FOUR NATIONS' TOURNAMENT SHOWS VARIANCE IN SOCCER INFLUENCE

By Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle

As the story goes, Vonnie Gros, head coach of the U.S. women's national team during the 1970s, turned to the Philadelphia Atoms of the North American Soccer League for inspiration as to how to best deploy her players.

It was apparently not the first time a field hockey coach has turned to a soccer coach for inspiration -- and it certainly won't be the last.

During the March to Madrid, at a four-nations tournament in the United States in the late summer of 2006, you could assign characteristics common to both the men's soccer and women's field hockey teams of the participants. The casual fan would discuss the four nations in similar adjectives: the useful, enterprising Americans; the skillful, interchanging Dutch; the passionate, good-at-finishing Argentines; and the fit, team-oriented Australians.

The relative histories of field hockey and soccer in each country play a role in these characteristics. Australia's hockey history, for example, was enhanced by emigres from the Indian subcontinent.

"They brought a very skillful, finessed game, and we had the hard, sandy grounds from which we have moved to the synthetic surfaces," says Hockeyroos head coach Frank Murray, who has been coaching internationally since 1989. "That enabled skill to be part of it, plus fitness and the Australian personality of an aggressive, risk-taking style."

It is the kind of style which produced Hockeyroo gold in Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 and got the men's soccer team, the Socceroos, into the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

But while there are similarities on the pitch, there are significant differences in terms of the methods used to assemble and develop talent.

"With the soccer, they all play professionally in Europe," Murray says. "(Socceroos head coach) Guus Hiddink can get them for a month or six weeks and get them ready. We can learn from their formations and structure, but we have our own approach. We can play up to 60 internationals a year, so we have the girls together quite a bit."

Holland, on the other hand, has had a lot of exchanges of information between the national governing bodies of hockey and voetbal. Years of European hockey history has been based on borrowing football tactics, and vice versa.

It is not surprising, for example, that the introduction of Holland's Total Football style of play in the early 1970s coincided with the start of Holland's domination of Women's World Cup competitions. The Dutch won six of the first eight Women's World Cups.

"We have a lot of contact with the head coaches of other sports in Holland; not just soccer, but all of the sports," says Oranje technical director Marc Lammers. "We're always trying new things and we can learn from other sports."

Argentina's head man, Gabriel Minadeo, agrees.

"Argentina's hockey, soccer, and rugby have a lot of ability and skill, but what they all have is the passion," he says. "If your skills are absent, your passion can compensate for that."

The Leonas did not have all of its players from their 2002 World Cup-winning side, but certainly had the amazing individual skills of Luciana Aymar and Soledad Garcia. Garcia not only had perhaps the single hardest shot of any of the players, but had a sequence in their match against Holland when she flipped the ball in the air and softly balanced the ball on the flat of her stick like an Irish camogie player.

These skills are reminiscent of a Kempes, a Maradona, a Batistuta, a Riquelme.

"These women," Minadeo says, "are stars in Argentina, and they get recognized on the streets."

Lee Bodimeade, on the other hand, has had a herculean task on his hands coaching the women's hockey team of the United States. That is because the history of tradition of men's soccer in America is much less than is found in most other hockey-playing nations, and the temptation of borrowing from the two-time World Cup winning women's soccer teams is quite high.

But what has happened is that this Australian emigre has turned what had been a defensive, counterattacking, almost stilted side into a fluid unit that takes the initiative. It would appear, given the fact that the Americans scored the first goal in each of its first three March to Madrid matches, that the team adopted the Bruce Arena philosophy of "first tackle, first shot, first foul, first goal." But Bodimeade says that everything about the team is a "hockey first" philosophy.

"We don't have a huge soccer influence in Australia, so right away, we were breaking mindsets in our attacking and defensive patterns," Bodimeade says. "We wanted to get them to conform to the ideals I'd like to approach, while embracing an American style of playing. I think that broke down a lot of the though processes of the players -- that, and having a team that started out with 14 first-time international players. They didn't have too much in-built in the way of bad habits."

Indeed, the American team looked much less like one which trained under systems based on soccer, such as staying in a a "lane" or an area of the field, or always firing crosses from deep on the right wing.

"What we like to do is give them the freedom to play," Bodimeade says.