A-League: CCM 4 - Sydney 5: Best game ever!

The FFA needs to work out how we get more games like this. It was a raging success even before it started. Central Coast's biggest crowd - largely thanks to traveling Sydney fans. And the Saturday before Christmas needs to become a regular fixture - like Boxing Day is for cricket (boxing?). One marquee game everyone will watch. Foxtel must have been smoking.

It was the most entertaining game of the A-League's 3 seasons.

Sydney learned from LA Galaxy, forget about defence. I don't know what happened to CCM's defence, it was a disaster. So we have an end-to-end game that at first looked like it was going to be the Petrovski & Aloisi show, 2-0. Then Australia's best goal-keeper, Danny Vukovic, slipped or something and got himself sent off for hand ball outside the box in the 16th (Christmas pudding?). Then McKinna made his first major mistake of the season. He took off Sasho instead of Aloisi. Alosis only made it to the 59th and by the 79th, CCM had run out of subs (more treacle anyone?). Occasionally they were down to 9 as Sydney played hard and CCM had injury after injury.

The scoreline went like this:

CCM 1-0 (Jedinak), 2-0 (Aloisi slid in), Petrovski misses a slide in, 2-1 (Fyfe, Trout is OK in goal but not Vukovic), 2-2 (McFlynn), 3-2 (Dutch Owens, Popovic lucky not to get sent off for a last man foul for which the penalty was given), Sydney put everything into attack - and amazingly a 10 man CCM respond, 3-3 (Biddle weaves some magic with the CCM defence - or would you call them guys running about in the park?), 3-4 (Brendon Santalab turn and shoot wonder strike), 4-4 (Kwasnik does his job), and then, after 90 minutes, a mean foul (stretching his leg out) by Talay just outside his own box only gets a yellow - he wasn't the last man but it reduced CCM to 9 men as there is no one left on the CCM bench. Sydney race up the other end, again where is the CCM defence? Chaos in the box, hand ball to Kwasnik - red card, penalty, CCM only have 8 on the field - Talay scores the winner - Matthew Breeze blows full time.

Sydney were in CCM's box 64 times! No defence to speak of from either side. There was blood everywhere - a head clash from Popovic and Andrew Clark (Clark had a good game).

What was in that Christmas pudding?

I just realised Aloisi is going to play more than 8 guest games. How do CCM get to have two marquee players?

I said to my wife 'It'll be a long time before you see a game like that again.' She said, 'You're right.'