Bahrain Keeps Us Waiting

The Socceroos have a two month wait before they can officially pop the champagne after Bahrain nipped Qatar for a 1-0 win in Manama overnight. A 2-0 win against Uzbekistan in Sydney earlier left the Socceroos as group leaders with 13 points, and a draw between Bahrain and Qatar would have meant that the Socceroos were mathematically safe. But a plucky performance by the Bahrainis, in what was a poor match for international standards, gave the home side a huge advantage in their fight for third spot and an outside chance of qualification via the play-off.

As The World Cup Blog doesn’t have pages for Bahrain and Qatar, I’ll throw my two cents in since I stayed up till the wee hours of this morning hoping for a draw. Admittedly, I missed the first half as I was flicking between the match and my Pro Evo adventure with the Socceroos (after all, I didn’t care about how they played the match, I just wanted to know the final result), and when I turned it on midway through the second half it was already 1-0 Bahrain.

I proceeded to watch the final half an hour of the match, and was honestly not impressed with what I saw. Passes were constantly misplaced, tackles seemed rash and deadly (especially from the Bahraini number 3), people weren’t going up for headers, the back line didn’t push up after clearing corners, it was almost amateur stuff. Save for flashes of individual brilliance, the match could have looked like my weekend club game.

The Qataris had a great chance to equalise on 70 minutes, after a nice ball through the crowded penalty box led to a shot at the back post, but the striker (forgive me I wasn’t taking notes on their names) tried to pick the keeper’s near post instead of firing across the goal, and his effort was nicely blocked. Besides that brief moment of excitement, the Bahrainis were all over Qatar, and in truth could have gotten one or two more goals.

Coming into the overnight matches, Bahrain, Uzbekistan and Qatar were level on four points from five games, so the win puts Bahrain in the driver’s seat for the race to third place.

Meanwhile, Australia needs one more point from their remaining three games to guarantee qualification. They next face Qatar in Doha, before returning home to play Bahrain in Sydney and the anti-climatic climax against Japan in Melbourne.