By his own admission, Mark Jackson is usually a terrible gift-giver. But last Christmas, which he spent apart from his family back in England, he happened upon the perfect present for his assistant, Danny Schofield, who accompanied him on his A-League coaching adventure. It was a world map printed onto a corkboard.“I said, ‘There you go, we can see where we visit this year.
A few months ago, during the group stage, Jackson remembers one of his friends back home asking on the phone: “So who’ve you got next?”“Getting off the plane, and seeing the environment ... a few members of staff at the front of the bus, particularly me and Danny, we kind of sat there with open eyes, looking at the traffic and the mopeds flying about and the craziness of that,” he said.
The Mariners lifted the A-League Premiership on Wednesday night – the first trophy in their bid for a historic Australian treble.It got hairy in Terengganu, Malaysia, when football director Matt Simon and team manager Darren Dobson were going for a late night walk searching for a convenience store when the latter – head down, following the map on his phone – stumbled into an open-air drain pit along the side of the street and fell into a four-metre deep pool of mud and slush.
Stranded in Bishkek for two extra days, they made the most of it and asked their local fixers to arrange a bus so they could explore the mountains. Some players saw snow for the first time. For an Englishman like Jackson, snow is old hat, but as a coach, all that time on the road together, in hotels and departure lounges across Malaysia, Indonesia, India, the Philippines and Kyrgyzstan, has been invaluable from a bonding perspective.
But the AFC Cup always looked winnable on paper for an Aussie team, given they would only play against clubs from lesser-regarded Asian nations – and so it has proved for the Mariners. In any case, this tournament will cease to exist after the final, to be replaced next season by the creatively named “AFC Champions League 2” as part of reforms designed to improve elite club football in Asia.
Peil would have been happy to take the hit because it would have been money spent on the same thing he got into football to do in the first place: help players get better. And that brings us to the truly special part of the Mariners’ journey.Jason Cummings, Sam Silvera, Nectar Triantis, Marco Tilio and Beni NkololoThey lost their first four games of the A-League season, which amounted to their worst-ever start, and fans were calling for Jackson’s head.