Asian Cup semi-final match review: Australia v. United Arab Emirates at Newcastle

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’

Man of the match: Massimo Luongo (Aust.)

Asian Cup quarter-final match review: Australia v. China at Brisbane

Following their failure to seal the proverbial deal against South Korea on Saturday night, the Socceroos were banished to Lang Park, a venue on which the code has some history, to face the in-form Chinese in the second quarter-final of the 2015 Asian Cup.

The hosts were back to a variation of their default starting eleven, after the player rotations for which Ange Postecoglou was criticised by anyone and everyone with a platform on teh interwebz. The finalists of this tournament will play six matches in three weeks in the middle of the Australian summer, so rotation is essential. A semi-final against Japan is not an issue – we would most likely have had to beat them to win the Cup anyway, and it doesn’t matter whether we do it in the semi-finals or the final. The proof will be in the eating, and one suspects that Postecoglou knows a bit more about coaching than the randoms who troll his work on t’internet.

The first half was an intriguing but goalless affair in which both sides tried to scope each other out. Australia had a whopping seventy-seven percent of the possession, but most of their scoring opportunities came from set pieces: Mark Bresciano alone had two free kicks almost headed into the back of the net by Mile Jedinak and Trent Sainsbury. Mathew Leckie had a strike saved in the twenty-ninth minute and crossed to Tim Cahill’s head in the thirty-ninth. A few defensive errors were almost pounced upon by the visitors, although the lads had composed themselves by the half-hour mark.

In stark contrast to the first two group matches, in which the Socceroos faced capitalist petrotyrannies (Kuwait and Oman) who defended as a unit, the men from Red China were hyper-individualistic in their marking, winning one-on-one duels and meeting each Australian demand for a goal with a supply of a body to block it. Their centre-forward Wŭ Lĕi was entrepreneurial in front of goal. The East Was Red (actually they were in their predominantly white away strips) but the West seemed readier to score. But from where would the Socceroos get that elusive first goal?

That question was answered soon after the break. A Bresciano corner led to a duel in the box in which Cahill out-muscled his opponent Zhèng Zhì, and the ball spilled back to Ivan Franjic who headed back to the former Goodison Park man. What followed was a classic goal as Cahill avoided any worries about the uneven state of the pitch by executing a bicycle kick – yes, dear readers, a bicycle kick – on the corner of the six-yard box. Forty-six thousand in the stands and twenty-three million at home went absolutely mental.

Cue the now-familiar post-goal celebration, this time performed with such gusto that he knocked the corner flag out of its moorings. The game began to be played at a faster tempo, as both sides tried their luck from outside the area. I gialloverdi hit a purple patch during the few minutes on either side of the hour mark, in which, among other manoeuvres, Bresciano shot a loose ball over the bar and Cahill collected a header with his back to goal and turned to shoot only to be denied by goalkeeper Wáng Dàléi.

The home side’s efforts paid off in the sixty-fifth minute when Cahill, loitering in the vicinage of the penalty spot, headed a Jason Davidson cross into the turf and past Wáng. Two goals seemed enough in theory, but the ‘Roos had to hold off some ferocious Chinese attacking around the seventy-minute mark. The great man was substituted off to rapturous applause in the eightieth minute, and the remainder of the match was a frantic series of moves and counter-moves, with neither team able to alter the margin.

The final whistle sounded and a triumphant Postecoglou shook hands with his bench. The next stop on the Socceroos’ road to glory is that spiritual home of Australian soccer, Newcastle, for a Tuesday night semi-final against our primary nemesis for continental supremacy, Japan (provided, of course, that the Samurai Blue beat the Emirates in their quarter-final in Sydney tonight).

Australia 2 (Tim Cahill 49’, 65’) – China 0

Cautions: Mile Jedinak (Aust.) 20’; Zhāng Línpéng (China) 54’

Man of the match: Tim Cahill (Aust.)

Asian Cup Group A match review: Australia v. Oman at Sydney

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’

Man of the match: Robbie Kruse (Aust.)

On Cricket

I’ve been watching every match possible in this season’s Big Bash League. It’s addictive viewing, but it’s not very good cricket.

Cricket has always had voices from within calling for a more exciting game, or ‘brighter cricket’ as it was known in the parlance of the early to mid-twentieth century. The 1919 County Championship was played over two days of four sessions each; major wartime matches in England were played as one-day single-innings affairs. There were serious calls for enlarging the wicket or adding a fourth stump, or for altering the leg before wicket law to even the contest between bat and ball.

My thesis is that the administrators of the sport erred in adopting formats involving limited overs. Limited-overs cricket has a fatal flaw, which only gets worse as matches are shortened. By limiting an innings to a number of overs, and in particular a number of overs in which it is difficult to lose ten wickets, it shifts the emphasis from taking wickets to preventing runs. Thus the fielding layouts one sees in a test match – with multiple slips, a gully, a silly mid-on or silly mid-off, and a helmeted bat-pad – don’t occur in the limited-overs game.

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that the typical Big Bash League field consists (from the perspective of the television viewer) of a bowler, a wicketkeeper, and empty space – because the other nine guys are all standing around the boundary. This means that rather than make the batsmen earn every run, they are prepared to concede ones and twos in order to save the fours and sixes. Thus, we end up with a more dour and defensive game.

There is a way, however, that one can have ‘brighter cricket’ without the ultra-defensiveness of the limited-overs game, while concluding matches in a much shorter timeframe than the four or five days it takes to complete a first-class match.

As a thought experiment, imagine if all major cricket matches were played as one-day, single-innings matches (though there may be some provision to complete an unfinished match on a second day, for example in the case of rain). The side batting first would do so until they declared or were bowled out, and their opponents would chase the target they set. Four sessions of thirty overs each might be the optimum length for a match. Imagine also that pitches were prepared with less batsman- and fast bowler-friendly bounce, so that these one-day contests were played on the equivalent of a fourth-day or fifth-day pitch in a test match.

The first consequence would be that the game would be more attacking. Needing to bowl their opponents out instead of merely restricting their scoring, fielding captains would place more fielders in catching positions, instead of along the boundary.

The second consequence would be that the cricketing calendar could be brought kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. We might have something resembling baseball: leagues of eight, ten, or twelve teams playing their opponents twice or four times per season, with the league champions meeting in post-season best-of-three series. These leagues would imitate the various post-2008 Twenty20 leagues in being based around franchises instead of provinces, but hopefully would avoid the technicoloured clothing and the abstract-noun nicknames. Proper league competitions, the bread and butter of every other sport, would replace the hodge-podge calendar of bilateral test series and triangular one-day series.

Test matches might still be played, but the changes in pitch preparation would mean that they wouldn’t need to be scheduled for five days – forty wickets would usually tumble long before then. A World Cup might be played, but would feature one-day, single-innings matches.

This way, we would get a shorter form of cricket, which would actually involve players employing all the skills used in cricket, instead of the sordid display of mere slogging and outfielding that is the Big Bash League.

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.)