Graham Arnold

The bus broke down.

You can't believe this.

And luckily it was about only 750-metre walk to get to the training ground.

So I made the players walk.

Then we're training.

Twenty minutes into training, electricity goes out again.

The floodlights are going out.

And it's pitch black on the field and I'm just yelling out to the boys, come here, come here, run there, run there, like jerking around with them.

And that was training over.

Then luckily the bus...

Got fixed and we could go back to the hotel and the electricity was back on there, but it was like nothing is going right.

Yeah, probably 10,000 people outside the hotel.

Singing, Iraq, Iraq.

And, you know, you can see in the players' faces, I could see in the players' faces that, you know, they're carrying the stress of the nation on their shoulders.

And the big job for me was to keep them relaxed and keep them believing.

And I just sort of asked them the question,

in small groups because I wanted to get a better, you know, more of an answer from, more honesty because a lot of players won't say much in front of 25, 26 people, but if they're in threes and fours, they will.

And the big question I said to them was, you know, when you're in the tunnel and you're about to walk out on the pitch and you walk across that white line, how will you feel?

Scared or excited?

And they just looked at me, quite a number said scared.