Aussies in sport

Having stayed up to watch the last hour of each of the Tour de France's stages and especially stage 9 I found it extremely disappointing to hear how Phil Ligett and Paul Sherwin were talking about Cadel Evans. Yes in terms of the tour and how competitve Cadel was is was very disappointing and yes they didn't have all the information about Cadel's condition, none of us did, but please don't talk about the wearer of the yellow jersey, a two time tour runner up and current road race world champion as someone who is weak. As seasoned tour commentators they should know Cadel better and know that he is made of tougher stuff than that...
All Aussies are. When our backs are against the wall we fight. And we saw Cadel do that the other night.
A good decender he tried to haul back the time gap between him and the leaders and what was predicted to be a 10 minute loss was only 8. Surely that's got to count for something.
I do have to give Phil and Paul their due here by saying last night they were very good towards Cadel with Phil telling Aussie journos he thought Cadel could still make the podium.

But more to the point, Aussies and I guess Kiwis here although I'm not really sure, they're just a necessity because AAC sounds stupid where ANZAC has some many connotations, will always fight and have the drive to succeed.
That's why there was so much uproar with Pim Verbeek's lineup against Germany in the World cup. We read it as him trying to limit his losses and make it difficult for Germany to score, he was going for the draw rather than the win which is something we're not used to. Guus Hiddink understood the Aussie mentality and formed a game plan around it accordingly and it obviously worked wonders. Guus anytime you want to come back name your price and if Frank Lowy can't match it, all Australians will contrubute $1, so that's $22 million, not bad huh?

A coach in Turkey's Super Liga thought he was the luckiest coach in the world because he thought he had signed the world's hardest working player, an Aussie. It was only when he was talking to other Super Liga coaches who also had Aussies on their squads that he realised he wasn't lucky, because he quickly learned all Aussies are hard workers, he was just smart and has since said that if any coach has the opportunity to sign an Aussie to do it because we work harder than anyone else on the planet.

If you look at the Socceroos, or even Tim Cahill to be more specific, he's not the world's greatest player, Linel Messi he is not, but he works hard and it shows.

So our message to the world is don't write us off, if something's not right then there's probably a reason as to why, so do what we do, work a little harder and find out why...