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That was utterly cringeworthy.
Yes we brutalised a minnow at home in general play, and yes we could have won by a few more with luck, but we also could have very easily been down 2-0 on the back of the blatant missed penalty.
More than the result, given the amount of opportunity, this was a day which established once and for all there is simply no replacement for Cahill in the current crop. Juric, Rogic and Troisi are all 'strikers' whose natural instinct is to hesitate until shut down and/or kick it into low orbit under any hint of pressure. If you had kept the rest of the teams the same and swapped our strikers for theirs, Australia would have won by about 15 goals.
Lol at channel 9 pumping this up as a good effort, this was a day when the socceroos established conclusively they don't deserve to go to the World Cup and it's more or less an exercise in futility if they get through, because against any halfway decent team which restricts opportunity, we are screwed. With Father Time finally catching up with Cahill we are a top 50 team with a set of strikers who wouldn't be in the top 150 in the world.
Like most people who've followed the Socceroos long term I'm exhausted with watching a team try to win with decade after decade of well drilled but by international standards slow, leadfooted strikers clunk balls into the stands, whilst most other international teams, including minnow sides like Thailand have at least one or two legit quicksilver players who are natural finishers.
In part its a result of other codes hoovering up the most physically gifted kid- in the long term Soccer Australia need to send scouts to every aboriginal community in the country, identify the quickest, most skilled prototype Hills, Jettas Riolis when they are still in their early teens and offer them scholarships and major incentives to switch to the round ball early on.
Yes we brutalised a minnow at home in general play, and yes we could have won by a few more with luck, but we also could have very easily been down 2-0 on the back of the blatant missed penalty.
More than the result, given the amount of opportunity, this was a day which established once and for all there is simply no replacement for Cahill in the current crop. Juric, Rogic and Troisi are all 'strikers' whose natural instinct is to hesitate until shut down and/or kick it into low orbit under any hint of pressure. If you had kept the rest of the teams the same and swapped our strikers for theirs, Australia would have won by about 15 goals.
Lol at channel 9 pumping this up as a good effort, this was a day when the socceroos established conclusively they don't deserve to go to the World Cup and it's more or less an exercise in futility if they get through, because against any halfway decent team which restricts opportunity, we are screwed. With Father Time finally catching up with Cahill we are a top 50 team with a set of strikers who wouldn't be in the top 150 in the world.
Like most people who've followed the Socceroos long term I'm exhausted with watching a team try to win with decade after decade of well drilled but by international standards slow, leadfooted strikers clunk balls into the stands, whilst most other international teams, including minnow sides like Thailand have at least one or two legit quicksilver players who are natural finishers.
In part its a result of other codes hoovering up the most physically gifted kid- in the long term Soccer Australia need to send scouts to every aboriginal community in the country, identify the quickest, most skilled prototype Hills, Jettas Riolis when they are still in their early teens and offer them scholarships and major incentives to switch to the round ball early on.
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