Thursday, March 08, 2007

Time for Sydney to sign Culina


The song is Culina Culina sung to the tune of ‘you’re the future of Australian football coaching, we hope.’

John Kosmina is gone from Adelaide and Terry Butcher is gone from Sydney. Of course the later earlier machinations allowed a final without Sydney and therefore spread the A-League dream.

Next year Branko Culina, father of Socceroo star Jason, should have his shot at the best run-on squad in the A-League. I’ve said this before and copped flak from Sydney fans. Because my idea was Alex Brosque, who we at the Roar persisted with (over 350 shots for 8 goals) and Saso Petrovski had about a million goals in them. But Tel-boy started them for most of the season on the bench. They certainly are not the team with the most depth or the fittest. But their defence can be the fiercest and the David Carney/ Steve Corica combination can pull out some of the most incredible goals. As we saw last night against Shanghai Shenhua. And while Saso was first off the Japan and now Central Coast, the key talent of their team remains.

And Culina stands like mechanic with 30 years experience looking after this model of E-type Jaguar.

It is an interesting feature that the two teams that let go their coaches at the end of the A-League version two are in this year’s Asian Champions League. Both teams were decidedly off guard. And yet Sydney won 1-2 in front of a huge and unbelieving Shanghai crowd, playing with style and scoring goals that could be out of the English Premier League (Carney's layoff for a Corica volley and Talay’s 25 metre slammer - that one makes us Roar fans wish Seo could once again pull off this type of outrage).

Adelaide, on the other hand, were on the back foot. And probably lucky not to loose two nil at home to a half full stadium - a fair goal was disallowed for off-side in the opening minutes. As it was they had the indignity of a horrible own goal from Valkanis.

Of course, since Adelaide has finished top two for two seasons, they get another shot after next season at the Champions League no matter how they go in version 3. For football starved Brisbane football fans this seems harsh. A month ago the Young Socceroos beat Chinese Taipei 11-0 in front of under 2,000 at Hindmarsh. And now in the biggest game so far for an A-League Club, Hindmarsh attracts - 7,654. Come on Roar it is your duty to get these games to Lang Park - where we can get 30,000 to a season game against Sydney.

In Roar news - long standing training squad members Chris Grossman and Robbie Kruse (see photo) have been signed. Both were signed by Miron as injury covers. Chris was a crowd favourite in his three games, while Robbie sat on the bench. Meanwhile, Dario Vidosic is trying out for Nurnberg in the Bundesliga. If successful he may leave after version 3 (we hope).

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