There are friends of mine – good people, smart people, some of them both – who say winter is the best time of year. Let them come to Brrrrlin. Cold days, long nights, and just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, they go and give the footballers a month off.
Ben Halloran – once of tropical far north Queensland, now at Fortuna Düsseldorf in Germany’s second division – spent his first Winterpause roadtripping across Central Europe with old friends. Good fun, no doubt, but as Halloran says: “driving in the middle of winter, it was pretty bleak. Much different to up north in Cairns. And then people tell me that it was a mild winter, that the year before there was like 10 feet of snow.”
It’s not the weather though, but the football culture, that has come as the real shock to the 21-year-old. For all the madcap shenanigans Clive Palmer got up to during their time together at the late Gold Coast United, he never beheaded a rival team’s mascot and deposited its skinned carcass at their home stadium (much to the disappointment of some Melbourne Heart fans).
Halloran can’t say the same thing about the supporters of his new club, not after what happened before their derby with Cologne two days before Christmas.
“Cologne, their mascot, like on their emblem, is actually a goat. And a day before the game, Fortuna fans took a live goat to Cologne’s stadium, cut its head off and skinned it and left it at the stadium.
“And then the next day, the game got delayed for 45 minutes because of riots, and then flares, and the whole game I was just looking around thinking this is madness.”
He might have lived through Palmergeddon, but one thing is clear: he's not in Queensland anymore.
“It’s pretty bloody fanatical over there [in Germany]. The Dusseldorf fans are known as being fanatical. It doesn’t compare to anything in Australia. I mean, the support is still very good in Australia, but over there it’s – phwoar – just next level.”
As another quick, goal-hungry youngster from the sunshine state wearing Fortuna’s No23, the comparisons with Robbie Kruse are inevitable. But Halloran has already proved he is his own man, and while he hasn’t yet eclipsed Kruse’s record in Düsseldorf, he’s certainly made a much better start.
“Robbie’s a great player, but we’re different players. [As I’ve been telling people in Düsseldorf] I’m not coming here to be the next Robbie Kruse, I’m here to be Ben Halloran."
It took Kruse until his second season at the club to make an impact, albeit in their short-lived return to Germany’s top flight. By contrast, Halloran finished his debut season third on Fortuna’s goal-scorers list. It was all thanks to a blistering run at the end of the season which saw him score five goals in their last six games, and helped lift them from 14th in late March to sixth by the season’s end.
So what is the difference between him and Kruse? “Robbie probably has better vision and stuff, and likes to play in the killer ball. I think I’m probably a bit more direct and like to dribble more and take players on.”
What they do share is pace, and Halloran has been tearing through defences since being switched from the left to the right towards season’s end. (It’s no coincidence that his and the team’s fortunes changed with the introduction of the coach who introduced this shift.)
Not that Halloran is the fastest player in the team. That honour goes to Mathis Bolly, who’ll be in Brazil with the Ivory Coast team. “He’s the fastest player in the world, or something. He leaves me for dead, comfortably. Yeah, he’s lightning.
“[But] pace is still one of my advantages. When I used to play at Gold Coast, you had a lot more space and you could get the freedom to take people on all the time. It’s a bit different over there, because there’s not as much space, but then I learnt to time my runs and make good combinations with the No10s and other players within my team.”
If the Socceroos’ send off match against South Africa is any indicator, Ange Postecoglou will keep Halloran’s quick legs fresh for late in their World Cup games. While Halloran didn’t manage to score that night in Sydney, he did look dangerous in his international debut. “Hopefully [my pace] still stands up OK [at international level], but we’ll have to wait and see. It’s another step up for sure.
“[Postecoglou has] reiterated the point that we want to go there and play with courage, we want to play out from the back and play our own style of football. We don’t want to go there and just play long balls and let them put pressure on us. We want to play an attacking and attractive style of football because I don’t think they are going to expect that.”
The frightening thought for Spain, Holland and Chile – that word is used patriotically – is not just the frequency with which Halloran has been scoring lately, but that when he scores, his team usually wins. In fact, it’s almost two and a half years since Halloran scored and his team wasn’t at least able to eke out a draw. And these aren’t just cheap goals when they don’t matter. He’s made a thing of scoring openers.
His star is rising, but he still has some work to do. Most notably, on his goal celebrations. When he scored one of the goals of the German season – an audacious chip over the keeper – he celebrated by raising his palms in the kind of gesture that says, “Hey, please don’t shoot”. To see him score, it’s almost as if he doesn’t want to believe what he is capable of.
“Yeah, my celebrations are pretty bad, because whenever I score I have no idea what to do. I’m normally pretty surprised. So if I score in a World Cup, I’m going to probably freak out and I’ll probably faint or something. But I’ll worry about that when it happens.”
Backflips? Airplane? Assault of the corner flag? He promises he’ll try to brush on his celebratory moves before the Socceroos opening match of the Cup, against Chile, on 13 June. But don’t expect to see him rocking the cradle.
“Oh, no! No, no, no! Not yet,” he laughs. “Hopefully not.”