The Socceroos have found a new way to compete with the world’s best

Across 30 years of coaching some of the greatest players and teams the world has ever seen, and having lifted practically every trophy worth winning, there’s not a lot left in soccer that surprises Carlo Ancelotti.

Tony Popovic’s Socceroos, apparently, just did.

“They played differently today,” the Brazil coach said after Tuesday night’s 4-2 result in Brisbane, having detected a clear stylistic shift from Australia since their World Cup campaign a few months ago.

“Honestly, I have to say they pressed really well, with high intensity. They are really well-organised, and they surprised us in this sense ... they put much more pressure in front, and we had more difficulty to build up from the back.

“It’s a really good team, in my opinion, a really good team. I have to say, in modern football there are no easy teams. They are all strong. Maybe you don’t have the quality that we have, but they are really powerful players, well-organised, strong in the duels.

“So: a really good national team.”

These were not empty platitudes from Ancelotti, but external confirmation that what you saw with your own eyes was real.

For long periods, Australia were Brazil’s equal – and not because they were physically aggressive, which they were, but because they dared to play. And while it didn’t deliver a result, the contrast with the way they played at the World Cup was stark, and what it suggests about the future of this team, with January’s Asian Cup on the horizon, is thrilling – especially with the injured Jordan Bos, Mohamed Toure and Cristian Volpato still to come.

This window might be remembered one day as the moment in which this exciting new generation of Socceroos took a great leap forward.

So, was this a planned post-World Cup tactical evolution from Popovic? Or are his players now more able to execute what he has been asking them to do, as he has been saying all week?

Popovic seemed curiously unimpressed by that obvious question, offering a short and terse response, as if he had no time for its premise.

“It’s probably more them than me,” he said.

“I think that’s a good answer. Yeah, let’s leave it that: it’s more the players than me.”

Well, the players reckon it’s a lot more him than he was letting on.

“We got told to play like that,” said defender Alessandro Circati, one of Australia’s best at Suncorp Stadium.

“So from that end, it comes from him – but then we’re the ones playing, so then that’s us. But the guidance, the things that we were told to do, ultimately comes from him, and then we’ve got to apply it on the field.”

The Socceroos are often competitive against top-tier nations. But as midfielder Jackson Irvine noted, they are not often competitive in this particular way: by playing through trouble, instead of belting it long, and by pressing forward aggressively rather than sitting back in numbers and absorbing pressure.

At times, they looked more like Brazil than Brazil.

“Obviously, it’s by design. It’s not luck, it’s not chance, it’s not random. This is things that we’ve worked on in the last few days, images we’ve seen, and it’s been a process to build to this. And so it’s not a surprise,” Irvine said.

“But yeah, of course, there are some moments when we’re playing football ... where you think, wow, we look a real threat here.

“You can see the confidence build in players. Their desire to make runs, to make forward passes ... and I think that’s really exciting to see, that we have added that to our game. We still run and defend and have that part of our game, which is a non-negotiable. It has to be there. But the ability to desire to run, to get on the ball, to break pressure, to get yourself free, fantastic.”

That the Socceroos did this after recovering from an early onslaught from Brazil, which left them 1-0 down, amplified everything. They could have “crumbled”, as Irvine said, but they did not, reflective of a newfound resilience.

“We played our way out of that pressure,” he said. “We managed to get the ball on the ground, break the press a couple of times and then build our way into the game.”

The crowd of 52,423, a record for soccer in Brisbane, lapped it all up, and the players could sense their appreciation for what they were seeing.

“At the World Cup, we showcased ourselves, and now they’ve started to realise, ‘You know what? They’re half-decent. They can kick a ball around’,” Circati said.”I’m very happy to have a full stadium because the games we played in Melbourne and Sydney [in March] … it was like 10 per cent full. It was like playing in my backyard.”

Of course, exciting as this all is, these Socceroos are far from the finished product, and the second-half fadeout showed what they need to improve next.

Popovic deliberately fielded the same starting XI from Townsville on Friday night to see whether they were capable of backing up four days later against high-calibre opposition – something that he said they were “nowhere near” ready to do, physically or mentally, at the World Cup. They are not there yet, and Nestory Irankunda’s silly foul on Vinicius jnrto give away the penalty for Brazil’s fourth goal was an example of how decision-making frays under fatigue.

Truly elite players, Popovic said, have the endurance to be able to make decisive actions after the 80th minute in games.

“That will be a really big step for us,” he said.

”Will that happen in four years? I hope so. If not, I’m sure in the second cycle after that, if the players can stay fit and play at a high level, maybe we will have situations like Norway where a striker [Erling Haaland] doesn’t touch a ball for 80 minutes and then touches it twice and scores two goals – but it’s the player that started the match, it’s not a player that came on.“

In the immediate term, there is a different challenge to confront. In Asia, they will not be the underdogs. Opponents will be content to let Australia have the ball and ask them to find a way through, requiring a different mentality – one that previous Socceroos teams have sometimes struggled to grasp, but Irvine reckons this one is ready to embrace.

“The football that we’ve been playing, we’re capable of doing it in every phase … whether teams want to come out and press us high, or if we are going to be more dominant and have the ball in the opponent’s half, we’ve shown that we can create chances that way, too,” he said.

“It will be a different mentality, but the players are more than capable of handling it.”

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