Fatlo.af

The FIFA World Cup has been going for 10 days now and it’s been filled with drama, excitement, boredom, expulsions, expletives, players, horns, grass, stadiums, fans. All the ingredients you’d expect really. Not sure what you were thinking if you didn’t.

Australia have played twice now, one game went poorly, one game went well, both had red cards both were handed to Australia. Our first game against Germany was met with a rousing array of articles by print and spoken media alike, filled with lots of scathing comments about how Germany were weaker without Michael Ballack and how we could now run all over them, so on and so forth. Admittedly, only a few were like that but there were a lot who were intimating that Germany should rightly feel intimidated by the footballing might of Australia.

And just like 1940′s Poland, Germany strolled right through us, pillaging as they went.

It was easy to get caught up in the positive spin that was being turned on the Socceroos, it’s not often so much good will is offered toward a sport which is still considered a blight on this country. Taking hardworking fans away from the honourable players of the AFL and NRL and the backpockets of their owners (including, amazingly enough, News Limited). However, all this praise needed to be tempered with some perspective. We were playing the Germans (also known as Die Mannschaft, nowhere near as funny as what the translation actually means).

• Currently ranked 6th in the world
• 16 (this is the 17th) World Cup appearances, 3 of them resulting in winning it, 4 others with them finishing runner-up
• For the last 14 WC’s, Germany has always reached at least the stage of the last eight teams
• In terms of semifinal appearances, Germany leads with 11, one more than Brazil’s 10, which has participated in two more tournaments

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all of this so that I can come up with a smug statement at the end postulating that we were never going to win, etc, etc so that I can sound prophetic. I know for a fact that competition isn’t won on historical stats, it’s won on the day. Period. We can beat anyone. On. The Day.

Germany clearly believed that more than we did. And as soon as Tim Cahill got a red card, we definitely weren’t going to be seeing any other big names in the squad.

Roll around the second game on the Saturday just gone and you’ve got yourself a different scenario, more big names starting and a more attacking attitude (initially, anyway).

Both games showed the good and bad parts of Australian football, the disappointing part is that if Australia don’t make the Second Round, the whole tournament will be viewed as a failure. The media will jump on and criticise everyone from Pim to Schwarzer to the ball boys on the sidelines for not throwing the balls back fast enough during games. It will be a bitter disappointment if we don’t make it as we’ve tasted the second round before but with the way the Australian populous works, it feels like there’s an expectation to be world beaters in what is essentially our second go at it (for the modern age of football in Australia at least) despite going up against teams who’ve competed in almost every World Cup that’s been held.

Our footballing revolution started 4 years ago, with Guus and with that amazing penalty from John Aloisi (still brings a lump to the throat whenever I watch it). But we’ve got a great gap in our squad where the youth starts and the seniors end which will only be fixed with time and toil. Hosting the World Cup in 2022 will give us an almost unstoppable momentum I’d hazard, if we know we’ve got that to look forward to then we will have a long term goal to aim for to become an international footballing menace. Turning up at these events to throw sand in the face of the superstars and make it hard for the big countries to waltz in and brush us aside.

It won’t be easy and it will be a long time before we taste even moderate success, remember; we used to get belted in the cricket too.

So now we’ve got Serbia to play, one more bite at the cherry for the boys. There are a few scenarios which can paint a positive picture for us, but there needs to be results, no draws. Someone needs to win and someone needs to lose. Fairly simple really.

Bring on Serbia.