Don’t make plans. If there’s one thing the A-League’s oldest player, Ante Covic, has learned from his long career as a footballer, it’s this. “You never know what’s around the corner,” says the goalkeeper by phone from Perth, where he’s in the early stages of his tenure with the Glory. “There are so many things that are out of your hands you just have to take the ride. That’s football.”
The Guardian approached Covic in his 20th season of professional football primarily to discuss the changing nature of goalkeeping over this time but inevitably the conversation drifted – to the evolving nature of the game home and abroad, and to the nomadic life of the footballer, one in which you need to be ready to pull up anchor when you least expect, or desire, it. And when that happens, and it will happen, to not let the disappointment and hurt derail you.
Covic, 40, has been in such a position on a number of occasions since starting his career with APIA Leichhardt in 1996. All too recently, in fact. At the conclusion of the 2011-2012 season Covic, then a popular Victory player, was let go by coach Ange Postecoglou having just won the Victory Medal (for player’s player of the year). It stung. He was happy and settled, and so was his family. But it was a blessing in disguise, proving the catalyst for a move to the Western Sydney Wanderers where he experienced the magic carpet ride that was the club’s first three seasons; a ride that culminated in him making, in the second leg of the 2014 Asian Champions League final, the save of his life to keep Saudi Arabia’s tempestuous Al Hilal at bay and help the Wanderers win the title.
But that achievement – the highlight of a career that has taken him to PAOK in Greece and Hammarby and IF Elfsborg in Sweden – was soon undermined when Tony Popovich told Covic he was no longer needed at the Wanderers. “Was I bitter? Yes,” says Covic. “I thought I’d put my blood, sweat and tears into that club, into that team. I believed in everything that club achieved and was doing. You’ve just won the MVP of the ACL and all of a sudden you’re told you’re not needed? So, yes, it was a bitter pill to swallow. But there comes a point where you have to realise that was someone else’s decision and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you let the anger eat at you the less effective you will be going forward. I knew I was good enough and I stayed positive and Perth came calling. [Perth coach] Kenny [Lowe] really motivated me to come out here and I don’t regret it.”
Covic’s crossing of the Nullarbor in order to prolong his career hasn’t come without huge sacrifice, however, and he left his wife and two primary school-aged children behind as he was tired of uprooting them. While it means he’s one of the few Perth-based athletes genuinely delighted to journey to an away game in Sydney it adds another level of difficulty to settling in. But Covic has always prided himself on his focus and mentality which, as well as good luck (“I can’t recall the last game I missed through injury”), helps explain the longevity of his career and his success as a goalkeeper.
A strong mentality, he explains, is perhaps the most important part of a goalkeeper’s skill set, and the best keepers have an aura around them which rubs off positively on team-mates and intimidates opposition strikers. “Your mental strength affects how you approach the game, how the opposition views you, how your own players view you, what sort of persona you have on the field,” Covic says. “People say to me how angry I get on the pitch, how much I yell. That’s me. Football is a mental game and I want the opposition to know I am on top of them, not the other way around.”
But mistakes happen, and every goalkeeper, he says, will go through periods where they’ve lost confidence. They flap at crosses, they’re slow off their line, they lose their near post, and their once granite gloves have all the rigidity of plasticine. “If you can’t overcome that it really eats at you and you can dig yourself a deeper hole,” Covic says, adding that he’ll never forget a few howlers of his own, like the time he completely misread the Wellington wind while playing for the Wanderers and watched in horror as a shot bent 90 degrees and trickled past him. “But it’s following a mistake when your true character comes out, and after that error I was probably the best player on the field and, importantly, Poppa [Tony Popovich] acknowledged that afterwards.”
Covic didn’t intend to be a goalkeeper. Few do. Why saddle yourself with the loneliest of football positions, one in which your mistakes are magnified and you become a convenient scapegoat for a loss? Never mind the sitters the strikers missed, mate, how’d you let that one slip through your hands?
No, growing up in Sydney’s Sans Souci, Covic played most of his junior football as a striker for Hurstville Zagreb, though he occasionally filled in between the sticks. But as a 17-year-old, playing third division for Sydney Croatia, he was asked to take on the role full-time and he discovered the position fit him like a tailored glove, suiting both his temperament and physical skills which lend themselves more to explosiveness than endurance. Indeed, his move to goalie was tougher on his parents. “My parents would come to watch all my games but whenever the ball came into the box my mother used to stress like a maniac; it’d be panic stations for her,” he says. “She’d ask me, ‘why did you have to choose goalkeeping?’. She couldn’t handle the pressure on me.”
Pressure, however – like hideous kits, and long stretches of inaction where it would be easy to let your thoughts stray to dinner, the brunette is row six and, in some cases, the meaning of life – is the goalkeepers’ lot, and it’s partly why Covic subscribes to the popular notion about goalkeepers. “A lot of people say goalkeepers are crazy and I agree. I think you need to be a little bit nuts to deal with the pressure and the scrutiny. You make a mistake, people remember. That’s why we’re a special breed, and why we goalies have a great respect for each other,” he says.
Goalkeepers, of course, also put themselves in harm’s way, and I raise the recent clash between Newcastle’s Mark Birighitti and Sydney FC striker Shane Smeltz as an example, what with Birighitti requiring 30 stitches in the mouth after getting kicked by Smeltz last month. Covic says he doesn’t believe Smeltz went into the challenge with any malice but believes he should have been punished. “I know Shane, he’s a great player and he didn’t want that to happen. But he left a foot in and caused a lot of damage. Now people say to me, ‘Well that’s the risk a goalkeeper takes. They have to put themselves on the line’. But I look at it this way; if I go to punch the ball but miss and hit a striker square in the face and break his nose, no-one will say ‘Well that’s the risk a striker takes’ and relieve me of any fault. I’d have to face the consequences. It should be the same here.”
All that said, goalkeepers are afforded a lot more protection from referees than at any time in the game’s history. It’s part of the game’s evolution. In his 20 years Covic has witnessed plenty of change, such as the death of the NSL (Covic played for Marconi in the old national competition before heading to Greece) and the rise of the A-League. As such he says he’s seen football in Australia transform from a minor sport, where it was like a “school of hard knocks”, to one which attracts big crowds and great exposure and provides for its players, giving them a decent living without them having to leave for Europe or elsewhere.
Not that he advices young players to settle for that. “Yes, the A-League can now provide a young player with a viable career but I hope it doesn’t stop our young players striving [for more]. When I started you worked hard for a shot at Europe and nothing was going to stop me getting there. I went to Greece and it was an eye opener for me. Different environment, different pressures. It almost broke me. I wasn’t getting paid in the second year and I had to go to court to get my money. People think once you’re there it’s all rosy, you’ve made it, but that’s just the first step. But I kept plugging away and then I found myself in Sweden. And those five years at Hammarby were five of the most exciting for me as a player. I absolutely loved it.”
The game, he says, has changed for the better in his two decades. Sport science has got the most out of players (“there were no GPS and heart monitors back in the day”), teams now have the ability to study their opponents in minute detail through statistics and video, and there is more tactical nuance. For the first half of his career Covic says it was all 4-4-2 – “a war of attrition” – but now the game is “more like chess”. And while possession-based football is having its day there is still room for old-school football, depending what a coach’s philosophy is, or what is called for to beat a particular opponent. “Look at the A-League. Ange [Postecoglou] started [possession-based football] at Brisbane, teams like Adelaide followed. They make 500-600 passes a game. But at the end of the day we played them a few weeks ago and they made hundreds more passes than us but we beat them 3-1. Different tactics.”
As for goalkeepers the most obvious change is their needing to be better with their feet, to find a team-mate rather than welly a ball out of danger. The amount a keeper is asked to do this still depends on the team and the coach’s style, Covic says, but when called to play out from the back he says his early years as an outfield player have made him comfortable with the ball at his feet. Covic adds that the keeper as a sweeper idea is an extension of that, Bayern’s Manuel Neuer being the poster boy for the movement.
It’s said, of course, that old dogs are beyond new tricks but Covic says the challenge of adapting and regularly updating his game keeps him fresh and piques his heightened sense of competitiveness, “to keep improving and find the methods to do so”.
As for how long he can keep it up he won’t even speculate. Something about football being a game where it’s silly to make plans.
