THE under-20 World Cup and the Olympic campaign were going to blaze a trail to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

It was a bold vision FFA technical director Han Berger laid out in these pages this time last year. So have we made any real progress?

The next phase of World Cup qualifying starts in June and it's hard to see Holger Osieck looking beyond the old guard because no one has put their hand up the way we all wanted.

A look at the Olyroos exposes the soft underbelly of Australian football - an inability to score goals.

It's a problem Berger noted a year ago and it remains the one thing that stops us from joining that upper bracket of teams.

You look across all of the junior grounds and there is an emphasis on passing the ball out of defence, playing in neat, intricate triangles, but pretty football gets you nowhere if you can't stick the ball in the back of the net.

Defensively, the Olyroos have been strong, but there have been no goals in four games and they now have to win against the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday to stay alive.

Miss out on London and we lose a golden opportunity to blood generation next.

Our old favourites can't last forever so we need some of these youngsters to kick a goal, literally and metaphorically.

Some argue that natural goalscorers are born and not made, and there is some truth in that. But I also wonder if we are spending enough time developing that killer instinct around goal.

When I played with Alan Shearer he would always be doing extra work with goalkeeper Tim Flowers, just working on his shooting. He was so single-minded about it.

There are coaching drills where kids are dissuaded from shooting and crossing the ball, with goals reduced to such a small size that they have to pass the ball through with no goalkeeper. It's all good, just don't neglect the most important part of the game.

Mark Viduka is the best striker Australia has produced - some would argue he's our greatest player - and I would love to see him grooming the next wave of strikers.

Outside of Melbourne Victory's Archie Thompson, you have to look at Besart Berisha, an Albanian, Kiwi Shane Smeltz and Dutchman Sergio van Dijk as true penalty-box predators.

At Socceroos level, our most reliable goalscorer in big matches has been Tim Cahill.

Our Achilles heel has been the lack of a cutting edge in the final third. We have bossed games and not finished teams off. Han Berger set the goalposts for Australian soccer this time last year, but we are still struggling to hit the target.

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