Exclusive Interview: Scott O'Donnel - Cambodia's Australian Coach Aiming High

One of Australia's football pioneers talks to Goal.com...

28 Jul 2009 02:26:34

Photo Gallery, Zoom

Scott O'Donell, coach of Cambodia's national team

As you would expect from a nation ranked 176th in the world, Cambodia are not one of south-east Asia’s giants, never mind the continent as a whole.

It could have been different, however. The nation was one of the region’s top dogs four decades ago, but the Khmer Rouge period of rule in the mid-1970s not only devastated the country, it also almost wiped football off the map.

The beautiful game in the beautiful country is still recovering, and Scott O’Donnel, the man at the helm of the national team, is doing his bit.

In 2005, after stints elsewhere in the region, he took the Cambodia job, becoming the first Australian to coach a non-Socceroo national team. He left at the end of 2007 after the federation could no longer afford to pay him.

Now he is back and he found time to answer Goal.com’s questions.

How did you end up in Cambodia?

I was offered the job just after I had resigned from my position as head coach at Geylang United, in Singapore, in 2005.

I had some contact with people at the Football Federation of Cambodia (FFC), because I had travelled up there quite often while my wife Margaret and I were adopting our two daughters, Emma and Ellie, back in 1998 and 1999.

When you got the job, what was the target for the team?

I wasn't set any targets for the team but my personal target was to try and bring some respectability back to the team after they had suffered some fairly big losses in the past.

Football in Cambodia obviously suffered because of other events in the country’s recent history, but just how much did this set football back?

It has obviously had a huge impact when it comes to the development of the game here. The lack of a proper youth structure, limited opportunities for kids to play, lack of qualified coaches, the lack of finances, etc. have all contributed.

Are there other reasons why Cambodia has never been a football power?

I believe the national team in the late 1960s was a very good team, one of the strongest teams in SE Asia, but obviously with the events that followed in the country, football was no longer a priority.

What needs to be done to make Cambodia competitive?

I think the priority should be youth development and it is something the FFC is currently working hard at. The second FIFA Goal project will go a long way in helping to provide better training facilities for the players.

The FFC has just conducted an AFC C Certificate Course here and has plans for another one later in the year. Coach education is vitally important as we need the young players to be taught the correct things at a young age.

A strong national league is also vitally important. At present we have a ten-team league and I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised at the improvement in the quality of the league this year. It is much more competitive than in recent years.

Can Cambodia ever become a regional powerhouse?

It is going to be difficult to catch up with the likes of Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, but with proper structures in place, there is no reason why we cannot become more competitive.

What’s the best and worst thing about your job and the country?
The best thing is getting the opportunity to work with boys who are enthusiastic and keen to learn. I don’t want to focus on negatives.

What is your highlight and lowlight as Cambodian coach?

The highlight was probably our 1-0 loss to Turkmenistan at home in the World Cup qualifiers in 2007. I know it sounds strange to say a highlight was losing, but that game was the best I had seen the boys play. Our 'keeper didn’t make a save until 75th minute. I was extremely proud of the boys.

The lowlight was a couple of months later when we were beaten 8-0 by Thailand in the SEA Games. We conceded some very soft goals after our first choice 'keeper was injured, and never recovered.

What kind of players are Cambodian players?

Cambodian players are similar to those in the region: relatively small in stature, quite quick, very attentive and eager to learn and improve.

Is the nation a football-loving one?

They love football here. They are always watching the big European games on TV and if you visit the Olympic Stadium any morning or afternoon, you will see hundreds of kids playing football, bare footed, on concrete outside the stadium.

Why did you leave and then return in 2009?

My contract ended at the end of 2007 and the sponsor who was paying my salary decided not to continue. I moved to AFC, where I was the director of coach education, which I enjoyed very much.

It was a great opportunity professionally, but my family stayed in Cambodia. So for personal reasons I resigned from AFC earlier this year and returned to Cambodia to be with my family.

I did not return to coach the national team again. I was still doing television work in Singapore as well as conducting courses for FIFA, but when the president of FCC, Lt. General Sao Sok ha, called me one day to offer me the job, I accepted.

What is your goal in Cambodia?

My immediate goal is to select the national U-23 squad for the upcoming SEA Games in Laos in December. I have also been asked to start preparing the national U-21 team to compete in the domestic Cambodian Premier League (CPL) next season. It is a project that I am very much looking forward to.

Would you want to coach in Australia? Has this ever been a possibility?

I would be very interested in working back in Australia. The rest of my family are back there and would jump at the chance, but opportunities are limited and it would have to be the right thing for my kids re: schooling etc.

But there are many experienced coaches in Australia who are out of work. Who knows? But with the A-League expanding there may be opportunities in the future.

Would you like to work elsewhere in SE Asia?

My family and I really enjoy SE Asia. We have lived in Malaysia, Singapore and now Cambodia. Obviously it will depend on what is good for my family, but yes, I am keen explore and work in other parts of Asia, not just SE Asia.

John Duerden

Asia Editor

john.duerden@goal.com

Japan executes three inmates: justice ministry

AFP – Chart on the number of executions in Japan since 2003(AFP/null)

TOKYO (AFP) – Japan on Tuesday hanged three inmates convicted of multiple murders, including a Chinese man and another man who found his victims through an Internet suicide site, officials said.

"Executions were carried out today on three inmates who had been sentenced to death," the justice ministry said in a statement.

It identified the convicts as two Japanese men -- Hiroshi Maeue, 40, and Yukio Yamaji, 25 -- and Chinese national Chen Detong, 41, who had killed three of his compatriots and wounded three more Chinese people.

Maeue, executed in Osaka, killed three people in 2005 after he got to know them separately through an Internet website where people contemplating suicide go to meet others thinking also of ending their lives.

Maeue arranged to meet them with the idea of a joint suicide, and then choked them to death. He confessed to deriving sexual pleasure by seeing people suffocate.

Yamaji, also executed in Osaka, raped and then stabbed to death two sisters, stole their money and set fire to their apartment in 2005.

Chen, the Chinese national, was executed in Tokyo for killing three of his compatriots and injuring three more in Kawasaki, southwest of Tokyo, in 1999.

Japan is the only major industrial nation other than the United States to apply the death penalty. Japan's last executions were in January when four convicted murderers were hanged.

The death penalty is overwhelmingly supported by the public in Japan, which has one of the world's lowest crime rates.

But Japan has regularly come under fire from the European Union and campaigners over its use of the death penalty, especially its practice of hanging inmates without any prior warning to them or to their families.

Makoto Teranaka, of Amnesty International's Japanese chapter, said after the latest executions Tuesday that "this is a grave act that cannot be permitted amid international calls to suspend capital punishment".

Despite the criticism, conservative governments have stepped up the pace of executions. Last year Japan hanged 15 death-row inmates, the highest number since 1975, when the country executed 17 people.

Japan's politics often a family business

YOKOSUKA, Japan (AFP) – In Japan's election next month, the two candidates for the prime minister's post are carrying on a family battle that started in the 1950s when their grandfathers were premiers.

The clash of the political bluebloods -- incumbent Taro Aso and his rival Yukio Hatoyama -- casts a spotlight on Japan's rich and powerful clans that have dominated, and some say stifled, post-war politics.

About one third of Japan's parliamentarians are hereditary politicians -- often derided as "botchan" or "babies from rich families" -- who inherited their districts and fund-raising bodies from a relative, usually their father.

AFP – Democratic Party of Japan leader Yukio Hatoyama displays a leaflet of the party's manifest for the …

by Kyoko Hasegawa Kyoko Hasegawa – 51 mins ago

In many areas, politics as a family business has all but shut out the possibility of fresh blood -- just ask Katsuhito Yokokume, a 27-year-old candidate for Hatoyama's opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

Yokokume, a lawyer and the son of a truck driver, has campaigned hard in Yokosuka, a port city south of Tokyo, hoping to wrest the seat from Aso's conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the August 30 election.

But, even with the DPJ leading in the national polls, Yokokume -- who criss-crosses the constituency on his bicycle and chats with railway commuters day after day -- admits he is fighting an uphill battle.

His opponent is Shinjiro Koizumi, the son of charismatic former premier Junichiro Koizumi, who ruled Japan until 2006.

"Before discussing anything substantial about political pledges, I have to ask voters to remember my face and name in this Koizumi dynasty (area)," said Yokukume, who graduated from a top university in Tokyo on a scholarship.

"I raised my hand to run in this constituency because what Mr. Koizumi has done is exactly the opposite of what I want to realise as a politician... I want to change politics to represent the views of ordinary people."

When the elder Koizumi last year announced he would not contest his Diet seat again, he apologised to supporters for his "blind parental love" -- and then urged them to support his 28-year-old son and anointed successor.

If elected, the younger Koizumi will be the district's fourth-generation representative -- carrying on what a local assemblyman derided as "a dynasty with a longer history than that of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il."

Yokokume's hopes were lifted when an independent mayoral candidate in June beat the incumbent supported by Junichiro Koizumi -- but he is under no illusion that taking on one of Japan's political aristocracies will be easy.

Criticism of the system has intensified especially since two recent LDP prime ministers -- Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda, respectively the grandson and son of former premiers -- unexpectedly quit after just one year in office each.

"Since these resignation dramas of the past few years, the public image emerged that second- and third-generation politicians are spineless," said Tomoaki Iwai, professor of politics at Nihon University.

"But the real problem with hereditary candidates is that they inherit their family members' political support groups, thus blocking newcomers from entering politics," the professor said.

Many of Aso's current and former cabinet members come from political families, including former finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who quit in February after appearing drunk at a media conference.

Few politicians epitomise the trend like Aso and Hatoyama, whose paternal grandfather Ichiro Hatoyama became the LDP's first premier in 1955, taking over from Aso's grandfather Shigeru Yoshida, who led a forerunner of the LDP.

Hatoyama insists he is not a hereditary candidate because he has run in a constituency different from his father's.

Responding to popular dissatisfaction with hereditary politics, the DPJ has pledged that, if it wins government, it would bar children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews of its members from running in the same constituencies.

The LDP has toyed with a similar policy this year, but the ruling party has so far made no official campaign pledge on the issue.

DPJ platform vows to weaken bureaucrats

Diet members would craft policies; child allowance in '11

The Japan Times

By ALEX MARTIN

Staff writer

With a month to go before the Aug. 30 election, the Democratic Party of Japan unveiled its campaign platform Monday, featuring five main principles centering on a government led by politicians rather than bureaucrats.

The platform includes five main promises, including a complete review of the budget, a ban on the "amakudari" custom of giving retired senior bureaucrats jobs in industries they previously oversaw, and creating a monthly allowance for families of ¥26,000 per child starting in 2011, a year earlier than originally planned.

"We are at a historical turning point," DPJ President Yukio Hatoyama said in announcing the manifesto.

"Our single most important goal is to bring people back to the center of politics," he said, stressing the need to reform the current bureaucracy-oriented politics.

The DPJ is riding high in opinion polls and faces a very real chance of unseating the Liberal Democratic Party-New Komeito coalition.

The LDP plans to reveal its manifesto by the end of the week.

The DPJ's platform is broken down into five categories: elimination of wasteful use of taxpayers' money; child-rearing and education; pensions and medical care; local autonomy; and employment and economy.

Pledges include providing income support for households engaged in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, establishing toll-free highways and re-examining postal services, all intended to bring "livelihood" back to rural communities.

The platform promises a complete review of the budget to cut waste as a way to secure resources to finance the party's measures.

On foreign policy, the manifesto states the DPJ will seek a close and equal Japan-U.S. alliance, assume a central role in United Nations peacekeeping activities, liberalize trade and investment, and pursue global warming countermeasures.

The manifesto pledges to slash Japan's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, setting a far more ambitious goal than the 8 percent target set by Prime Minister Taro Aso.

The manifesto includes five main "plans" that map out specific methods by which a DPJ-led government would shift power away from bureaucrats. One plan is to appoint more than 100 Diet members to posts in ministries and agencies and have them take a central role in drafting, adjusting and deciding on policies.

The platform calls for abolishing vice ministerial meetings and establishing a national strategy bureau, which would hire from both the public and private sectors. The prime minister would decide policies on the budget and diplomacy.

Hatoyama said he is ready to take responsibility if a DPJ-led government fails to meet these pledges.

"In the event that we fail to bring about a regime change — something we promised the people we would do — it goes without saying that I will take grave responsibility for my lack of ability as (DPJ) president," he said.

DPJ manifesto

The DPJ pledges to:

• Achieve a government led by politicians, not by bureaucrats.

• Eliminate wasteful spending of tax revenues. Set up a national strategy bureau directly under the prime minister to set basic policies on the nation's budget and diplomacy.

• Offer a child-raising allowance of ¥26,000 for each child of junior high school age or younger.

• Provide up to ¥100,000 per month to those who have already exhausted unemployment benefits and are in vocational training.

• Seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

• Introduce income indemnity to all farming households.

• Waive all expressway tolls and abolish gasoline taxes.

• Make public high school tuition free.