Thursday, July 12, 2007

Asia Cup - Thailand 2 roll Oman 0

An emphatic second half performance saw Thailand's local legs outrun Oman and two great goals.

Again a disappointingly empty stadium.

Bad news for Oman but perhaps worse for Australia. If we struggled against Oman and Thailand finished them off and drew with Iraq, where does that leave us?

Ray Gatt The Australian's football writer wrote this week that if he didn't know the Socceroos better he would believe that many didn't want to be at this cup. I suspect that our success in putting players into Europe has back fired badly, and our boys used to cold weather just don't want to suffer in these conditions.

Arnold is talking about two changes for tomorrow nights game against Iraq. This shows his lack of creativity and risk aversion. After going out on a limb and convincing Viduka to come - he now finds he has to play the big guy even if he looks dis-interested.

Arnold has Nick Carle and Archie Thompson, hot summer players siting in the stands. He has to call them down. And next time we go to hot humid conditions we need to pick a team for the conditions - not for popularity, after all I expect ratings in Australia for these matches is going to quite low, and if we look like losers, by not making it out of our group, even lower.

1 comment:

Hamish Alcorn said...

Interesting thoughts.

If you're right - and there's no doubt that to some extent or another you are - involvement in Asia has suddenly given the A-League new raison detre. Concomitantly if there's new reason to recruit A-League players for Socceroos games in Asia, it will make the A-League more attractive to any Ozzie players in Europe making borderline decisions about when to come home.

Meanwhile, the sub-tropically based Roar should theoretically gain that bit of extra importance, as will playing against them. And there is extra reason to support teams coming on board from Townsville and Darwin. If we had a team from Hobart eventually we'd have proximate European conditions to deal with as well (I guess Wellington provides this already). Apart from altitude (Australia doesn't really have any), this would give Australia a very broad range of conditions to deal with, and along with the need to fly pretty long distances, could be the international competitive advantage in years ahead.

It would require a large pool of good players to draw from however, who come from a variety of climes, who would be chosen on their local conditioning as well as the rest of their playing resume, game to game.