The Socceroos last night continued their
winning ways with a 4-0 defeat of Oman at the Cathy Freeman-Sam Burgess
Memorial Stadium.
Oman obtained the first chance of the
match, Raed Ibrahim Saleh’s shot on target saved in the third minute. The first
quarter of the match proceeded with little incident, as the Socceroos played
reactively, dominating possession while soaking up Omani pressure. The men in
yellow had their first serious opportunities in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth
minutes, when they pursued their usual strategy of KEEP CALM AND LOB IT TO TIM.
But Ange Postecoglou had more tricks up his
sleeve than that, and in the twenty-seventh minute, the lads went 1-0 up
courtesy of a corner kick. Trent Sainsbury headed it down for Matt McKay to tap
in from close range. Before this turn of events could be digested, they added a
second when a counter-attack landed the ball at the feet of the one and only
Massimo Luongo (who, by the way, is in red hot form and ought to be playing
somewhere much more prestigious than Swindon Town); lobbing over the Omani
defence, he set up Robbie Kruse for a splendid finish.
The ‘Roos continued to probe the Omani
defence for opportunities, clearly not satisfied with two goals. For the Red Warriors,
it was, as the Mancunian television commentator put it, “‘ard graft”. The home
side got the third in injury time after an unusual sequence of events. Kruse
crossed to the Melbourne Victory’s Mark Milligan, in the side for the injured
Mile Jedinak, who tapped the ball in. Kruse was ruled offside, but as Tim
Cahill had been brought down by Ali Al-Busaidi while trying to get to said
cross, Australia were awarded a penalty which Milligan duly converted.
The second half began with a long-range
effort from Kruse which landed on the top of the net, but there was a sense
that los verde y oro were taking the
proverbial foot off the pedal in the fifty-first minute when Cahill and Luongo
were substituted off, the Swindonian’s benching a good decision for reasons of
conserving his energy and fitness, although he was on course for another man of
the match performance. The men from the foot of the Arabian Peninsula seemed a
mite more organised in defence, beginning as they were to resemble the six-man
rhombus that Kuwait marshalled in the Aussies’ first match.
It was more of the same for the middle section
of the second half. It would be Cahill’s replacement, Tomi Jurić, who would
score the fourth, when Oman got fed up of watching the Socceroos pass the ball
around among themselves and tried to win it away from the hosts. A quick
forward movement and Mathew Leckie spied Jurić at the far post, and the Western
Sydney Wanderer timed his slide perfectly. But Jurić had other chances: he
failed to convert a counter-attacking long ball from McKay, he had a header
batted away by Omani goalkeeper Ali Al-Habsi, and he was one of a number of
Socceroos crowded around the box who couldn’t quite figure out what to do with
a sixty-ninth-minute corner.
The remainder of the match added little to
the storyline, the only remarkable occurrences being the subbed-on Tommy Oar’s
twisting strike in the penultimate minute of regulation time, which almost
swerved underneath the bar, and Kruse’s pouncing on a loose ball in the box in
the ninty-fifth minute, which would have been a goal had it not ricocheted off
a sliding Omani defender.
This match felt like a turning point in the
evolution of o seleção under
Postecoglou. The lads controlled the flow of the game, but were content to play
a patient brand of soccer in which they capitalised on the opposition’s
mistakes (though one wonders, naturally, whether Worst Korea will make the same
number of unforced errors). The most telling statistics were the number of shots
from inside the penalty area (14-1 in favour of the home side at the
eighty-minute mark) and the number of completed passes (700-308 in Australia’s
favour). Perhaps the best move of the night was the two early crosses to Cahill
– it was as if the lads were parodying the cahilldependencia
of which they have been accused when they turned around and immediately started
pursuing other avenues to goal.
All this sets up a mouth-watering clash
with the team representing the capitalist, pro-American regime on the southern
half of the Korean peninsula at Lang Park on Saturday night.
Australia 4 (Matt McKay 27’;
Robbie Kruse 30’; Mark Milligan 45+2’ pen.; Tomi Jurić 70’) – Oman 0
Cautions: Ahmed Mubarak Al-Mahaijri (Oman) 36’;
Abdul Al-Mukhaini (Oman) 45+1’; Matthew Špiranović (Aust.) 73’; Jason Davidson
(Aust.) 87’
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