Olympics Wrap and New Blogger

G’day everyone. I’m Caleb, and I’m a new member of the Australia World Cup Blog team; hopefully that should mean more posts and more opinions.

Anyway, obviously our beloved Olyroos have just been knocked out of the Olympics. I’ll spare a couple of moments for each game and then take a minute to discuss some of the individual players.

Australia 1 - 1 Serbia

It’s hard to be too positive about this game. The defence was excellent, but the team came out with five men at the back and were set up for a minimum of attack. Aren’t we good enough to try and attack against Serbia? We really could have used this win to set us up against the more difficult opponents later in the group. The seeds of doubt in Graham Arnold were already affecting me. My man of the match was Matthew Spiranovic, because not only was he absurdly solid at the back, he came charging forward once to take a nice shot; good work for a centre-back.

Australia 0 - 1 Argentina

Well, if we didn’t attack much against Serbia, we did less against Argentina. I can at least understand us planning to defend against a team which fields Riquelme, Messi and an Agüero (who only had one good attacking run in the whole match, poor guy). Defence was solid again; noone could have kept out that goal. But what about that final substitution, Graham? We go a goal down, then you take off Celeski for McClenahan? How does this help? Going two goals down won’t kill us any more than going one goal down, so why not throw caution to the wind? And where is Kristian Sarkies in all of this? Also, Thompson produced one of the worst misses I have ever seen.

Australia 0 - 1 Cote d’Ivoire

Well, at least we went out for the win this time. Thompson was injured, Zadkovich was presumably injured. Sarkies finally started, and played really well. The team did well, but the injury to Thompson left us without a certain amount of firepower up front. I was surprised to see Matt Simon come on near the end. I wish Troisi had had more time to make an impact. But overall, they played reasonably well, and could have won on another day.

So, onto some player performances. Adam Federici was very good, making only a couple of small mistakes and recovering well. I admit I was worried about our goalkeeping situation when Vukovic was excluded, but Adam covered extremely well.

The defence was excellent, in every game. Spiranovic is a hero. I didn’t notice North as much, but the back line was solid every step of the way.

Sarkies, Celeski and Zadkovich were all very good, though for some unknown reason Sarkies only played one game. Carney, who I haven’t always been a huge fan of, tried very hard and produced some good play; I actually liked him better at left-back than on the wing, since he seemed to produce much the same play and covered the LB position quite well at the same time. Musialik was mostly invisible; I got the impression Milligan may have been stepping on his feet somewhat.

Thompson was good off the ball, dribbled well, and was a truly atrocious finisher. Nikita had some good chances, but couldn’t put any away. Troisi looked good a few times, but didn’t get a lot of chances. Ultimately, though, it’s hard to say anything much at all about the attack, since they spent most of their time in defence. Against Argentina, we often had every man behind the ball - you could see Federici aching to play a quick throw to produce a counter attack only to find there was noone forward.

I thought that overall the team did well. The management, however, let us down quite badly. Why couldn’t we attack against Serbia? Why not try to get a goal back against Argentina? These are the questions I have to ask.

Anyway, thanks for reading, anyone who has done so. Please leave comments ad infinitum.