Young guns make their mark and allow Socceroos to glimpse bright future

D espite him being barely 30 minutes into his senior international career, nobody can accuse newly minted Socceroo Alex Robertson of showing a lack of ambition for the future. Indeed, it would be difficult for him to be showing any more. “You’ve got to reach for the stars and win a World Cup,” he told reporters after Australia’s 3-1 win over Ecuador on Friday. “You never know what’s going to happen. You see what [Australia’s] just done at the last one and for the next few years, building up to [2026] I think we can do some really big things in the future. I mean, why not say it?”

Now bombastic declarations, commitments to future success, and an almost fanatically unwavering sense of self-belief aren’t exactly a new phenomenon for this Australian team. Graham Arnold is back for another four-year cycle, and once again declaring his belief that these coming years will give rise to the greatest Socceroos team of all time. But to hear such a statement from a 19-year-old with less than 45 international minutes under his belt, for a nation that’s progression to the last 16 at the World Cup was considered a bit of a miracle, is still striking.

In most circumstances, you’d call it brash. But if you’re training week-in and week-out under Pep Guardiola as Robertson is at Manchester City, to say nothing of rubbing shoulders with players such as Kevin De Bryne, Bernardo Silva, and İlkay Gündoğan, then a few things are going to rub off on you. Things such as an all-encompassing focus on winning and a special kind of belief in one’s abilities to take whatever adverse circumstances are placed in front of you and replace it with a more acceptable reality. The kind of mental acuity that only the elite of the elite possesses.

Time will