Asian Cup Group A match review: Australia v. Kuwait at Melbourne

The opening match of the 2015 Asian Cup took place at what this blog, due to its gauchiste horror at stadium sponsorship, will refer to as the Melbourne Rectangular Stadium.

A lot of rubbish has been written in the lead-up to this tournament. The usual suspects who seek to denigrate our historic links to Britain and the United States have been out in force, telling us that Asia Is Our Future™ and that we need to get really excited about playing against a bunch of petrotyrannies and tacky post-colonial tourist strips. The reality is that the A-League has been interrupted to make way for an overblown sixteen-team tournament (soon to be increased to twenty-four, just like its European counterpart) featuring mostly weak national teams who bring to the table large television audiences but little in the way of footballing pedigree. We are set for a month of low-grade soccer played in hot weather between countries no-one cares about, and if the Socceroos are bundled out early, it could all start to look like a waste of time and money.

(If this blog had its way, the Socceroos and the All Whites would take the eleventh and twelfth spots in the Copa América. That way, we would play against better opponents [sometimes at altitude!] while rekindling our cultural links with South America which have been forgotten about over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

The Socceroos’ first opponents were the oil-rich, human rights-poor swamp known as Kuwait. The Blue qualified for a World Cup once upon a time (*checks Wikipedia and sees that it was 1982*), but have generally not set the world on fire (although Saddam set fire to some of their oil wells…boom boom tish).

The first sign that we might be in for a long tournament was the manner in which Kuwait scored the opening goal. Hussain Fadhel poached a goal out of thin air, diving to head home a poorly-defended corner kick in the eighth minute. The same player was cautioned eleven minutes later for a trip on Mathew Leckie just outside the box, but the resulting free kick was deflected over the bar.

After half an hour of not posing any real threat to the Kuwaiti goal, the Socceroos redeemed themselves in the thirty-second minute, when an Ivan Franjic throw-in found Massimo Luongo, who in turn found Tim Cahill unmarked in the middle of the penalty area, and the trademark corner flag-boxing celebration ensued. Generally, a well-shaped phalanx of al-azraq defenders was in place to block any Socceroo advance, but the visitors would eventually be worn down. With just over a minute of regulation time remaining before the interval, a perfectly-weighted cross from Franjic soared towards the heads of Luongo and Cahill, the former getting to it first and putting his team 2-1 up.

The second half saw a bit of rain, falling perpendicularly into the Rectangular Stadium, and a bit more success in penetrating the gulfsiders’ defence, though i gialloverdi lost too many balls in the final third for comfort. Though Leckie struck and hit the bar in the sixtieth minute, their offensive efforts paid off just past the hour mark, however, when Robbie Kruse was felled in the area and captain Mile Jedinak converted the resultant penalty. They were unlucky not to get another such opportunity in the sixty-eighth minute, when Kruse, this time the recipient of a delicious through ball, was brought down again.

Both sides hit the cross-bar late in the match: Kuwait’s Fahad Al Ansari from a crafty outside-the-box strike and the substitute Nathan Burns, who got his head to the pointy end of an Aziz Behich cross. The Socceroos fired a barrage of crosses and headers at Kuwaiti goalkeeper Hameed Youssef, who skilfully batted each away, before running up the score with a goal in injury time, in which Leckie dribbled around two defenders but lost control, with James Troisi perfectly positioned to slot it home. It was all over, and the pride of the southern continent had withstood an early scare to begin the campaign with a win.

Next up for the lads is another Gulf monarchy, Oman, the one-time colonial overlords of Zanzibar, which was the birthplace of Freddy Mercury. Does this mean that the Socceroos will be singing We Are The Champions on January 31? You know it makes sense.

Australia 4 (Tim Cahill 32’; Massimo Luongo 44’; Mile Jedinak 62’ pen.; James Troisi 92’) – Kuwait 1 (Hussain Fadhel 8’)

Cautions: Hussain Fadhel (Kuw.) 19’; Faisal Zaid (Kuw.) 46’

Man of the match: Massimo Luongo (Aust.)