Life after the Socceroos
Highlights
- Dr Craig Duncan, a senior ACU lecturer, played a key role in leading the Socceroos’ performance strategy through major international campaigns, including the FIFA World Cup.
- After leaving elite international football, he shifted focus to mentoring, teaching and advancing performance science through ACU and his Performance Intelligence Agency.
- His career highlights how ACU expertise in sports science bridges elite sport, education and real‑world impact to develop the next generation of high‑performance professionals.
As the dust settled on Australia’s World Cup campaign, one of the nation’s premier performance scientists has set his sights on new challenges.
In the world of sports science, working with your national team at the FIFA World Cup is like standing at the foot of Mt Everest.
It was a dream come true for Dr Craig Duncan, the chief architect of the Socceroos’ performance strategy in Russia and for the four years leading up to the tournament. But having clambered up that hill, he now turns his focus to greater challenges that lie ahead.
“I’ve been a Socceroos fan since I was a child and that will never change, and it’s been a great honour to work with the team over the past four years,” Dr Duncan told Impact.
“But the world of sports science is vast. There’s so much more to achieve and I want to continue building on the systems I’ve created and make an impact on the performance science discipline all over the world.”
Dr Duncan has had his share of successes with the Socceroos. In 2015, he overhauled the team’s fitness regime ahead of the nation’s first-ever Asian Cup victory. More recently, he expertly managed player fatigue and kept the Socceroos in top physical condition in the longest and hardest qualifying campaign in World Cup history.
But on his return to Sydney in July after the Socceroos’ early exit from the World Cup, Dr Duncan announced he would retire from his position as Football Federation Australia’s Head of Sports Science.
By then, the dust had begun to settle on the national team’s performance in Russia, which resulted in two narrow losses, against France and Peru, and one heartbreaking draw against Denmark.
Answering the critics
“They did everything I asked. We played football very well. We got a lot of chances, only we cannot score.”
With those 20 words, coach Bert Van Marwijk succinctly summed up Australia’s World Cup campaign, which saw the national side booted out after three brave performances but no goals in open play.
The more sober analysts acknowledged that the coach got the team playing as a cohesive unit in a very short amount of time, implementing a simple but shrewd game plan. Others were quick to heap criticism on the Dutchman, questioning his tactics.
The players, however, unanimously backed their coach. And Dr Duncan said many of the pundits who attacked Van Marwijk had “thrown the baby out with the bathwater”.
“Some of the rhetoric in the media in the post mortem has just been over the top. The coaches were outstanding in respect to what they did tactically and how they worked with the players, and I think there were a lot of positives to take out of our performances,” he said.
“It was just that when it came to the final pass, the final attack on goal, we found it difficult to score. That stuff is outside my control as a performance scientist, and in many cases it’s out of the coach’s control, so it didn’t go our way and that’s just how it is.”
Many fans and commentators were also critical of Van Marwijk’s decision to not use Australia’s all-time leading goal scorer Tim Cahill against Denmark.
Dr Duncan, who has worked very closely with Cahill and has been a long-time supporter, said the veteran striker “was in fantastic shape psychologically and physiologically”. But he refused to question the coach’s judgment.
“It's not my place to think about or comment on decisions that coaches make but I will say again that Bert and his coaching team were very impressive and I have total confidence in any decision they would make."
