The city which has some claim to having
been the soccer capital of Australia in the era prior to the Ethnic Ascendancy
of the late 1950s hosted the second semi-final of the 2015 Asian Cup on Tuesday
night. The Novocastrians were treated to a largely unenthralling spectacle
played in wet conditions, though one in which the host nation did what it
needed to do to ensure a place in Saturday night’s final against South Korea.
The Socceroos’ opponents, thanks to a pair
of upsets in the two Friday quarter-finals which also saw Iraq knock out Iran,
were the seven Gulf emirates once known as the Trucial States. Like our earlier
opponents Kuwait, the U. A. E. qualified for a World Cup once upon a time –
namely Italia ’90. Since then, they’ve been too busy shopping and having their
South Asian slaves construction workers build really tall buildings to
win soccer matches.
The ‘Roos opened the scoring in the third
minute, when Tim Cahill and Trent Sainsbury both jumped up to head a cross, the
first-mentioned not connecting with the ball but the latter heading truly.
Eleven minutes later, Cahill and Mathew Leckie each had a crack at converting a
Robbie Kruse cross but were denied by the goalkeeper; it fell to the third man
in, Jason Davidson, to do the honours. It felt then that it was all over bar
the shooting, and the slow tempo of the remaining hour and a quarter ensured
that there was never much chance of the scorers being troubled further.
The Emirates’ playmaker Omar Abdulrahman
had been sledged
as ‘lazy’ coming into the match, and seemed determined to prove his critics
wrong. He got back in defence, and was instrumental in most of his team’s forward
thrusts. Centre-forward Ahmed Khalil was also in the thick of it, going just
wide and to the right with an outside-the-box strike in the fifty-first minute.
But overall, al-abyad didn’t look like a side which had just knocked out the continent’s
flagship team. The Socceroos pressed mercilessly and were able to strip their
opponents of possession in a comically easily fashion; the gulfsiders’ feeble
attempts at counter-attacking were usually a case of one player (usually Omar Abdulrahman
or Khalil) dribbling the ball upfield and having no-one to whom to pass.
Postecoglou’s men continued their dominance of the possession statistics, going
into the interval with fifty-eight percent of the ball, and having advanced
inside their opponents’ penalty area nine times to the Arabs’ four.
Cahill decided to provide another
highlight-reel moment when he used Ali Mabkhout as a springboard to head away
an Emirati corner in the fortieth minute. He was substituted off in the sixty-seventh
for Tomi Jurić. This blog thought that captain Mile Jedinak had done
a Paul Gascoigne three minutes prior, ruling himself out of the final with
a second caution, only to discover that the Asian Football Confederation
expunges previous yellow cards before the semi-finals. The rest of the lads did
more or less what was expected of them; Kruse, one of this blog’s favourite players,
particularly distinguished himself, going on a nice little solo run across the
‘D’ in the fifty-sixth minute before shooting wide, and generally motoring
along the wings providing lots of ball for the various options in the box.
The only other noteworthy event occurred in
the seventy-fifth minute, when a Leckie shot was saved by Emirati ‘keeper and
captain Majed Naser. The continent’s highest-profile referee, Uzbek Ravshan
Irmatov, awarded a goal kick instead of a corner, to the astonishment of all
present.
With the nouveaux riches from the Gulf dispatched, the Socceroos head to Homebush
for a final against South Korea. This group of players are ninety minutes away
from this nation’s finest ever soccer triumph. A triumph that owes everything
to Novocastrian miners and steelworkers who founded great clubs like Adamstown
and West Wallsend, and who kept the association game alive in its darkest hours.
FORZA AUSTRALIA!!!
Australia 2 (Trent Sainsbury 3’;
Jason Davidson 14’) – United Arab Emirates 0
Cautions: Mathew Leckie (Aust.) 42’; Mile
Jedinak (Aust.) 64’
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