Aaron Mooy gently agonises over every one of his answers for 10 full minutes before eventually confirming what was already long suspected. “I’m not much of a big talker around the room,” he says quietly, inviting supportive laughter. “Everyone that knows me knows that.”
The midfielder, seated at a press conference table in front of a dozen journalists, had just been reminded of his relative seniority compared to many of his World Cup teammates and asked if he was providing a strong guiding presence in the dressing room.
“I just try and do the right things off the pitch, on the pitch, and yeah, hopefully, I dunno, I don’t like to talk about myself.” Mooy is laughing now, too, and the Socceroos media manager is murmuring something to him about letting his football do the talking. “Yeah,” he says. “Hopefully just try and play well, and then hopefully that inspires people.”
For as long as Mooy has been playing for Australia – he has 53 caps, for the record, equal with Aziz Behich and behind only Mat Ryan (75) and Mat Leckie (73) – he has been frugal with the spoken word. One can only speculate, but it seems he is simply shy. In a world loaded with loud voices, it is endearing, and inversely makes you want to hear more of what he has to say.
On this particular occasion it feels as if the 32-year-old should have quite a lot of material. There was that shock move in 2020 from Brighton to Shanghai SIPG, followed by his mid-pandemic departure and five clubless months. Then came those lonely training sessions at a local park in Glasgow with only Socceroos coaching staff for company, trying to ready himself to play some part in Australia’s qualifying playoffs against the United Arab Emirates and Peru.
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“It was a tough period for me,” he says. “In China there was lots of Covid restrictions and stuff like that. Arnie [coach Graham Arnold] gave me a call a few times and he wanted me to be involved, so that gave me a real motivation. They wanted me to be there and yeah, that’s what my focus was on. Just worked as hard as I could, got into the best shape as possible and tried to help.
“Probably [also] the little boy inside of me that started playing football, that’s probably what motivated me. Always the World Cup, we were close to qualifying and … I knew that if I was going to be involved I didn’t want to let anyone down.”
Mooy went into those June matches otherwise cold yet somehow played the full 90 and 120 minutes, exceeding internal expectations about how far his body would take him.
After that, of course, Ange Postecoglou had seen enough to afford him another chance in the UK at Celtic where, after a tentative start, he has forced his way into the team and made 20 appearances including eight starts – one against Real Madrid at the Bernabéu in the Champions League. At the time, the former Socceroos boss said Mooy’s “unique situation” presented a reciprocal opportunity for both club and player.
“Obviously he was with Shanghai and that sort of didn’t work out in the end,” Postecoglou told Fox Sports last month. “And him being based here in Glasgow, I just thought it was a good opportunity for both sides, for him and for us to do something quickly to bring him in.
“He’s a good footballer, he’s somebody I knew well and I knew he could contribute here … he’s finding his feet now after getting his fitness up to speed, because he’d obviously missed pre-season and hadn’t played a lot of football, but I think everyone can see now he’s sort of getting to a really good condition. And his football’s been really good over recent games.”
Mooy himself describes Scotland as “a very testing place” to play. “Every day we go in with the boys and train a hundred miles an hour,” he adds. “That’s the way Ange likes it and there’s no days where it’s just chill, so it’s intense and it’s a good place to be.”
Harry Kewell, the Socceroos great and Celtic first-team coach who is in Australia for the club’s two-match tour against Sydney FC and Everton, felt Mooy handled the pressure with aplomb.
“For Aaron to step up and play and to force his way into the team, it takes a lot because we don’t let anything slide,” Kewell told AAP. “You have to be at your very best at training to even be in the manager’s mind.”
Mooy does not, of course, need to point out that this isn’t where the story ends, because here he is, in Qatar, five days before Australia’s opening World Cup game against France.
Mooy’s talking on the pitch that he struggles to speak of is looking very much like one of Australia’s key strengths at this juncture, with teammate Martin Boyle (knee) racing the clock to be fit for the opening Group D fixture on Tuesday night (Wednesday 6am AEDT).
