From Con Constantine to John Kosmina, Steve McMahon to Walter Bugno, from its very inception the A-League has been dominated by big personalities and larger-than-life characters.
Clive Palmer’s travelling circus might have packed up and left the Gold Coast, cult heroes Franz Straka and Milton Rodriguez may have left these shores, but through it all, one man has endured, quietly.
With his gently lilted speaking voice, hooded eyes and earnest gaze, Ernie Merrick is one-part genial Christmas relative, one part disapproving Latin master.
He bustles with purpose when he enters a room, but refuses to become the focus of attention. Whereas Miron Bleiberg would often hold court at a press conference – “Miron may stay, Miron may go, but Miron will still be driving Mercedes” for Merrick it’s never about him.
As A-League managers have come and gone – 55 at last count – for almost the entire duration of the competition, for 10 out of the 12 seasons, the quietly spoken Scot has endured.
Nobody has won more A-League premierships, only Ange Postecoglou can boast as many championships, and no one else has won coach of the year more than once.
This season Merrick will pass 250 A-League games at the helm, almost 100 more than the league’s second longest serving coach and Wellington’s only other boss, Ricky Herbert, as well as the second most experienced active coach, Graham Arnold.
But if this comes to pass don’t expect any pomp or ceremony. And should his side feature prominently come finals he’ll gently redirect praise to the players, as he has since the competition’s beginning.
As we meet in Sydney’s beachside suburb of Coogee Merrick pauses and stirs his coffee before reflecting how the A-League has changed across his 10 seasons.
“Crowds. Facilities. And the quality of the players willing to come over and play in the A-League now,” he says.
His team has just emerged from a downstairs meeting room following a detailed session outlining the squad’s physical preparation program for preseason and beyond. Staff take the players through a raft of data – on exertion rates, nutrition plans. It’s a far cry from the infamous days of A-League players taking ice baths in Sulo bins.
“I remember when I started at Victory we had to use school facilities. For training now, they’ve got AAMI Park,” he says. “At Wellington, we’ve just finished building two sand-based pitches, they’re outfitting a new office area for us. The academy is three to four years down the track, but that’s a much bigger venture.”
As the degree of professionalism accelerates off the pitch, so too the standard on the pitch progresses. “All in all, the football’s much better; I think the coaching’s at a higher standard. I think the coaches are knowledgeable and astute at correcting a player and are willing to use tactics that are more modern.”
In comparison, a team like Perth Glory in 2005-06 prepared by McMahon around marquee Brian Deane looks antediluvian in comparison with Merrick’s Wellington of 2016-17. And that’s not even touching the low-hanging fruit that was the New Zealand Knights.
His Melbourne Victory side of 2005-06 followed the blueprint that would later form the hallmark of Merrick’s success, and whilst competitive, ultimately there was one vital piece missing.
“I like to have a key decision maker up front supported by two very quick strikers – I like to give them a lot of freedom, and not turn them into defenders.”
In Archie Thompson and Danny Allsopp, Melbourne Victory had perhaps the league’s most potent strike duo, but in players like Richard Kitzbichler, Michael Ferrante or Carl Recchia, Merrick never quite managed to find his key decision maker.
“At the Victory after the first year Geoff Lord says to me, ‘what do you need?’ I said ‘an injection of funds’.” Enter Fred, one of the first great imports of the A-League. With captain Kevin Muscat shifting from full-back to the base of the midfield, Fred was free to pull the strings – the attacking playmaker behind Thompson and Allsopp.
It was the A-League’s first really dominant team – second only perhaps to Ange Postecoglou’s almost all-conquerers (the “Near-Invincibles”) of 2010-11 – and a season that ended with Melbourne winning the first ever premiers-champions double with that most emphatic of grand final thumpings against arch rivals Adelaide.
As we discuss the growing influence of different tactical styles upon the league – Dutch, Spanish, even German – and the emergence of Asia as a major player within world football (at least, economically), Merrick offers an unprompted comparison.
“I was with the Victory team in season two when we won the grand final 6-0 – today I think that team would struggle, would be a middle-placed team. They were a great bunch of lads, it was a tremendous achievement what we did but I think the standard has just gone up and up.”
As the non-Australian club, for the Phoenix it’s often a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. Their successes are marked as aberrations, their struggles almost expected. It’s a context of low-expectation that irks the veteran coach.
When Merrick secured Wellington’s equal best finish, fourth in 2014-15 in his second season at the club, the media plaudits focused on the standout season of Nathan Burns, rather than the team structure surrounding him, or in fact that under Merrick Burns was a player reborn.
More than a fluke, this run to the finals was informed by the same basic philosophy that guided Merrick’s all-conquering Victory side; trade Allsopp and Thompson for Burns and Roy Krishna, Fred for Roly Bonevacia or Michael McGlinchey, and Muscat for Albert Riera. The cattle were different, but the attacking philosophy remained the same.
And yet, for all Merrick’s experience, there’s no refuting that last season was a horror-show for the Phoenix, an almost perfect-storm of calamity that flustered the usually unflappable Scot.
“Last season, everything seemed to go wrong from the start, really,” Merrick says. “We didn’t have training facilities for a lot of the pre-season, so we were training on a cricket pitch. We had the licence [speculation] over our heads. I signed Jeffrey Sarpong, who’d lost the motivation to play the game – that was a big mistake.”
Merrick, pauses, and shakes his head: “I’m giving you excuses, I never give excuses. It was just one of those years. If there was an injury to be had, we had it, suspension to be had, we had them. For me one of the biggest killers though was our schedule – from round four to round 17 we had three games at Westpac … we hardly trained, we were just getting on planes all the time.”
It’s a reality that will always trouble the Phoenix – not too many clubs travel 5,250km (and back) for a domestic league game as Wellington did last weekend. But with their heightened focus on conditioning and sport science, off the field you get the inkling Merrick’s staff is learning its lessons.
Having seen the club’s ups and downs over a decade, foundation player Vince Lia is well placed to judge the impact of the Phoenix’s new coach; his old coach at Melbourne Victory. “It’s a pretty fickle business if you look at coaching careers and who’s stayed and who’s gone – it’s not a great industry to be involved in but Ernie’s stood the test of time,” Lia says.
It’s a relationship of respect that cuts two ways, and is instructive of Merrick’s man management, and the culture he tries to instil at his clubs. “He is one of those coaches that signs men,” Lia explains. “He likes to sign characters, and see how they can fit into the team.”
At the Victory in season two, a wealth of midfield options saw Merrick make the call to release Lia. With just a handful of games to his name and his professional future on the line the defensive midfielder could have drifted from the A-League like so many fringe players before him.
Instead, Merrick placed a call to friend and then Wellington coach, Ricky Herbert. He’s a good lad, a good character, he’ll do a job for you, was the message.
177 A-League games later Lia never forgets the loyalty shown to him, by a coach in whose plans he no longer featured. Reunited, in turn this season Merrick has every confidence the player who’s career he helped rescue will play a key role in his side.
The successful knitting of youth with experience is a hallmark of Merrick sides – no coach has blooded more youth internationals or given chances to National Premier League players than the Scot. But if last season’s injuries led to an over-reliance on green youngsters, veteran Lia is confident of the squad’s depth for this campaign.
“Looking back at last year’s squad you always thought if we had a few injuries, we’d struggle, and it’s exactly what happened,” he says. “We lost Siggy [Ben Sigmund], we lost Roy [Krishna], we lost Dura [Andrew Durante] for parts of the season and we couldn’t cope.
“Last season when we lost Roy, they started to double up on Roly and he struggled to have an impact – but this season, how do you double up on five players?”
The recruitment of key duo Kosta Barbarouses and Gui Finkler may have made the Australian football media take notice, but more ominously than big name signings, Merrick’s trusted attacking system appears to once again have all the component parts it needs to fire.
“[Last season] was horrendous in many respects,” says Merrick. “But it will make our team stronger. If we learn the lesson than we are pushing for the top four, end of story. It will be a disaster if we don’t make the finals this year.”
Only once during our interview does Merrick interrupt. Shifting uncomfortably in his chair, in his thick Scottish drawl he interjects: “Ach, don’t talk about me, let’s talk about football.”
We don’t delve into his past. His background growing up in a large carnival family, this spirit of wandering that took him from Scottish town to town and in his early 20s to the outskirts of Melbourne. But as the interview continues fleeting moments in this journey are revealed.
“I arrived in Australia in 1975 and after one week I knew I wasn’t going back to Europe, to Scotland – and that weather. I remember my mate picking me up and driving me from the airport, and I thought ‘what are these big posts, do they play rugby here?’
“They were different posts and I had no idea what Australian rules football was. I said ‘there’s two big ones and two wee ones’ and my mate says ‘the wee ones are for encouragement.’”
As a trained PE teacher Merrick had a love for many sports – a fact that later became a strength in his coaching of football.
“Growing up, I liked all sports, I really enjoy playing basketball, volleyball – every sport. But everybody played football in Scotland, we played it in the streets, we played it in the schoolyard every minute we got, I just loved it.”
Watching “wee” Willie Henderson, and later Billy Bremner or Joe Jordan, the passion for the game so intrinsic to Scottish culture infected the younger Merrick, and the other sports fell by the wayside.
“Football was the game, and we used to qualify for the World Cup – it was just great to see us beat England every year, until we got banned for hooliganism. Scotland was pretty good at that too.”
After an undistinguished playing career – “I was pretty rubbish” Merrick reports – the Scot began his badges during the 1970s while playing in Melbourne’s suburban south east.
“I couldn’t wait to get on the field as the assistant coach at Doveton soccer club, and show all my fellow coaches how much I knew. I was just showing off, just trying to tell ‘em everything I knew, and the best thing about Doveton soccer club is there was no plastic people, so they just put me in my place.”
Chastened, Merrick got his break in the National Soccer League, first with Preston Makedonia and then with Sunshine George Cross. And “having made every mistake you can make in coaching” by the early 90s Merrick figured his time in the game was up.
“After I was sacked from my second NSL club I imagined I’d never be involved in football again. I thought ‘I’ve had enough, I’ll go and do something else’ – until the Victorian Institute of Sport came along; and that changed my view of everything.”
Juggling full-time employment as a PE teacher with a part-time role at the VIS, for the first time Merrick saw a pathway towards being a professional football coach.
With his interests in other sports – at one stage Merrick even undertook an AFL coaching course to learn how the game could inform the code he loved – the Scotsman was able to rub shoulders with some of the world’s best coaches, from rugby, from AFL, from netball – anything that might expand his horizons.
Over 13 years Merrick continued to re-imagine himself as a student of the game; willing to sit at the feet of anyone who could teach him new insights, new philosophies.
When Merrick signed Grant Brebner for Victory in 2006 it was as much for his talents as a player, as the insights and winning mentality he’d developed over five years as an apprentice at Manchester United under Alex Ferguson.
“I spoke to Grant Brebner about Alex Ferguson … and he said everybody knows him as a hard man and all the rest of it but he’s a person who was very very good with the players. We as coaches, we don’t really coach skills – we coach people.”
During the A-League’s lengthy off-seasons Merrick continues to undergo football sabbaticals. With former Wellington goalkeeping coach Jonathan Gould now with West Bromwich Albion the ‘Nix boss recently enjoyed a fruitful stint learning about the Premier League club’s backroom operations.
As we digress onto his recent dissertation into Jürgen Klopp’s “unusual” back-four tactical formation (“very attacking, yet very solid at the back”) it’s clear the veteran Merrick has lost no hunger for new knowledge, new insights.
Despite his longevity in the game, there’s no hint of tiredness in Merrick. In fact, after last season’s disappointment you get the lingering feeling the 63-year-old still has a point to prove.
“The scary thought is, I haven’t peaked yet,” Merrick laughs softly. “After 30 years, I still feel I’m getting better.”
.png?w=600)
