Player Profile

On the day Australia’s 30-man provisional World Cup group was named, there were 737 members of the ‘Brett Holman is a joke’ group on social networking site Facebook.

Derided by fans of the Socceroos who fail to see his worth to the team, he is seemingly loved in equal measure by coach Pim Verbeek.

It is a strange situation considering the attacking midfielder is the only member of the Australian squad to have played in the Champions League group stage this season and has been an integral part of the Aussie team throughout qualifying for the World Cup.

Criticisms from fans range from his lack of touch to his poor finishing skills, but Holman himself is unperturbed saying: “Some of those comments you hear actually help you out because they motivate you to prove the people who says those things wrong.”

He moved to Feyenoord in Holland as a raw 17-year-old following a burst of goals for Paramatta Power.

He never actually played a match for Feyenoord as he was loaned to Excelsior and became a regular in their first team, playing 134 times in a four-year spell. His next port of call was NEC Nijmegen before departing for AZ where he won the league title in his first season.

He found first team opportunities hard to come by but Ronald Koeman took over from Louis van Gaal at the start of the season and has given Holman a more prominent role in the team and he went on to play in all six of AZ’s Champions League games.

Primarily used as back-up to Tim Cahill, Holman cannot boast a scoring record anywhere near as good as the Everton midfielder’s, but he has the total backing of coach Verbeek who says: “Normally he plays behind the striker but at AZ he's a right winger. He's played almost every game and he's very important for their team. He's always been very important for us.”