Ring the bells, the ACL is back!

 
Davidde Corran Columnist

By , 23 Feb 2010 Davidde Corran is a Roar Expert

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Adelaide United's Sasa Ognenovski beats Masato Yamazaki of Gamba Osaka to the ball during the Asian Champions League final match in Adelaide, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008. AAP Image/Rob Hutchison

At 9pm AEST tonight, Asia’s premier club competition will return, and like all good football, the Asian Champions League is a warts and all microcosm of Asian football.

On the downside, there’s the misguided political interference that means the majority of fans from the two teams who make it all the way to the end of the tournament won’t have the chance to see their team play the one-off final in Tokyo in person.

But while the ACL is still finding its feet, what gives the tournament the best chance of succeeding is the mostly under-appreciated quality of talent on offer.

Australia aside, the vast majority of Asia’s best footballers still plays within the region.

From the United Arab Emirates to South Korea, most national team players still play their club football domestically. Sprinkle in some exciting foreigners and promising young managers, and you’ve got an enticing mix.

While I’ve never quite understood why some choose to relegate the ACL to the same “worthless” status as UEFA’s Europa League, I’m once again looking forward to another chance to see some football from parts of the world I wouldn’t normally get to.

Just like last season, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the exciting attacking brand of football played by J-League side Kawasaki Frontale. My only regret is that I won’t be able to see them mix things up with Melbourne Victory in person.

While I’ll take the opportunity to watch Kawasaki play in Seongnam tonight, my recommendation is for any football fan within or near Melbourne to get to Etihad Stadium on the 31st of March when Tsutomu Takahata’s men visit.

That brings me on nicely to how Australia’s two entrants, the Victory and 2008/09 A-League runners-up, Adelaide United, will go.

My heart sank a little yesterday when I read some of Melbourne coach Ernie Merrick’s thoughts on his first opponents Beijing Guoan.

“I think we have to be patient,” the 2009/10 A-League coach of the year explained. “(Beijing) are similar to Sydney, the way they come across and pressure centrally and on the flank and leave exposed the other side.

“They are very good at smothering the ball and it’s very hard to pass out of defence, so you tend to have to play longer balls.”

Those comments sent my mind spinning back to Victory’s failed debut ACL campaign from 2008. Throughout that tournament, Merrick’s men were caught offside so often they’d put Filippo Inzaghi to shame.

In both their games against Gamba Osaka, Melbourne players were offside 19 times. It’s a stat that becomes even more damning when you realise that Gamba’s tally didn’t even come close to exiting single digits.

At the time Merrick explained that because the Japanese side played such a high defensive line, he decided Melbourne would try and catch out Gamba by exploiting the space left behind the defence.

Considering that Archie Thompson is at his best when running into space – remember how “hopeless” the Victory striker was for the Socceroos when Indonesia sat deep in Jakarta last year – it would almost be a good plan.

Almost.

The problem was Gamba was playing a high defensive line so as to contract the field of play. This meant there was less space in midfield, an obstacle their more technically astute players could exploit. On the flipside, when the Victory got their hands on the ball they had less time to accurately pick out Archie Thompson’s runs.

Whenever a long ball did come over the top, Gamba’s centre-back pairing were more then adept enough to step up and catch Thompson offside.

So while all the sounds from the Victory has been that they’ve learned form their last Asian experience, Merrick’s comments have me worried.

Personally, I’m much more confident in Adelaide United’s ability to adapt to Asian football. A good example of this was how coach Aurelio Vidmar reacted to United’s 5-0 thrashing by Gamba in the 2008 ACL final.

Only weeks later, with a much more compact set-up, the Reds were unfortunate to loose by a solitary goal to the ACL champions.

At the time, I opined about how the Central Coast Mariners learned a similar lesson last year against Kawasaki Frontale. After a 5-goal drubbing at home, Lawrie McKinna’s men travelled to Japan and lost 2-1 in the driving rain in Kawasaki.

The fantastic Jonathon Wilson often refers to football as “the manipulation of space”. Judging form the acres of space left in A-League games, it’s a lesson that the A-League’s “personnel driven” coaching has yet to learn.

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