Socceroos now need to walk the walk

Finally Australia has reached sixteenth place on the recent FIFA Rankings, a personal best for the team. It’s where we deserve to be as we had a great run on our road to the World Cup.

We finished top of our group, we were the second team on the planet to secure our spot in Africa for 2010 (second only by a couple of hours, mind you), and with the great Mark Schwarzer between our posts, we also managed to keep an amazing seven games clean sheet.

On these facts alone, we deserve every ounce of this great achievement.

However, I am embarrassed to remember that there are countries such as Portugal, Cameroon, Paraguay, Ivory Coast, and so on, that are ranked below us.

These are countries that live and breathe football.

You walk out into the street or on a local beach and you will find kids in the hundreds playing the beautiful game. The football passion that these countries have makes us look like were supporting a game of golf.

Football is the number one sport in these places, while our dominate sporting codes are rugby and AFL.

I hope that one day we become a dominant football nation. It’s time for football fever to really hit our land!

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