New Hanoi FC coach Harry Kewell and the bumpy but ambitious road

Harry Kewell started his coaching career in 2015, 15 months after retiring from playing, with Watford U21s. At the dawn of his managerial career, he was honest in saying he had no idea what lay ahead.

“Would I have been a good coach? I don’t know,” Kewell said in an interview 10 years ago. “My old coach, Ange Postecoglou (at the Australian national team), told me to go my own way, so I wanted to do it my way, even though I wasn’t sure if it would work.”

So what is Kewell’s philosophy? According to him, it is “to develop players who can think, who can adapt to any situation in the game”. Indeed, under Kewell’s guidance, Watford U21s have impressed not only with results but also with exciting performances. As a result, in 2017 he became the first Australian to coach a professional English team, Crawley Town, a League Two club based in a modest town south of London.

Ten years ago, Harry Kewell was full of excitement as he began his coaching career.

Here, Kewell continued his path. He pursued a fast, attacking style of play but did not like to stick to a fixed tactical system, nor did he give his players any specific philosophy to follow. He allowed them to express themselves.

“Football is like chess,” Kewell explains. “A good player rarely repeats the same moves so that the opponent never gets the better of them. I like players who are always asking questions, thinking about what to do, how to handle a ball this way or that. I don’t want them to act like robots and then justify that that’s what the manager wants me to do.”

That is why, despite having had many good teachers, including Rafa Benitez, Gerard Houllier, Guus Hiddink, George Graham and Postecoglou, Kewell still has special admiration for Frank Rijkaard. “His thinking is very unique, always open and has a different perspective, a few steps ahead of others,” the strategist born in 1978 shared. Don’t forget that as a player, he played more than 500 matches, 56 times for the Australian national team, attended two World Cups, won the Champions League, and was famous for his creativity and intelligence.

Harry Kewell wants his players to play football based on creative thinking.

But coaching is a different experience to playing, with so much out of his control. The former Leeds and Liverpool man had a brief successful spell with Crawley Town before moving on to Notts County (2018), Oldham Athletic (2020) and Barnet (2021). All three clubs, as well as Yokohama F. Marinos (2023), ended in dismissal, with more defeats than wins.

England player Davis Keillor-Dunn, a former player of Kewell's at Oldham Athletic, said these failures were not enough to judge the 47-year-old's ability.

“There is no one like Kewell in terms of the amount of work he puts in on the training pitch. He works tirelessly to make his players better, and only leaves when the last one has gone into the dressing room,” Keillor-Dunn said. “Kewell has all the attributes to be a top manager. His ability will be developed when working with high-class players, the best players, not at lower-level clubs.”

Kewell while in charge of Yokohama F. Marinos, where he lost his job after just 33 games.

However, Kewell himself knows that there are no shortcuts. He once declared ambitiously that he “wanted to reach the top, manage the biggest clubs in the world and create something in football that people would admire”. But for his dream to come true, he needed to prove himself at mid-level teams. And Kewell is not afraid to venture into footballing countries outside of Europe, such as Japan or now Vietnam, to restart his coaching career.

Crucially, Kewell genuinely enjoys the job. “I enjoy coaching more than playing,” he said in 2017. “I enjoy planning, organising the team, preparing for games, watching the players develop and getting excited off the pitch about a goal, and the experience of celebrating wins as a manager.”

We hope that with passion, ambition and determination, Kewell will succeed with Hanoi FC, building a team based on thinking, playing interesting and effective football.