AFTER years wandering around the edges of the game, Australia's football coaches are being called back to the dugout. While the sentiment has long been expressed, the stats now prove it to be a reality.
With the appointment of John Kosmina at Adelaide United, it marks a return to something that has only intermittently been the case in the A-League: local managers outnumbering the imports.
Misguided notions of foreign coaches being better than locals, regardless of track record, certainly held sway in the competition's early days. Of the 12 clubs that have existed over the journey, only two have begun life with a local coach. None of the three expansion clubs has ever employed a locally raised coach.
When the A-League began, seven of the eight head coaching positions were held by foreign-raised coaches. Just one club had a local coach - Kosmina at Adelaide. He flew the local flag well, taking the Reds to the minor premiership in season one and a grand final in season two.
Now the landscape is immeasurably different. Kosmina is joined by Mehmet Durakovic at Melbourne Victory, Graham Arnold at Central Coast, Gary van Egmond at Newcastle and Ange Postecoglou at Brisbane. In the shape of Ricki Herbert, Wellington Phoenix have a local coach of their own, who doubles as the national team boss.
It's not the first time where there's been more locals than foreigners but it is the first time the locals have felt like they are no longer second-class citizens.
What's worth noting is that all of the aforementioned local coaches have represented Australia, or in the case of Herbert, New Zealand. Our Socceroos of the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes renowned as much for their elbows as their feet, clearly had a brain up there, too.
Yet of the four coaches defined in this discussion as foreigners, Gold Coast's Miron Bleiberg has been in Australia since 1985 and Perth Glory's Ian Ferguson has been here a decade. Neither have coached anywhere else.
Branko Culina made headlines in 2009 for comments made after his side, Newcastle, outplayed Sydney FC but lost. On that occasion, Culina famously said: ''I don't care what their coach [Czech Vitezslav Lavicka] says and the fact that he's on $500,000 and I'm on 50 bucks. If that's what foreigners are going to bring to this game then let's have more local coaches.''
Culina toned down those statements but he sparked an overdue conversation. ''Those comments weren't meant to be disrespectful to the foreign coaches but it's just that I was, and still am, a firm believer that local coaches were a hell of a lot better than they were given credit for,'' Culina said yesterday.
''And maybe 20 to 30 years ago, foreign coaches were better and maybe, at the time, that perception of them being superior coaches was justified. But it doesn't stack up any more. I'm all for foreign coaches and players coming to Australia, but only if they are vastly superior to what we have here.''
Culina says the change can only help the A-League as a competition. ''The past two, three years has seen the arrival of some fantastic Australian coaches, of all ages, and they're finally getting the credit they deserve,'' he said. ''Local coaches have things to offer that maybe people didn't realise. Many of us have invested a lot of time and money into our coaching education and we've had to fight a lot harder to prove themselves.''
Some of the credit must go to FFA technical director Han Berger, who enforced minimum qualification standards for A-League coaches.
''I started here three years ago, when there was five coaches with only a B-licence. Where I come from [the Netherlands], you can't even be an assistant coach with that,'' he said. ''In every professional league in the world, a head coach requires a pro-diploma, so one of the first things I did was change the rules to reflect that, and I organised classes so those five coaches could be upgraded to an A-licence.''
Now Australia is the only country in Asia apart from Japan to have a structured local pathway that sees coaches able to gain every possible level of qualification.
It's not just domestically that Australian coaches are finding respect. In recent months, Chinese club Chongqing Lifan has hired Lawrie McKinna while Ernie Merrick was appointed as coach of Hong Kong. They're not defined as Australian-raised, but collectively, they've spent 61 years here. Postecoglou has been repeatedly linked with the biggest job in Asian club football, Urawa Red Diamonds. Over in Europe, Tony Popovic was regarded highly enough by Dougie Freedman to make him his assistant at Crystal Palace.
It's taken some time, but no longer are Australians considered the neanderthals of the touchline.
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