Qantas Joeys head coach Alistair Edwards has selected a 30-player squad to participate in a three-day training camp at the AIS in Canberra from 19-21 October.
Qantas Joeys head coach Alistair Edwards has selected a 30-player squad from the recent FFA National Youth Championship to participate in a three-day training camp at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) in Canberra from 19-21 October.
Edwards is looking forward to working with this group of the next Qantas Joeys for a variety of reasons.,
“These are the first batch of players to come through the Skill Acquisition Program so it will be interesting to see how this group compares with previous squads,” Edwards said.
"Tony Vidmar and I commenced our roles with the Qantas Joeys half way through the last campaign so it will be good to be able to work with the group from day one.
"The first part of this process is to identify the 50 most talented players in the country born on or after the 1st of January 1998.
The current AFC rules state we have to submit this list one month prior to the AFC Qualification tournament to be held next year, then for the actual AFC Championships, which is held a year later we can only add players born on or after the 1st of September 1998. There has been a history of age-cheating at the U16 championships and this is one of the rules to try and combat this ongoing issue.
“It's therefore crucial we get this identification process right as we were caught out with this ruling for the last campaign and therefore unable to use quite a number of talented 1996 born players due to them not being identified in time to comply with the AFC rules.
"This resulted in eight 1997-born players being included in the Iran squad, which meant we were by far the youngest team at the AFC Championships.
"To address this we started this identification process at the U13 FFA National Youth Championships in 2011, have had regular reports from the Skill Acquisition Trainers over the past two years and while Tony and I were in Iran, Aurelio Vidmar, Paul Okon, Tony Franken and AIS Technical Manager Peter De Roo finalised this 30 player camp squad from the 2012 U14 FFA National Youth Championships."
Football Federation Australia would like to thank the AIS for their ongoing support for this camp and the Qantas Joeys Football Program.
Qantas Joeys Squad - AIS Training Camp 19-21 October 2012
Name Team Jackson Bandiera NSW Metro Ricardo Bernardino NSW Metro Jake Brimmer VIC Metro Joe Caletti NSW Metro Nicholas D-Agostino QLD Metro James Delanov VIC Metro Jamie Dimitroff QLD Country Mitchell Evans NSW Metro Charles Horsley NNSW Metro Danny Kim QLD Metro Ross Kirby Football West Aleksandar Krsic QLD Metro Jordan Maracic SA Daniel Maskin NSW Metro Riley McGree SA Sam Mclllhatton NSW Country Gian Mendez NSW Metro Nicholas Panetta QLD Country Kosta Petratos NSW Metro Toan Pham QLD Metro Rhys Raymond QLD Country Gerard Roebuck NSW Country Joel Rollinson Football West Tomas Ross QLD Metro Kye Rowles QLD Metro Thomas Schulz QLD Country Christian Verbi SA Vuk Vucic Capital Football Luke Ward VIC Metro Zak Waters SA