Legacy: The Autobiography of Tim Cahill. Tim Cahill

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ