Socceroos reputation unfair: Arnold

Socceroos assistant coach Graham Arnold has said the reputation Australia developed many years ago, as a hard physical side, is still hurting this current squad unfairly.

Socceroos assistant coach Graham Arnold has said the reputation Australia developed many years ago, as a hard physical side, is still hurting this current squad unfairly.

While Australia more than matched it with Brazil in their clash in Munich, the official stats from the game showed that Australia committed a staggering 25 fouls to Brazil-s 9, a count that left most Australian-s very frustrated.

"We-ve got a reputation, an unfair reputation," Arnold said after the players trained, in front of over 4,000 Australian supporters at their training base in Oehringen.

"I fully agree and admit that in the mid-eighties to the early 90-s, we were a very physical side when the rules allowed it. But these days we have very technical players."

"We are not a physical side in terms of being dirty, we are physical in terms of we have got good athletes and physically fit players and I think it-s very harsh if people look at us and say we are a dirty side or a hard, physical, rough side."

"I think Brazil would be the first to admit that we are not that. We played football against them yesterday; we played good football and some of the decisions were puzzling."

"Even if you go back through the previous campaigns and if you go to the Olympics, Under 20, 17 World Cup-s, unfortunately in a certain way we are still seen as a small footballing nation and maybe we get penalised for that."

When asked how we can turn that around, Arnold said: "We should have turned that around yesterday and we should have turned that around in the past with our results. Our results speak for themselves."

So far five players will go into the match against Croatia with a yellow card hanging over their head, with any card received against Croatia earning them a suspension if they get through to the second phase. But Arnold didn-t want to get drawn into the debate about cards and wanted to make sure that we achieve our main objective and that is to qualify for the second phase.

"You can only take one game at a time. The goal for us is to get through to the second round and those yellow cards mean nothing if we don-t win on Thursday night."

"We will go into the game and play the normal game that we have to play and worry about that after the event."

Asked whether he thought the match against Croatia would be a physical confrontation, Arnold said:

"You probably can-t get two more mirrored-imaged sides in the competition, us and Croatia."

"They have got similar style players to us. Big, physically strong; got good technical players, with huge work rates and its going to be a very intriguing game. It-s going to be a 50/50 battle."

"A draw is good enough. But if you has said to me before this comp started that going in to the third game needing only a draw or win to go through I would have signed off on it straight away."

"I envisioned before the competition that it would get down to goal average in the third game or we-d have to win and now we have a 66% chance instead of 50/50."