Phil Moss survives sack to burnish golden crop of Australian coaches
Phil Moss was prepared for the sack before he was ever appointed a head coach. “I’ll never forget the first day of my A Licence,” he recalls. “The instructor wrote on the whiteboard: ‘There’s only one sure thing about professional coaching, and that is you will get sacked’.”
That sure thing happened to Moss in February 2015, just over a year after taking charge of Central Coast Mariners. Based purely on results – three wins in 19 games during Moss’s second season at the helm - it was an uncontroversial dismissal. “At the end of the day it’s on my head. I’m the head coach, I’m responsible for that,” he accepts. “But people need to understand there is a backstory to the performance of every team, and it’s not just the coach.”
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This particular backstory included a complicated working relationship with the club’s hierarchy. “I was asked to set up for a rugby lineout at a corner,” Moss explains. “That was designed to create headlines and get the Mariners brand viral. But it was never going to happen. In my mind it was playing with a coach’s career and asking the players on the pitch to do something not within the spirit of the game. For me that was a bit of a sign of the tide turning.”
Such backstories rarely make the backpages. Even when they see the light of day they rarely divert the buck from stopping at the manager. In print, online, or in the stands, we cling to wins and losses like drunks grasping at lampposts.
This A-League campaign is only two-thirds old but already almost a third of coaches who occupied dugouts in round one have been relieved of their duties. Six of the 11 clubs appointed new coaches during the preseason. A job for life it is not.
The man in the club tie just has to grin and bear it. “You don’t go into coaching unless you’ve got thick skin,” Moss says. “But any coach who says that criticism doesn’t affect them is probably telling porkies. Every coach is a human being first and a coach second, and everyone’s got feelings. It can be a very lonely place, because you’re leading 23 players, 10 to 15 staff, the boardroom, the volunteers, everyone is relying on you to put a team out on the weekend to win a game.”
But Moss didn’t win enough games on enough weekends. His office was vacant soon after a goalless draw in the F3 derby. “You don’t really get an opportunity to say goodbye.”
Nor were there many opportunities to reach out for support. In Gosford, Moss had to be a leader. “But to be a leader - and let’s scrap the term coach, because you’re a leader,” he asserts, “you have to roll your sleeves up when times are tough.”
Contemporaries who could empathise were necessarily out of reach. “It’s an easier conversation when it’s someone you’re not coaching against,” Moss states. But Graham Arnold was always on the end of the phone when required, as were others who had experienced the sharp end of the business. “I was lucky to have people like Ron Smith and Aurelio Vidmar around. It’s really important to have an impartial support network as a coach.”
Moss is acutely aware not everyone in his position is so fortunate, and the urge to provide that external support network helped crystallise the formation of Football Coaches Australia. “That was the key pillar around why FCA had to be formed,” says Moss, the organisation’s founding president.
“If you look at the ecosystem of coaching in Australia, FFA runs the courses, but after those and even between them, there’s no ongoing wellbeing programs or professional development - apart from the next course. That’s why we’re so determined to work with FFA to get coaches through their qualifications and then continued professional development and ongoing mental and physical wellbeing support.”
Open to all coaches at C Licence or above, FCA is “driving professional standards for coaches, standardised conditions, making sure there’s a standardised grievance procedure and standardised contracts” so coaches everywhere are protected. They’re also developing a hall of fame event to celebrate the contributions of previous generations of coaches.
It is a timely companion organisation to a golden crop of Australian managers. Ange Postecoglou continues to raise the bar, Joe Montemurro is garnering acclaim in Europe, while closer to home the likes of Steve Corica, Tony Popovic, Mark Rudan and Ufuk Talay have all demonstrated there is no shortage of talent.
The mobilisation of coaches, alongside that of the players, professional referees and a host of other specific interest groups within the Australian game, has added depth to an urgent conversation. As football in Australia figures out its next chapter under the leadership of newly installed chief executive James Johnson, it benefits from stories like Moss’s being told, and voices like his being heard. “It’s not what he [Johnson] can do for the game,” Moss offers sagely, “it’s what we can do for him. If we don’t unite, and if we don’t row the same boat up the same stream, a CEO will just come and go. It’s time for everyone to band together and move the game in the right direction.”
Phil Moss knew he was going to be sacked one day. He turned it into a day that could have a lasting, positive effect on football in Australia.
