Tom Humphries on the revolution in soccer Down Under and Guus Hiddink's role in the transformation

Hot times in World Cup City. For seven days under the roaring German sun the princes and the pretenders have been presenting their credentials. Good fun at court. England have toiled, but swagged six svenly points. Argentina, Italy and Spain have played like grown-ups. Brazil you'd worry about. If Germany would play a libero they'd be dangerous. Ecuador have been a riot. The French are at death's door. And the Aussies are the life of the party.

In Kaiserslautern during the week the Socceroos had a delicate task. Japan, experienced and patient at this level, started as favourites and found the lead in the second half. Back home in Australia this wasn't entirely unexpected. The game was broadcast live but late at night on the SBS channel (2.57 million tuned in at peak), and figures show that from half-time on Aussies were turning off their televisions and heading to bed.

One can only imagine the regrets of those who didn't leap out of bed quickly enough when they heard the cheering which greeted Tim Cahill's first goal with six minutes left. As the Australian team celebrated deliriously, one player had the presence of mind to make a tactical inquiry. John Aloisi leaned into Guus Hiddink's ear and asked which strikers should drop back into midfield to secure the draw.

Hiddink shook his head.

"No, let's go for it. Let's go for the win, Let's not settle for 1-1."

A few minutes later Aloisi found himself adding the grace note, the final goal in a remarkable 3-1 win.

All hell broke loose in Kaiserslautern and in many spots on the bottomside of the globe. Aussie soccer had arrived. The game which struggles along as the number four football code Down Under and ranks way down the list in terms of all sports, had provided Australia with one of its most indelibly glorious sporting moments.

And Australia, unlike America, where soccer has also struggled, is a country which understands global sport. The game has lodged itself into the national consciousness and is in a position to grow.

It has a familiar feel, this explosion. The Australian approach is redolent of Ireland's in the early days of our footballing innocence. Better planned and more subtle, but bear with us . . .

Hiddink once said he would prefer to lose a World Cup final beautifully than win one ugly. He is a pragmatist in a romantic's finery, however. In Kaiserslautern on Monday he was just another man who likes to put 'em under pressure. His side launched high balls at the brawny Viduka and the towering Josh Kennedy and fed off the breaks.

When the going got tough it was the silky Marco Bresciano who was quickly withdrawn. Why pick the lock when you can kick the door down? Of course, Hiddink is more sophisticated about it than Jack Charlton was, but he recognises that good teams are less effective when harried and hustled. His side has a backbone of English Premiership players. They are built for bone-crunching. Their reputation goes before them. When Carlos Parreira announced he wasn't going to let his team get into a slugging match with the Aussies tomorrow evening, his words were greeted with some glee Down Under.

If the world finds the Aussie style uncouth and blunt, there's something perverse in the Aussie temperament which finds the compliment there. More significantly, there is something in Hiddink which can find usefulness in that perverse national temperament. He is a genius at working with what he is given.

It took him 18 months to bring South Korea from nowhere to fourth in the world in the last competition. He brought his native Netherlands to the same spot at the 1998 finals when they won the match of the tournament against Argentina in Marseille at the quarter-final stage.

When this World Cup ends Hiddink is off to Russia next to work his magic. His legend will be intact regardless of how much further the great Socceroo adventure goes. He has made his mark and left his legacy.

It was Hiddink who, upon meeting the notoriously touchy Mark Viduka for the first time, reached for Viduka's stomach and pinched an inch of fat.

"You are overweight," said Hiddink. "We can't get to the World Cup like this."

And next time he saw Viduka, a couple of months later, the big Boro striker had washboard abs and a big grin on his face.

Steve McClaren 0 Hiddink 1.

Hiddink's short time in Australian football leaves the game there in fine shape for his successor. Thirty-two years after Australia sent a semi-pro team to the last finals played in Germany, soccer is about to take off in the world's most sporting nation.

The Australians, with a population of 19 million, can turn out world-class rugby sides (league and union), swimming champions, tennis champions, fine athletes, great cricket teams and still have their own thriving indigenous sport. When they turned their mind seriously to soccer there was a chance for others to watch and learn.

In recent years the objective has been to broaden the base of the sport so that it leaks out from the immigrant communities where it thrives as a form of lingering tribalism.

(The Balkan influence is huge, for instance. When the Aussies play Croatia next week, Joey Didulica, Ante Seric and Josip Simunic in the chequered jerseys will all be native Australians who opted to play for the land of their parents, despite having been through the soccer programme at the Institute of Sport in Canberra. On the other hand, Viduka, Ante Covic, Jason Culina, Zeljko Kalac, Ante Popovic and Josip Skoko are all sons of Croatian parents and play for Australia.)

The game is spreading to the new urban suburbs where it needs to fight for a place on the menu with more traditional Aussie pastimes ("Other games you invent with different shaped objects," as Hiddink puts it). Registrations of players are up all over Australia. Some 95,103 turned up in the MCG for Australia's final home friendly with Greece a few weeks ago, and the brand new A League has surpassed the expectations of its founders, hauling in numbers comfortably over the target attendance of 10,000 per match.

Then there is Germany. Aussies are so nomadic, such inveterate backpackers, that it is hard to count, but they reckon that somewhere between 30,000 to 60,000 Australians are in Germany to watch their Socceroos.

Hiddink's trick has been to get it right. All of it. The Australians have taken all 38 rooms at the exclusive Wald-und-Schlosshotel in Oehringen outside Stuttgart. Once a royal palace and hunting lodge, it boasts a golf course and tennis courts, a sauna, a day spa and a Michelin-rated restaurant.

Hiddink micromanages all aspects of his team's daily existence. From his demand that they eat together at precisely the same time to deciding what they eat when they do sit down. From the freedom he sometimes and unexpectedly offers his players to the mind games he constantly plays with them, building tension in the squad until it seems like they will explode and then resolving everything suddenly and drawing all their energy out at the right time.

Last week, for instance, the rival goalkeepers, Mark Schwarzer and Zeljko Kalac, went right to the wire. The pair have grown up together on teams since the 1980s and Schwarzer has always won out, with Kalac being the perennial understudy.

Kalac, though, somehow got the impression last week that this World Cup would be his time. He chirped happily to the media. Schwarzer, who had performed brilliantly in a Rotterdam friendly against Holland, brooded and knuckled under for more intensive work. Schwarzer won out. Always was going to.

When Hiddink assembled his players in Australia a few weeks ago he surprised many observers by putting them through not one, but two intensive, two-hour sessions every day. No fan of fitness levels in the Premiership, he felt the players needed more rather than less. Three goals in the final six minutes on a torridly hot afternoon against Japan was the reward for his judgment call.

Tomorrow, in the biggest game in the country's history, Australia face Brazil. Win or lose, the game will be a landmark, and on Monday morning Hiddink's Socceroos will still be alive in the competition.

Oddly, they don't fear losing. Seven of the squad were part of the team that beat Brazil in South Korea in 2001, while John Kennedy played on the Australian Under-17 squad which lost to Brazil on penalties in the World Cup in New Zealand in 1999.

Tomorrow is a massive occasion, but it won't alter the graph long-term.

Australian soccer was undergoing a radical change and that graph climbs steeply. The new Football Federation Australia (FFA) has, under the guidance of former rugby executive John O'Neill and millionaire patrons like Frank Lowy, raised its sights significantly.

When Hiddink took the Australian job he accepted what was the lowest offer on the table. The South Koreans were offering to make him the highest paid coach in the world, Russia was in the queue already with major money and any number of topline clubs were dangling carrots. He liked the challenge put by Australia the best.

(Anyway, is was Hiddink who, during his playing days, was transferred to second division De Graafschap when the club successfully raised the 40,000 guilders transfer fee by staging a public appeal in which supporters dropped a 10-guilder note in a milk can.)

Hiddink came at the right time. Money is flooding the Australian game. The FFA's corporate family already includes players like Qantas, Nike, Hyundai, NAB, Telstra and Westfield, and as sponsors come to appreciate the possibilities of year-in, year-out exposure in world markets, that portfolio will continue to grow.

The future? Australian soccer will make significant dividends off this tournament, something it failed to do on its adventure in 1974.

The groundwork was laid last year when Australia changed its place in the world. The Socceroos got to the World Cup by qualifying in the Oceania group, but are actually playing in Germany as part of the Asian representation. On January 1st this year the Aussies officially sundered their ties with Oceania and threw their lot in with Asia.

It was a marriage of mutual convenience. Until now, Oceania has had just half a qualifying place for the finals , in that the winners of the Oceania qualifiers play a South American team for a place. Most notably against Uruguay for the 2002 finals, this has brought about some considerable heartbreak for the Aussies.

Now they are in an Asian set-up which has four-and-a-half qualifying places. Their presence there (and the reason they are so welcome) strengthens Asia's case for a fifth place.

In the short term, five teams will be seeded for the 2010 qualification series. As Asian Football Confederation seedings are based primarily on previous World Cup performances, and with Australia almost certain to finish ahead of Japan, they look like being seeds for the qualifying campaign for the next World Cup.

This vastly increases the chances of Aussie involvement in South Africa and also opens up the massive Asian market for sponsors and clients.

Ironically, a change in Fifa policy means that the fifth-ranked team out of Asia will probably now play the Oceania winners for the right to qualify.

The Australians are nonetheless pleased. They will play in a stronger, more prolonged qualifying series and have the room ultimately to make mistakes and survive. Decent performances will see them avoid the play-off pitfall altogether.

There are also proposals for an annual Tri-Nations tournament involving Japan, South Korea and Australia which would further strengthen the game.

"When you think of Australia, it's not in the same sort of way as you did a year ago," said Viduka on Monday. He was talking about the previous 90 minutes but might as well have been considering the future.

The Aussies have arrived. Their game will flourish, and in our lifetimes they will win or come close to winning a World Cup.

Not much, though, will beat the romance of a week which began with a Houdini act and ended with a samba.