Scott Jamieson has ‘no regrets’ in a 15-year playing career that will finish with a Grand Final, Melbourne City’s captain tells Tom Smithies.
It’s hard to know who will have to make the bigger adjustment once Scott Jamieson’s playing career finishes at some point this coming Saturday night – him or his two-year-old son Cooper.
The success that has garlanded the latter years of Jamieson’s career has been the norm for Cooper, and his father’s leadership role too as captain for nearly five years of a relentlessly successful Melbourne City side.
JAMIESON SAYS GOODBYE: City veteran to retire after Isuzu UTE A-League Grand Final
Now the Jamieson family will have to adjust to a different rhythm, as Scott joins the City coaching staff at 34 once Saturday’s Isuzu UTE A-League Grand Final is over, and it’s strange to think that’s it for a player who burst into the A-League at 19 with Adelaide United, making such an impression in his first season that he was capped by the Socceroos before it had finished.
But there are plenty of stories to tell Cooper and Jamieson’s other son as they grow up, from European trials to winding up your best mates on opposition teams. “There’s so much that happens in a career and just never gets told, I guess,” Jamieson tells KEEPUP.
But the decision to hang up his boots makes sense on a number of levels – not many players get to go out on top, and Jordan Bos’s emergence this season gave Jamieson a taste of the fact that football waits for no one. Remember also that Jamieson made the commendable decision to stay with his partner Vicky for Cooper’s birth when the 2019-20 A-League Men season was completed in a bubble due to Covid.
“I always looked at interviews of sports people that had just become parents and they would say, ‘It’s different now because I’m trying to provide for my kids’,” Jamieson says now.
“I don’t think fatherhood changed anything inside me to work harder or to compete harder. I think it grounded me outside of football just in the sense of I wasn’t responsible for myself anymore.
“It was a case of I’ve got two kids and my life didn’t revolve around (just) me, it was around my two kids and my partner.
“I just grew more facets to my, I guess, repertoire as a human being because I have two beautiful boys that I love more than anything.
“My oldest Cooper, who’s nearly three, is obsessed with football, non-stop asking for Melbourne City on the TV, or asking to kick a ball. It’s got to a point where he wants to wear the captain’s armband because papa wears it.
“So I hope for him and his love of the game that it continues to go on. But it’s special having that with my son and being able to go home to my kids and my partner and be able to spend time with them on a different level.
“Cooper started grabbing my premiership medals that I’ve got in my bedside table and my A-League championship medal and started taking them out and putting them around his neck. It got to the point where I was worried they’d get damaged… so I gave him my FA Cup runners up medal from 2018.
“I’ve got a video of him standing in front of the TV, when we did the trophy lift of the Premiers Plate a couple of weeks ago, and when we lift it he lifts the trophy and mimics it. That’s something I’ll cherish forever, it’s pretty special.”
It’s not at all surprising that Jamieson has been looking back in recent days on the seminal moments and changing pathways of a career even he admits hasn’t been universally admired. He wouldn’t, he insists, change any of it, though the memory of sitting at Groningen Station in the north of Holland, aged just 20 and yet making life decisions sitting on a platform bench, burns strongly still a decade and a half later.
“That year I’d won (Australian) Young Player of the Year and I went on trial to Groningen and to Greuther Fürth in Germany,” he said. “But I left the Groningen trial and had (then Socceroos coach) Pim Verbeek calling up my father and myself, telling us that he’d organized some more trials for me in Holland and some clubs wanted to speak to me and see me. I wanted to come back to Australia and didn’t entertain it whatsoever.
“I don’t regret anything in my career (but) I kind of wish I would have taken a different approach with that. I’m sitting at a train station in Holland ready to go back to the airport and my dad’s calling me and frantically saying, Stay in Holland!
“I was adamant that I could go back to Australia and do what I’d done the year before and it didn’t work out like that. But like I said, I don’t regret anything in my career.”
That includes, he adds, curtailing a second chance at making it in Europe that came a decade later in part because of issues back in Australia. “I signed for Gothenburg (in Sweden) on a two-and-a-half-year deal and a couple of weeks later I made my debut in the Europa League.
“We finished the season well and then I went back and started the next season but tore my hamstring and then couldn’t get back in the team.
“Ultimately I was enjoying Gothenburg and Sweden and the experience of a change in football but also life. But the opportunity to come back to Australia presented itself with Melbourne City, and there was some stuff going on with family and friends.
“So it just all meshed together and ultimately I kind of looked at the fact I was coming up to about 28 and I kind of felt the opportunity to really try and break into a bigger league had probably left me at that time. I would’ve had to stayed another year or so in Sweden to get a move and it would have been hard going into 30.
“So it was just about coming back to Australia, the stuff with family and friends, and coming to Melbourne City.”
Now he has the chance to add a second A-League Championship to go with three Premier’s Plates secured with City plus that Young Player of the Year Award, when his side face the Mariners in Saturday night’s Grand Final.
It’s tempting to ask Jamieson when the firebrand full-back of his youth with an uncanny ability to irritate opponents became something of an elder statesman. With days left of that playing career, he insists it’s all two sides of the same coin.
“When I was younger, going through the Adelaide teams and then Sydney FC, Perth Glory and the Wanderers, I was always willing to voice my opinion,” he says.
“It was a case I guess of speaking up whenever I thought of something, good or bad, that I thought needed to be said. When your age goes up, you tend to get more people listening to you!
“I’ve always had that inside me where I’ve looked to make change or confirm what’s doing good for the benefit of the team. On the flip side, I’ve been the captain now for close to five years and not once have I stepped back in terms of competing with anybody.
ISUZU UTE A-LEAGUE GRAND FINAL – TICKET DETAILS
“Some people see it as getting under the skin of other people. I look at it as just competing physically and verbally, even (in the Semi Final) with my good mate Luke Brattan (of Sydney FC) – going toe to toe, not just on the pitch but verbally. I’m not taking a backward step so nothing’s changed, mate.
“I’ll never change who I am, the person I am. Anyone who’s been in the same change room as me will tell you I’m an antagoniser, I push buttons of people. I’ve stripped it back a bit because of the natural growth as a person that I’ve had over the years.
“But also in my role within the club and in the team, you know, I can’t continually just rip on people like I did when I was a youngster.
“The fabric of me is still the same as a 34-year-old speaking to you now as it was as 22-year-old getting criticized for talking to opposition players and all that.
“I remember when I was at Adelaide in my second year, an Adelaide reporter standing up for Mile Sterjovski when he grabbed me by the throat in a game against Perth.
‘I’ve got nothing against that reporter but I know that things were used against me in the fact that I would compete with people and not take a backward step and people saw it as disrespect.
“I saw it as respect, I respect everyone I played against but verbally and physically I would compete. That’s just who I was and who I am.
“I think at times it took away from certain other stuff with me but ultimately everyone has their own opinions. Over time I started believing that the only opinions that matter to me are the ones inside the club and more importantly my family and friends.
“There were times it annoyed me but it got to a point where it was water off a duck’s back. I still think sometimes people maybe don’t give me credit for what I’ve done as a captain.
“That’s not me complaining. And in saying that, sometimes I got the credit that I didn’t deserve. So it balances itself out definitely… without a doubt.”
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