Arnold not to blame for Socceroos’ Asian Cup exit, says FA’s top technical chief

Football Australia’s top technical advisor has taken aim at critics of Graham Arnold and the Socceroos’ style of play, saying the coach should be better appreciated for extracting what he has from the limited talent pool available to him.

Arnold will on Thursday name a 25-player squad for Australia’s upcoming World Cup qualifiers against Lebanon – their first matches since their heartbreaking exit from the quarter-finals of the Asian Cup, when they surrendered a one-goal lead deep in injury time to lose 2-1 to South Korea and their superstar captain Son Heung-min.

While that game was comfortably the Socceroos’ best performance at the tournament, Arnold bristled at earlier questions about their group-stage displays after struggling to break down teams that packed numbers into their defensive box – an echo of the same criticisms he faced for his coaching at the 2019 Asian Cup, when they also crashed out in the quarter-finals, as well as during the fraught qualification campaign for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Question marks about the team’s lack of creativity in attack will be partly addressed by the welcome return of Ajdin Hrustic, who was not selected for the Asian Cup due to his lack of game time at Italian Serie A side Hellas Verona. Hrustic, 27, has not played for Australia in almost a year but has steered his club career back on track after last month joining Dutch relegation battlers Heracles Almelo, where he has become a regular starter.

Meanwhile, two of Arnold’s regular starters, left-back Aziz Behich (injury) and midfielder Aiden O’Neill (suspension), will miss out on this window, in which the Socceroos will face Lebanon in Sydney next Thursday night and then in Canberra the following Tuesday. Two wins would book Australia’s place in the next round of World Cup qualification, where the top two teams in their group will go directly to the 2026 tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Unlike predecessor Ange Postecoglou, who has a much more dogmatic approach towards attacking football, Arnold has long maintained the Socceroos’ style of play is almost entirely dependent on the qualities and attributes of the players who are eligible for selection – and it is here where Ernie Merrick, Football Australia’s chief football officer, believes Arnold is actually being “let down” by the system.

A former A-League championship winner with Melbourne Victory and an old coaching rival of Arnold, Merrick was appointed to the key technical role in mid-2022, partly to address concerns regarding Australia’s overall footballing direction and player development pathways after the Socceroos’ failure to secure direct qualification to the World Cup and the Matildas’ quarter-final capitulation at the last Asian Cup.

“I think Graham Arnold has done a marvellous job considering the quality of players we have,” Merrick told this masthead.

“And they’re good players – we just don’t have players playing at the top level in many countries now. He really is struggling to find players that are good enough to come into the squad.”

Were it not for Hibernian defender Lewis Miller’s careless late foul on Son, which conceded a 96th-minute penalty and enabled South Korea to take the quarter-final into extra time, Merrick believes the Socceroos would have gone all the way and won the Asian Cup decider.

“The player [Miller] that gave away the penalty, when is he going to get experience of playing at that level? Because he’s playing in Scotland, which is a fair bit below that level, and he fouled one of the best strikers in the world,” Merrick said.

“So we’ve got to keep it in context. [Arnold has] devised a system to make the most of what he’s got. He does get players forward on the counter – I know it’s on the counter, but he gets players forward, and he presses high, which are both risky, but he does it to create chances, and it’s worked for him so well.

“I take my hat off to him. I really never thought he would do so well in the World Cup. And to be honest, I really think he’s an exceptional coach. We’re very lucky to have him.”

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Merrick pointed to Arnold’s exceptional Sydney FC team as proof that he could foster a more attacking brand of football if he had the “right” players – and said producing them was FA’s responsibility, not his.

To address it, Merrick and FA are preparing to unveil a new 10-year technical plan, which includes an overhaul of Australia’s youth development systems, and will have the aim of turning the Socceroos into a top-10 team in FIFA’s world rankings and lifting the Matildas into the top five.

“When [Arnold] gets better players – and it’s my job, because we have let them down,” Merrick said. “We haven’t produced the strikers that he needs. It’s high on my list, that we’ll have coaches that know about strikers, how to develop them, and give them a lot more creativity going forward.”