Sydney, June 4 (DPA) Australian goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer is not alone in spending an inordinate amount of time with the controversial Jabulani World Cup football.
Australian coach Pim Verbeek said Friday that the flighty sphere had forced all the 23-man squad back into basic training to make sure passes are centimetre-perfect for the tournament, which begins June 11.
‘We’ve started with a simple passing drill so every ball must be 100-per-cent good,’ the Dutchman told Australia’s AAP news agency from the team’s training grounds in South Africa. ‘In this climate, it’s impossible to play a ball half a metre not in the right place because the ball never stops. The ball keeps on going. We have to adjust to it.’
Brazilian Julio Cesar, England’s David James and Spain’s Iker Casillas have led a goalkeeper backlash against the ball, which maker Adidas AG claims ‘offers maximum control and perfect grip’.
Because it is welded together, the Jabulani has fewer seams and is closer to a perfect sphere than earlier World Cup offerings.
Verbeek said it was the combination of the Jabulani and the high altitude at the team’s training grounds outside Johannesburg, which sits 1,750 metres above sea level, that had prompted him to go back to basic training techniques.
‘It’s difficult to explain if you’re not on the field, if you don’t touch the ball yourself,’ he said. ‘A normal curling ball is impossible in altitude. The ball is not making the normal curl – that’s very strange. To play a curling ball, you need air resistance, [but] there is no air resistance here.’
Oddly enough, the coach said veterans were having more trouble with the Jabulani than younger players.
‘Older players who’ve played already a long time the same way, they will probably have more problems with it than younger players, who don’t have that already in their minds,’ Verbeek said.
For neighbours and eternal rivals New Zealand, there is the same divide, with goalies aghast at the ball and strikers in delirium.
Striker Rory Fallon said he hit a shot straight at reserve goalkeeper James Bannatyne and it moved and went around, leaving him gobsmacked.
He reckoned Shane Smeltz’s winning goal in the warm-up against Serbia had a lot to do with the mercurial Jabulani – a view endorsed by Serbian goalkeeper Vladimir Stojkovic.
‘It’s a catastrophe,’ Stojkovic was reported as saying. ‘I played with many different balls, some of which wiggled or changed directions, but this one is the worst of them all.’
