The answer to Aus football's problems has never been more exciting

“This is a glass half full column on topics where glass half empty writers would take a very different approach.”

So begins David Weiner’s waltz through the hottest topics in Australian football right now, from Nestory Irankunda’s dance moves and Graham Arnold’s heroics with Iraq, to the disappointing crowds that attended recent Socceroos, Matildas and A-League games.

In part, David’s column is looking at the reasons why Irankunda and his Socceroos teammates are the perfect people to make football fans fall in love with the men’s national team again - something that has been curiously difficult in recent times.

But it’s also a much broader look at the other issues the game faces in Australia - and why the solutions to those issues are actually reasons to be excited rather than anxious about the future of football in this country.

If it’s sounding like this is covering a lot of territory, that’s because it does.

Have a read and let us know what you make of it all by hitting reply on this email.

Tomorrow, the Emerging Matildas Championships get underway in Melbourne, with the Socceroos version held in Sydney later this month.

This is football’s version of the NFL combine, a chance for the best teenage talents from across the country to come together and test themselves in an elite environment, in front of the coaches that will ultimately decide if these players have a future as a professional footballer.

“The reality is we're going to see some future Matildas,” says Michael Cooper, and he would know.

As Australia’s under-17s coach, the Emerging Matildas Championships is a critical part of Cooper’s remit around talent identification, and recent history shows that a good performance at the tournament can rapidly accelerate a player’s journey up the professional footballing ladder.

Just last year, one of the standout performers was Willa Pearson, who a few months later became the youngest player to ever feature in an A-League match, and has since broken Sam Kerr’s long-standing record as the youngest goal-scorer in A-League history.

Cooper provides some fascinating details around how the talent scouting actually works at an event that features close to 700 players, including the fact that he’ll often watch replays of matches three or four times to make sure he doesn’t miss anything.

You can read more of the interview with Cooper here.

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Liverpool manager Arne Slot just can’t take a trick at the moment.

It seems strange to say given he delivered the club a Premier League title last season, but the Dutchman is under serious pressure to turn things around before the powers that be at Liverpool might be forced to take drastic action.

A 2-0 loss away to Paris Saint-Germain this morning isn’t exactly disastrous, but it continues a poor run of results in which they’ve won just one of their last six games.

On this occasion Liverpool set up very defensively to try nullify the attacking threat posed by PSG’s young stars, but that plan was looking flawed when Desire Doue opened the scoring after 10 minutes.

Georgian wizard Khvicha Kvaratskhelia scored the second for PSG, with the only consolation for Liverpool being that they have a good history of overturning deficits in the second leg of Champions League ties.

Barcelona will need to rely on a similar history next week, after going down 2-0 to Atletico Madrid in the first leg of their quarter-final this morning.

A red card to Pau Cubarsi late in the first half changed the game, and Barca never recovered.

We’ll have a report on those Champions League games up on our website a bit later today.

We won’t be seeing Mitch Duke in a Socceroos jersey after July this year - whether he makes it to the World Cup or not.

Duke confirmed yesterday that he’ll call time on his international career regardless of whether he makes Tony Popovic’s squad at the World Cup, even though there is an Asian Cup less than a year later.

The 35-year-old is a reasonable chance of making the cut for the Socceroos despite being left out of the most recent squad, with his big-game experience and good form with Macarthur likely to count in his favour.

Click here to read the interview Duke gave where he dropped the news of his impending international retirement.

Another player hoping to make it on the plane to North America in a few months is Joe Gauci, the goalkeeper that for a brief moment early in Popovic’s time as Socceroos boss looked like he could displace Maty Ryan as Australia’s No.1.

That’s not on the cards any more, but a trip to the World Cup is still a possibility if Gauci can produce more performances like the one he did for Port Vale yesterday, helping the League One side keep a clean sheet in their win over Rotherham.

It was a far cry from the 7-0 shellacking they copped from Chelsea in the FA Cup over the weekend, a result that surely weighed on Gauci in the days that followed.

As Jake Rosengarten pointed out in this piece, there are parallels between that game and the 7-0 beating that Ryan suffered a decade ago at the hands of Messi, Neymar and Suarez when the Aussie goalkeeper was at Valencia.

“The Socceroos captain has spoken in the years since about the hurt of that night, bouncing back and how it helped him lift his game,” Jake wrote. “Perhaps it will do the same for Gauci.”

One man who unfortunately won’t bounce back in time for the World Cup is US striker Patrick Agyemang, who was ruled out of the tournament after suffering an Achilles injury earlier this week.

Agyemang, a teammate of Australian Callum Elder at Derby County in the English Championship, was a decent chance of leading the line against the Socceroos in June, but US coach Mauricio Pochettino will now need to turn to other options.

Find out who they might be in this article, the first of many we’ll do on the Socceroos’ World Cup opponents in the lead-up to June.

Another week, another loss to Japan at a Women’s Asian Cup - but this one comes with a silver lining.

The Young Matildas went down 5-2 to Japan at the Under-20 Women’s Asian Cup last night, with the Japanese youngsters proving too strong for their Aussie counterparts.

Despite the defeat, the Young Matildas secured progress to the knockout stage courtesy of their two earlier wins in the group stage, meaning they finished second in their group and will face North Korea in the quarter-finals.

Avaani Prakash and Daisy Brown were the goalscorers for Australia, while Shelby McMahon was impressive in midfield, as she usually is.

The 17-year-old has already built an impressive resume in her short professional career so far, highlighted by two A-League Women’s premierships at Melbourne City.

She had a lengthy chat with Ann Odong from The Women’s Game that went into plenty of detail around what it’s like to try integrate into such a highly successful - and tactically complex - setup as a 15-year-old, and this quote stood out to me:

“I didn’t have my friends as a teenager, and I was missing out on what my friends were doing back home [in Brisbane], but I knew that I was on a different path. I knew that my life would pan out exactly how I wanted it to when I stuck to what I believed in.”

You can read the full interview with Shelby McMahon here.