Australia

Stalemate will do me fine, and even do me proud

It may have been one of the most boring games I’d ever seen, but it brought a smile to my face at the end of it. A deserved valuable point away from home against China in Kunming. 0-0 was the final score.

To say that our preparation was ‘not ideal’ would be an understatement. Before I even begin with the problems we’ve had in the past few days, months beforehand, the Chinese FA decided to hold this match at an isolated city, at altitude. They even pushed back the Chinese League so that the national squad would have adequate preparation time. So what this meant was that they’d have over two and a half weeks to prepare at 1,900 metres above sea level. We had the best part of two and a half days, because of our European based players, not to mention the A-League which already finished last month.

So weeks beforehand, we knew this would be tough for us. China may not be the most formidable opposition, but they certainly aren’t the worst team in Asia. So the time came for us to slowly start preparing for Kunming. Unfortunately, call it a conspiracy, or just bad luck and bad timing, but all of our big stars happened to get injured this week. Cahill, Kennedy, Sterjovski, McDonald and Emerton all ruled out in recent days. After a poor showing in Singapore, Kewell and Djite were ruled out just before the start of the big game against China. This meant that Archie Thompson had to start as a lone striker today. The curse then continued, he was tackled early on and had to be substituted in the 9th minute. What a nightmare, but we still managed to hold on.

We played well, but were helped by the way China played. You’d expect a huge crowd in a formidable place like China to put pressure on the visitors, but it never really happened. For all the preparation they had at altitude, they really lacked the killer punch. Their passes were always going astray and they never really looked like they were trying to tire us down. Having said that, we really didn’t have much venom in our attack either but that’s understandable, seeing as all our main attackers were ruled out. 0-0 was a fair result. The next qualifiers are in June where all the European players will be available and will be much better prepared. I can’t wait.