Drugs

John Aloisi: The Goal We Score In The Back Yard

Hayden Foxe et al: Kangaroos Don’t Play Football

Epilogue

20 Years since the first edition of The Away Game everything is upside down and it is not supposed to be like this

It took a pandemic to trigger a global pause and some self-reflection. In 2020, Australian football was no different. Already facing a reality check on the legacy left behind by years of the Lowy family’s autocratic administration of the game, it turned out an international shut down would be the trigger to have conversations we’d all previously avoided.

Sure, some people had flagged concern about the way the Lowy family had run football in Australia for almost 15 years. And sure, they’d wondered how those running the game in Australia were from rugby, Australian Rules, and rugby league backgrounds. And sure, some people were making a ton of money from Australian football.

On the field, some people wondered about the standard of the local league even if the men’s national team had qualified for consecutive World Cups (but struggled to win a single game once there) and claimed the Asian Cup on home soil in 2015. Some of us, though, also wondered whatever happened to Australian players bossing it at the very highest levels of the game?

In 2020 style, it took a rare interview with Mark Viduka at home in Zagreb and a subsequent video conference call - smartly hosted and broadcast by a rising media organization - featuring players from the famed 2006 World Cup squad to drive that issue into the spotlight. Yeah, whatever did happen to Australian players being at the top of the game? As The Away Game revealed in 2000 and again in its second edition in 2006, Australians played for top teams in England, Spain, Italy, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and France. Today, only Mat Ryan and Aaron Mooy at struggling Brighton and Hove Albion in England, Matthew Leckie at Hertha Berlin, and, maybe Tom Rogic at Celtic in Scotland, can claim to be playing with big boys.

History tells us a lot. Twenty years ago, when this book was first published, Australia had not qualified for the World Cup finals since 1974 and Perth Glory and Wollongong Wolves had just played out the most dramatic National Soccer League final in history in front of over 43,000 fans. That was a big deal, especially as the league - that included a team from Gippsland in rural Victoria and another from Auckland in New Zealand - crumbled around it. The World Trade Center’s twin towers stood tall, the internet was still figuring out exactly what it was, smartphones did not yet exist, and social media was, perhaps thankfully, not yet even an idea.

For most Australian footballers at that time, the dream was to leave Australia at the soonest opportunity and make or break a career in Europe. Australia’s NSL had certain qualities but offered little incentive for players wanting to be taken seriously, wanting to be tested at the highest level possible, or wanting to make serious money. Europe, alternatively, had all that and more. The player’s stories remained largely untold, however, whether they were playing for Blackburn Rovers and winning the Premier League or living in a bedsit in Glasgow struggling to get a game with a small lower division club in Scotland.

At that time, there were limited ways to discover how Australians fared in Europe: inky soccer newspapers with week-old news; scratchy highlights shows on SBS-TV with weeks-old clips; or maybe you would call a dollar-a-minute phone line on a Sunday morning to hear the overnight scores from Europe read out by SBS presenter Les Murray. Hurry up and get to Germany, Les. We need to know if Paul Agostino has scored again for 1860 Munich.

So that Golden Generation conference call - featuring John Aloisi, Craig Moore, Mark Viduka, Josip Skoko, Mark Schwarzer, and Vince Grella - showed that it wasn’t just some of us who wondered where all the Australian players had disappeared to. Those who’d made the journey themselves asked the very same question.

Those same players - and many of their teammates - had told me their stories in The Away Game and their experiences are incredibly important to the history of the game in Australia. It’s often said that you don’t know where you are going until you know where you have been. So, 2020 is a perfect time to give this book another run - 20 years since the first edition was published.

It is also worth noting that The Away Game was adapted into a TV documentary. The battle to get that made is a story in itself and it may seem odd for those brought up on a diet of click-ready online content, Fox Sports, and now Optus offering excellent insight into the local game but trying to get interest in a modest film about Australian soccer players who play in Europe in 2005 was a brutal exercise in banging heads against a wall.

In 2005, with Australia still to beat Uruguay on penalties in Sydney, not one commercial broadcaster expressed interest in the film - let alone the story. Even the ABC, the government broadcaster that prided itself on telling Australian stories, said no. The words of one senior executive at the national broadcaster are still clear today: Why would we invest money in a documentary about Australian soccer?

That left SBS television as a do-or-die option for the film and - as apparently everything with Australian soccer - there was still politics to navigate. A meeting with Les Murray at a street cafe in Sydney’s fancy Double Bay neighbourhood made it clear that any progress within SBS would need to be steered through him. He wasn’t quite right but he was very close. SBS did agree to broadcast the program during the 2006 World Cup but he film was only able to be funded when the actor Anthony LaPaglia, having received a copy of the book at his home in Los Angeles and after hearing a 30-second pitch for the film at a Bondi cafe while visiting Sydney, stepped up with a cheque. We finally had the money to make it. But only just.

All of this made that game against Japan in Kaiserslautern in 2006 more than just a sunny day out. It was the end of 32 years of pain - sure - but also, briefly, the world was the right way up. Sometimes stories are told to empty rooms but here we were - finally - at a World Cup. As Australia and its players suddenly became a story at the tournament calls began to come in about The Away Game. German TV. Hong Kong. There was a tense negotiation with a major cable network in the United States whose lawyers demanded we buy insurance for the film in case you’ve left anything out of the story. A few months later, I stood on a stage in Palermo, Sicily, accepting an award for the film, making a short speech in bad Italian that drew laughs when I sarcastically thanked the Italian player Fabio Grosso for his work at the World Cup. Afterwards, a Juventus player shook my hand. Our stories apparently did matter after all.

Of the Australian players who took the field in Kaiserslautern against Japan, seven were with English Premier League clubs, two were regulars in Serie A, one was playing in La Liga (I even have a John Aloisi trading card, bought at a market in Madrid), another with one of Switzerland’s top teams. Yet another was with one of the top clubs in the Netherlands (which happened to be coached by Guus Hiddink). Pin that teamsheet up anywhere and tell me Australians can’t play football.

That team was a team from an era that is unlikely to ever be repeated. Today, in 2020, everything is upside down and it was not supposed to be like this. There are no Australian players with a top 10 Premier League team, none in Spain, and zero in Italy. The discussion about why this is so can be had elsewhere but the Golden Generation - and pioneers before them like the late Joe Marston, Craig Johnston, Eddie Krncevic, Frank Farina, and Robbie Slater who paved the way for the often begrudging acceptance that Australians can actually play - showed what can be achieved when a dream is your driving force. In 2020, we can look back at the past 20 years and say, on many levels, that we don’t know what we have until it’s gone. Alternatively, we did know what we had. We just didn’t think we’d ever lose it.

Matthew Hall

New York City

2020

Introduction to the 2006 Edition: Rocks For Goalposts

In August 2005, I nudged my scooter off the busy beachside boulevard in Nha Trang, Vietnam’s own ‘Bondi Beach’, hauled the bike up on its stand, and watched one of about 20 football matches taking place in front of me.

The six-, seven-, eight-a-side pick-up games were being played on a rocky stretch of land between the road and the beach. Later, when night fell, the pitches would be full of parked scooters with couples, making the most of some sort of privacy, doing what couples do. But in the waning afternoon sun, it was six hours before then and the loving going on was that of a round leather ball.

In front of me, a group of what would soon become two teams were involved in a long and precise warm-up routine. One player, the flashiest one, you know the type of guy, wore a replica Barcelona shirt and shorts. Another, perhaps perversely, wore a Middlesbrough shirt. This humid, late-afternoon Nha Trang scene could not have seemed further from a rainy, bleak, corner of England.

After watching for about ten minutes, Barcelona boy extended an invitation. Working at a local casino, he spoke reasonable English. Would I like to play?

For the next 90 minutes, playing for Skins against Shirts, I anchored my team’s dusty midfield, spraying the ball into goalscoring positions and, almost as often, into the game next door or towards the sea.

Did I mention the goalposts? They were rocks

My appearance for Nha Trang Skins should be recorded as significant for Australian football. In my book (and this is my book) it is up there with Frank Lowy and John O’Neill’s tactical masterstroke that saw Australia accepted as a member of the Asian Football Confederation.

In a game of nicknames, my teammates decided to call me ‘Viduka’. This may have been because, in comparison to their rice, fish and football diet, I was conspicuously pudgy, sunburnt and sweaty. Or, it may have been that having worked out I was from ‘Uc’ (as Australia is called in Vietnamese), Viduka and I were, as far as my Vietnamese brothers were concerned, of the same skin.

More to the point, on a beach in Vietnam, kids knew who Mark Viduka was.

***

The genesis of the first edition of this book, published in 2000 for those who missed it, began seven years ago in France. The 1998 FIFA World Cup was, for Australia, the one that got away, a tournament we should have been at but, for 20 minutes of madness against Iran at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, we weren’t. Frank Farina told me just after his appointment as national team coach that he’d never been to a World Cup as a player and wouldn’t go as a coach or spectator until Australia qualified. Me? I couldn’t wait and I booked a ticket to Paris.

In June in 1998, I walked right across Lyon, the second-largest city in France. It was a Sunday, the 21st, a day when people from every corner of the globe seemed to have descended upon the city. Which, in truth, they had. From midday onwards, the streets had filled with people – talking, singing, dancing. Some drank beer, others water. Some ate baguettes, others cooked large feasts at impromptu carpark campsites. Loud hip-hop music intermingled with exotic, ancient guitar-like sounds as car stereo systems were pushed to their limits. Strangers who had been born and lived in different parts of the world posed together for photographs and kissed and shook hands. Police offered directions to those who were lost, while others holding riot shields and big batons stood by and laughed as a group of young men tried to link arms and dance in a circle only to succeed in falling clumsily to the ground.

These people had come to Lyon to watch a game of football. However, Iran versus USA, an ultimately insignificant match in deciding the winner of France ’98, was a game that had much more meaning than just being a football match. It was a game, thrown up by nothing more than chance, that brought together two of the most politically and culturally antagonistic nations on earth. It was a feat that no diplomatic initiative had ever achieved, or would ever be likely to, but was made possible solely by a simple game of football.

Walking through Lyon that day, I met some unusual people. People I might never normally meet. There was a man from Florida dressed as Uncle Sam. He told me his name was ‘Love 22’ and showed me his passport to prove it. He was very much looking forward to coming to Australia for the Sydney Olympics, he said. I also met a man from Iran, who hugged me when I told him I was Australian. He had been a member of the Iran squad that had played Australia in the World Cup qualifiers of 1973. He was very pleased to meet me and said he was ‘sorry for the Australian children’ that our team was not in France. Five minutes later, I spoke to a young woman who had been born in Iran but who now lived in Germany. She had come to Lyon to stand outside the football stadium and protest at the Iranian government. She said that she was against sexism, racism and fundamentalism and had come to these opinions after her parents – ‘intellectuals’– had been executed a few years earlier by the Iranian government. In light of that, I embarrassed myself by asking who might win the game that evening. ‘Two–one, Iran,’ she said, prophetically, and added that the result would make her proud. Of the possible hypocrisy in her support for the Iranian team she said, ‘I know. It is very complicated … ’

During those weeks at the 1998 World Cup I met and spoke with many more people from all over the world. Most of them laughed a lot. Several bordered on insane. Many poked fun at their own national stereotype (only the English and Germans appeared to struggle in this regard). In St Etienne there was the Mexican who wore a giant sombrero and a costume in the shape of a giant bottle of tequila. In Marseille, there was the Dutchman who wore a bright orange one-piece bathing suit and who had painted the flag of Holland on one exposed buttock and the flag of Brazil on the other. He taught me the words to a Dutch song and the dance that accompanied it. There was just the one word – ‘low’ – which was repeated over and over again to the tune of the cancan. The ‘objective’ of the dance was to get your body as close to the ground as possible without falling over.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘To be as stupid as possible, of course,’ he explained, as if I was an idiot.

In Paris, I met Elias, a Brazilian who was travelling to the matches across France on a giant tandem bicycle with his Mexican girlfriend, Concepcion. Despite the fact that the bike was ridiculously high, Elias explained that at Italia ’90 and USA ’94 he had found it a most reliable form of transport.

During France ’98, a man in Argentina shot and wounded three people in an argument with his neighbours over the national team’s performance at the tournament. Minutes earlier Argentina had beaten Jamaica 5–0. A man in Bangladesh hanged himself when Argentina later lost to Holland in the quarterfinal. (There is something about Bangladesh: when Maradona was banned from USA ’94, 20 000 people took to the streets of Dhaka and shouted that their city would be burned to the ground unless Maradona was allowed to play.) France ’98 so captivated Brazil that lost production cost the national economy an estimated US$2 billion.

When, on 12 July, France won their own World Cup by beating Brazil in the final, the president of the French Football Federation said that the subsequent scenes that night were the greatest since Liberation. ‘They were unparalleled since, well, we don’t really know when …’ wrote Le Monde the next day. Over a million people poured onto the Champs-Elysées and even more danced across the whole of France. Paris came to a standstill as streets spontaneously filled with revellers. I was one of those people and I guarantee it was a peculiar and spectacular sight. I even met three Australians outside the Stade de France in Paris: Darren, Pablo and Paul. ‘We’re here for the party,’ they had said, somewhat starry-eyed as the carnival spun around them. They all wore the gold shirts of Australia’s national soccer team. ‘Allez Brasil!’ (‘Go Brazil!’) someone shouted at them as we chatted. At first Darren, Pablo and Paul looked confused, but then it dawned on them that no one recognised they were Australian. They were deeply hurt.

***

In the introduction to his biography of Diego Maradona, Hand Of God, Jimmy Burns wrote that the past few decades had been ‘an age in which football has been transformed from a popular leisure activity into the world sport; in which footballers, their fans, and club officials are subjected to media and commercial pressure undreamt of 30 years ago’.

Australia loves sporting heroes, so naturally the Australian media frequently rushes to eulogise athletes whose achievements take place in arenas no grander than suburban parks, idolises winners of trophies where no one else turns up, and champions the feats of freakish animals. Australian soccer? Before John Aloisi’s penalty on November 16, 2005, there was rarely a mention outside of Johnny Warren, even though the sport has a long history in Australia. The first game of organised soccer in Australia took place at Parramatta in 1880, where a team known as the Wanderers played The Kings School. A thousand people turned up to watch Wanderers win 5–0. A report from the time drily suggests the school side was ‘let down by their lack of basic skills of the game, especially with their passing and kicking’.

Joe Marston, an Australian who travelled to England in the early 1950s to play as a professional, recalled that the coastal strips north and south of Sydney in the 1930s and 1940s were entrenched soccer communities. In those days, in the suburbs of the cities, local teams would play against each other in crowded stadiums. ‘All of our group was Australian-born,’ said Marston of his friends who would rush home from school to play soccer in the park until the sun went down. ‘Except for Dicky Young.’ Dicky was Chinese, explained Marston’s wife, Edith.

The first edition of The Away Game was written in a different time and place. It was published before Aloisi hit the top right corner of the net, beforeFrank Lowy decided he would return to lead the sport he loved, and before John O’Neill oversaw an administrative overhaul that ended the dark, dark, days of incompetence. That edition attempted to correct some of the journalistic oversights made by predecessors and all but a few of my contemporaries. This edition, completed after that November 16 night, continues to press for the winning goal.

The Away Game is not a conclusive history of the game in Australia. Nor is it intended as a complete biographical study of every Australian player who, for a variety of reasons, sought to play out his career in a foreign country. That would be to ignore the likes of Charlie Perkins, who discovered soccer, a game played with ‘a funny lookin’ ball’, when he saw a team training in an Adelaide park in the 1950s. Perkins ended up trialling at Everton, working on the Liverpool docks, and playing for Britain’s top amateur team before he returned to Australia and became a crusader for Aboriginal rights. Soccer people, recalled Perkins, ‘accepted me for what I was and were never paternalistic or embarrassed by my presence. I felt free …’

To call this book definitive would also betray the experiences of people such as John Kosmina, who played at Arsenal in the 1970s, and others, less known in local circles, like John Crawley, a goalkeeper who spent many almost entirely unreported years with the famous Colo Colo club in Chile. The truth is that each time an Australian boards a plane for another country, whether to trial or sign for a team, he is embarking on an adventure no less valid or remarkable than any that appear between the covers of this book. The Away Game should be seen as a snapshot; a few train rides, and a couple of tickets to some football matches. Hopefully, it also gives an insight into how kids from nondescript Australian suburbs became millionaire international superstars and why many, many others never reach such heights, yet still play for the most important reason – joy. The reader may also discover here why some things within the Australian game are as they are and why others aren’t as clear as they should be.

It’s worth noting that nearly every player approached for their perspective contributed in some way. There is only one glaring omission – Tim Cahill. Actually, Cahill did not personally turn down a request to meet in Liverpool where his club Everton is based. It was Cahill’s agent, Paul Martin from the international conglomerate SFX, who told me that Tim was ‘not overly keen in being involved’. An odd position, I thought, considering that in my last conversation with Cahill he emphasised how important World Cup qualification was for ‘the kids back home in Australia’. But then again, Cahill is represented by SFX, the company that looks after Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard, Dwight Yorke, among others, and, until a few years ago, David Beckham. This in itself is a sign of the times. Australians now have credibility and the potential to be rich sources of income for management companies.

***

On 16 November 2005, I watched 120 minutes of torture and then the penalty shootout in Montevideo, Uruguay. It’s a long story why I wasn’t in Sydney but let’s cut to the end: the waiter from our bar gave a thumbs-up as I ran back to our hotel to watch the spot kicks – he later told me he knew Australia was going to win. As Aloisi wheeled away and peeled off his shirt to whirl it above his head, my wife burst into tears. Her first reaction was to call her father in Melbourne. He could not initially be found because, the legend now says, he was running down the street embracing strangers. Darren, Pablo and Paul, those confused Aussies I’d met at France ’98, could now travel to Germany ’06 and not be mistaken for Brazilians. Australia was going to the World Cup. We’d come a long way.

I returned home to New York after Australia’s World Cup qualification, just in time for my team’s regular Friday-night kickabout that takes place in an old Manhattan car park converted into football pitches (you see, you can’t stop the world game, not even in New York). My teammates, Brazilian, Japanese, Bulgarian, even American, offered congratulations and said: ‘Welcome to the party.’

Mark Schwarzer:

And Schwarzer Saves!

‘It was one of those moments when I was in the zone,’ says Mark Schwarzer. ‘I just had a feeling.’

Let’s go through this again. The penalty shootout against Uruguay on 16 November 2005, is worth reliving. After all, the fact that it took a spot-kick lottery – itself an extension of the sudden-death play-off that Australia was already involved in – for the Socceroos to qualify for the World Cup after 32 years was the final nail in a coffin heavy with irony.

Previously … so much bad luck, bad decisions, just plain bad. Alex Tobin’s own goal against Argentina in 1993; Khodadad Azizi’s blink-and-you-miss-he’s-done-what?-you’re-kidding-me? equaliser for Iran in 1997; and, in 2001, Richard Morales’ incredible hulking haul for Uruguay that hammered the life from Frank Farina’s side in Montevideo.

So, a penalty shootout? Ah, whatever. After all those years of heartbreak, what’s ten more kicks of emotional torture? Was that a question? Let me tell you what it’s like: it makes you physically sick. If you had time to vomit between each kick, then you would. Like a car crash magnified, ten, 20, 100 times. It’s best not to look, but still you do. That’s why hands were made with gaps between fingers.

In Montevideo, as the match kick-offed in the late afternoon sun, I remember thinking: I want no entertainment. I want no action. I want no drama. I want the ball to sit in the middle of the pitch and not leave the centre circle. I want nothing to happen for 90 minutes. A perfect match. Nil-nil in Montevideo? I’ll take it.

And then in Sydney, after 210 minutes, when both teams couldn’t be separated in open play, the penalty shootout would be (and was) unwatchable yet unmissable. There are those that think that shootouts are unjust and don’t offer a fair result and are based only on luck. There are counter arguments that talking penalties is a football skill (which it is). The shootout is also test of physical and mental strength. Of nerves and steel. Of preparation and of fitness. It is a fight to the death. If this was a battle, the ammunition has run out and bayonets are drawn. A penalty shootout is personal. One-on-one. Eye-to-eye. It’s not luck.

‘It's intimidation, your presence,’ explained Schwarzer after the November 16 match. ‘I try to give the ball to each kicker personally. He has to look at me close up and I try and put him under pressure: "Listen, you've got to beat me."’

Schwarzer saves penalties for fun. He pretty much does it every day after breakfast and then again before lunch. And then, if he feels like it, he might do it again after that. In May 2005, his club, Middlesbrough, played Manchester City in the final league match of the season. With seconds left on the clock, and the game tied at 1–1, City won a penalty. This would be the last kick of the game. A win for City would see them qualify for the UEFA Cup – at Boro’s expense. Robbie Fowler stepped up and swung. Schwarzer saved.

‘He's done it, the big Aussie has done it, the greatest hero to come out of Australia since Ned Kelly!’ screamed a radio commentator.

Middlesbrough went to play in Europe the following season. The entire year swayed by one of Schwarzer’s saves.

Which is why, of all the people born in Australia, of all the people to have kicked a football and all of those who never will, on that night in November – and with apologies to Zeljko Kalac who was warming up to come on as a substitute for that shootout – Schwarzer was the one person in 20 million we would have wanted, we needed, to stand ten metres from a round ball and stop someone from South America from kicking it between two sticks.

It went like this, with sub-plots to every kick: Harry Kewell, the hometown hero, seeking redemption … goal.

Dario Rodriguez, Uruguay’s goalscorer in Montevideo, with his young son watching back in Montevideo …

‘I waited and waited and went with the kick,’ Schwarzer says. ‘Penalties are a science rather than a lottery. You read the way the player runs up to the ball and how he is just before he strikes it. You have about a second to take it all in and spit out the right answer.’

Schwarzer saves!

‘He tried to make me move early on two occasions on his run-up but I held my ground and in the end I had more patience than he did.’

Australia and Uruguay traded goals (because, by rights, penalties should be scored not saved) until Mark Viduka, the country’s captain and on his day Australia’s most talented striker, stepped up to seal an