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Adelaide United have lost just one of their last six games. There has been a rare flutter occurring in the city of churches, belatedly reviving a team that has, for most of the rest of this season, looked in need of emergency resuscitation.
The double-winners from last season, champions and premiers, are this season’s basement dwellers, from champs to chumps, less a title defence than a sort of instant title amnesia.
The entire team – or what remained of last year’s squad, which saw a great number depart – are playing like they’re completely oblivious how well they had done last term. This late season rattle cannot conceal how poor they have been.
How normal is it for the premiers to fall so gracelessly in the space of a single season?
Well, twice in the last ten years has a reigning premier not made the finals the next season; the 2006/07 premiers Melbourne Victory finished fifth in 2007/08, when only the top four made the finals.
And then the 2009/10 premiers Sydney fell disastrously to ninth in 2010/11, in an 11-team competition. But no premier has ever finished last the next season, something Adelaide still stand a good chance of doing this season. This measure just takes into account table position, which may communicate a distorted view, as it doesn’t take into account the possibility that a league-wide rise in quality might have affected things.
Indeed, even though Sydney fell more places between seasons 09/10 and 10/11 than Melbourne did in their 06/07 to 07/08 plummet, Sydney actually managed a smaller gap in points differential (-14) between the two season than Melbourne (-18). Adelaide, at the moment, have 22 points earned in 2016/17; that is less than half of their total of 49 from last season, and they stand to complete this season with a point drop off of around 50 per cent.
This volatility, season to season, is in many ways what makes the A-League so interesting; the nature of the league, the salary cap, the lack of transfer fees between clubs, the fact that so many of the young and talented use the league as a one-or-two season springboard, all of this has rightly been criticised. But these things also prevent monopolies from forming, ensure that teams like Central Coast and Adelaide can even aspire to succeed over the country’s traditional football epicentre clubs.
It means that teams like Perth can finish second-bottom, as they did in 2010/11, and then finish third the next season, as they also did.
We’ve been waiting in vain for Adelaide to click all season. It felt as though the ingredients were there, in spite of the exodus – the mortal damage of which was subsequently revealed – that occurred in the off-season. Isaias, Marcelo Carrusca and Sergio Cirio are all very good players, and have played together now for a while.
Riley McGree is very promising indeed, mixed in as he is into a team with a relatively pleasant mixture of youth and experience. Gui Amor – who seems set to leave at the end of the season – is a good manager. All of these assertions aren’t rendered totally false because of Adelaide’s terrible season.
Perhaps their plight this year is less a holistic problem, and more a critical failure because of a few vital missing components; Baba Diawara must be given considerable credit for Adelaide’s late surge, offering his team a physical presence up front, and anchoring himself as a pivot-point around which his teammates can run, the sort of thing Sergi Guardiola failed to provide.
Diawara has scored three goals in a little under 300 minutes of football for Adelaide, and is their equal-top scorer already, having arrived there in February.
Adelaide might well bounce back next season just as quickly as they’ve fallen this season, and the malaise of 2016/17 might be rendered a cute historical curiosity and nothing more. Still, as much as a sense of blind potential as every new season approaches excites, the fact that Adelaide can suffer through a title defence as bad as this hurts the A-League in Asia, because our champion teams can turn up, months later, at the ACL completely unlike – both in personnel and morale – the teams that originally earned entry.
Western Sydney and Adelaide are attempting to compete in the continental competition this season in this very way. As supremely dominant as Sydney FC have been this term, it is well within the bounds of the imagination that they might labour up to the ACL next season, shorn of, say, Milos Ninkovic and a few others, and fail to make any telling impact there.
No one wants an aristocracy forming in the A-League, with only a few teams capable of winning the like league every year, but the potential for violent fluctuation at the top isn’t ideal either.
Adelaide were the better team against Perth last night, and should really have won. It ended 1-1, with Liam Reddy making a fine one-on-one save as Diawara bore down, the winning goal already playing out in his mind. McGree dazzled a vocal Coopers Stadium with a winding run into the Perth box, with his cross only barely scuffed away.
Diawarra had a genuine penalty appeal turned down, which may well have been given upon video review, were it in place in an official sense, instead of just in a testing capacity on the night. This game, along with the last five, offers hope that next season will be better. Although, as we traipse through these final few rounds, it can’t really be much worse.