His side might have ripped up the script and played out their own Escape from Alcatraz in Manama, but at least Pim Verbeek is man enough to own up to the fact that Australia was found wanting on Thursday morning in its World Cup qualifier against Bahrain.

Tom Smithies, writing for News Limited, slammed Verbeek’s team as having “played without structure, intelligence or style” and described Mark Bresciano’s lucky winner against the run of play as “grand larceny”.

Uncharacteristically brutal for Australian football reportage in the dailies but utterly correct.

It was a shitty effort all round.

I am no oracle, but I take some satisfaction from seeing the man I pinpointed as a major threat to the Socceroos, Jaycee John Okwunwanne, emerge from the 90 minutes as a runaway man-of-the-match.

He missed two gilt-edged chances, one from a cross from Salman Isa early in the second half, another right at the death from his own ingenuity, but throughout the match he showed a level of fluidity and mastery of distribution that reminded me of Ahmed Mubarak Al Mahaijri of Oman (he destroyed Australia in Bangkok in 2007), and the raw technical ability of a Sulley Muntari (if not the shooting and pay-packet).

Since posting my blog on Wednesday, I’ve had a number of people ask me why we can’t get a player like Jaycee John in the A-League.

Beats me as much as you.

I bet your average good-looking, charismatic young Nigerian footballer would stump for the sights and sounds of Sydney over Bahrain any day – even if the money was better in the Gulf.

(A Jaycee John playing for Sydney FC is exactly what would pull in the punters; but I’m not going to rehash that argument here. I’ve done it to many times. But the math is pretty simple: skill + flair + pace = entertainment. Kosmina? Kemeny? Lowy? Are you listening?)

What also struck me from this game is that Verbeek can no longer go on justifying his selection of David Carney, who is horribly out of sorts and repeatedly gave the Bahrainis more joy through turnovers and stray passing than a pin-up’s striptease at a Nevada brothel.

Enough is enough: if you don’t play for your club you should have no business playing for the Socceroos, no matter who you are.

Lest I say it, but it seems awfully hard on Nicky Carle, for instance, to be told he isn’t playing well enough for his Championship club so can’t get a Socceroos gig; yet Carney isn’t playing for his Championship club at all and is playing full games for the Socceroos.

Carle has played 17 times for Palace’s first team this season, scoring three goals and leading the team in assists.

Carney has made one start and done not much else.

Yes, they play in different positions, and Carle has been uncharacteristically stuck in Palace’s reserves the past couple of games while trying to fight his back into first-team reckoning, but I believe the principle of fairness – and applying it – is just as important for the welfare of the team looking ahead to South Africa 2010.

Australia look virtual dead certs to make it now, with nine points from a possible nine so far, and for that Verbeek is owed much credit, but when our team is depleted through injuries to key players, like it was in Manama, it looks defensively brittle, short of inventiveness and is devoid of penetration.

We better pray Verbeek has got his full complement of players when we get to Africa, because otherwise we could be set for a very short stay.

Dear me. Pim Verbeek, ensconced in a hotel in Manama, has a casualty list longer than a Mexican Day of the Dead. Scott McDonald, the latest to pull out of Australia’s World Cup clash against Bahrain, has a chest infection (whatever happened to V for Vicks?) and of those left standing Tim Cahill, probably our most lethal attacking weapon, has a bung foot.

If that weren’t bad enough, the poker-faced Rotterdammer has practically got the time it takes to whip up a plate of couscous to get his team focused on the task ahead.

No problem for Super Pim, though. He’s been there and done it many times before.

With Harry Kewell expected to assume a lone striker role, frankly I’m a little worried.

“H” might be in scoring form in Turkey but when he’s been given responsibility upfront for the Socceroos he usually doesn’t match the hype with deeds.

It’s a big gamble to leave Josh Kennedy on the bench, especially given the home side, depleted with suspensions to Mohammed Salmeen, Abdulla Al Marzooqi, Abdulla Omar and Mahmood Jalal, are treating this assignment like Escape from Alcatraz.

Their jack-in-the-box for this match is naturalised 1.81-metre-tall 23-year-old Nigerian striker Jaycee John (aka “Jesse John”, great name) Okwunwanne, who plays for Royal Excelsior Mouscron in Belgium’s Jupiler Ligue and was responsible for this breakdance-like bit of magic during a match in Bahrain in 2007 (pardon the music). To pull off a move like that takes balls and nerve. And lots of skill.

Time and time again our defenders have been caught out by opposing forwards with sleight-of-foot skills so they’re going to have to work harder than they probably anticipated. (Then again, I can’t see any Australian defender allowing Jaycee John as much time on the ball as he got in that clip.)

This is the first time the Australians will have met the crafty Nigerian-Bahraini (he didn’t play in either of the two games Australia played against Bahrain in 2006), but if Verbeek’s scouts have been doing their work they will be aware not only of his footwork but his creative impact: he set up Bahrain’s equaliser in their World Cup qualifier against Qatar in Doha in September and in a friendly in November last year against Singapore scored a hat-trick. Ominously it was in the same stadium the Socceroos meet the Bahrainis in the early hours of Thursday morning AEST. Coming on a substitute, he also posed some problems for the Japanese in their 3-2 away win over Bahrain in September.

Australians’ sum knowledge of Bahraini football doesn’t add up to much at all really, all things considered, so the ingredients of this match – lack of preparation and personnel for the Socceroos, do or die urgency from the Bahrainis – will go a long way to ensuring it is far more competitive than any of us would have anticipated in the wake of the Aussies’ demolition job of Qatar in Brisbane.

All the same, I think the Australians will be too good for their hosts and set-up an almost unassailable lead in Group A qualifying.

It’s a shame it’s been so easy for the Aussies – I would have loved to have seen them lumped in the far more cutthroat Group B, just for competition’s sake – but we’re not home and hosed yet.

One banana skin in Manama and Verbeek’s forecast could start looking a whole lot different. And we’re sure as hell one football nation that knows all about banana skins, aren’t we?

Well, nothing much I need to add that already hasn’t been written about Adelaide’s thumping over two legs at the hands of Gamba Osaka in the Asian Champions League final. As I wrote a week ago even before a ball had been kicked in anger, “We have much, much more to learn from Japanese football.”

Chris Paraskevas, a young Australian football writer, has penned an interesting piece about it for the football website Goal.com.

One observation in particular interested me, apropos of Football Federation Australia chief executive Ben Buckley’s press release issued after the game, “Buckley seems to have taken nothing from Adelaide’s run, which – if treated correctly – could signify one of the most important moments of the history of the domestic came: when Australia, as a football nation, realised its conspicuous fallibility… it is time to acknowledge the fact that Australian football – and not Adelaide United – was exposed across 180 minutes.”

Since writing my book 15 Days in June: When Australia Became a Football Nation I’ve had a few arguments with people who have read the book about the validity of the title.

Is Australia a football nation after all?

I thought we were at the time, I still think we are, just not a very realised one.

Chris says in his story that Adelaide “deserve credit for their application and tenacity” for their Asian Champions League run; but application and tenacity are qualities Australian football has had in spades since the 1960s, if not earlier.

We could do with less application and tenacity and more invention and skill, in my opinion. The stuff I was writing about a fortnight ago. Until such time as we can match the Japanese in technique, we will go on falling short when it matters most.

All the same, the FFA was right to heap praise on Adelaide in the wake of their achievement in reaching the final (”Adelaide United is the pride of football in Australia”,et al) but, like Chris says, they need to take some lessons from it, and starting making changes now; especially in light of the fact that FFA chairman Frank Lowy is assiduously trying to position Australia as Asia’s football superpower in his concerted bid to snaffle the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

In the circumstances of a terrible beating we’ve been handed a great opportunity to grow.

This week was notable for another hard luck story, that of Socceroos defender and Queensland Roar captain Craig Moore.

After being diagnosed with testicular cancer, the tough-as-nails 32-year-old withdrew from the Australia squad to face Bahrain next week and underwent an operation in a Brisbane hospital to remove a tumour in his left testicle.

My family has had some personal experience of this horrible disease; my uncle Peter Crimmins, the Hawthorn rover, captain and club legend of the 1960s and 1970s, died from testicular cancer in 1976, aged just 28.

Despite having searing pain in his groin, Peter played on with the help of pain-killing injections for almost an entire season in 1974 before being diagnosed with the disease and having chemotherapy. By then it was too late to save his life, but it was a mark of Peter’s courage that he went on playing for a time in 1975 after his cancer treatment. He was shattered when he was left out of John Kennedy’s grand final side that year.

Times have changed.

Early detection is vital and clubs are much more cognisant of their responsibilities to their players’ physical and mental wellbeing.

Not a lot of things in life are more important football, but living itself is one of them.

All Australian football fans wish Moorey and his young family a speedy recovery.

I often get asked how hard it is to keep on writing about football, but, as Slippery Jim will tell you, it’s not hard when you stick to your pet themes: praising Nicky Carle, bucketing Graham Arnold and banging on about how technically advanced our Asian rivals are compared to us Aussie knuckledraggers.

(If I’ve forgotten anything, Jimbo will no doubt weigh in later.)

Another favourite subject is John Kosmina, because he’s just a gift that keeps on giving. A comedic gift. The funniest Australian I know of since Kevin Bloody Wilson. (Actually Kossie would be perfect for Kev’s next bawdy ditty.)

Kosmina wouldn’t know he’s being funny, of course, because he takes himself far too seriously when he’s losing. He likes to present himself as a lovable larrikin, but demonstrably only on his own terms: ie, when he’s in control of the situation, got nothing at stake or doesn’t have to explain himself.

When he’s not in control, stands to lose something and has a bit of explaining to do, he comes a cropper like he did last Friday night when his Sydney FC side lost at the death to Wellington Phoenix at the Sydney Football Stadium.

I’ve already written a blog about his contretemps with Phoenix coach Ricki Herbert at the whistle.

Fans of the game appalled by his antics (there are many) will be unsurprised, then, to hear the news that came out last Tuesday afternoon. Sydney FC’s and Wellington Phoenix’s respective chief executives, Stefan Kamasz and Tony Pignata, had, in the words of Kamasz, decided “they are not pursuing it any further… there was nothing more than an exchange of words. The matter is now closed.”

Hooray for self-policing! Thank god it’s all over!

Meanwhile, Football Federation Australia, which curiously decided not to investigate any part of the explosive incident between Herbert and Kosmina, has thrown the book at Gary van Egmond for his bust-up with Adrian Trinidad in Perth, citing him for “a breach of clause 2.1 of the National Code of Conduct”.

“FFA alleges that the actions of the Coach constitute examples of bringing the game into Disrepute as outlined in clauses 2.2(c), 2.2(f) and 2.2(k) in the National Code of Conduct.”

Hooray for the FFA! Consistency is their watchword!

Kosmina might have escaped penalty this time, from both club and federation, but he should be brought to account by somebody (hell, might as well be me) for his outrageous cuckolding of a hapless reporter at the post-match press conference.

If you haven’t seen video of the incident, we’ve embedded it below.

After spraying his sometime Fox colleague Simon Hill on TV (a bizarre bit of footage, and well handled by Simon; what the flip is a “scandal word” anyway?), Kosmina, looking like he’d just stepped out of a Cronulla hotel at 2am, hair messed up, tie akimbo, took to the stage in a fighting mood.

“Herbie and I used to fight with each other when we played against each other. Nothing’s changed,” he sneered wide-eyed at a journo who’d had the temerity to press him about the Herbert incident and what was said between the two.

(Which is an issue in itself; earth to Kossie, something has changed, mate: you’re the coach of Sydney FC. Entrusted with a position of great responsibility. Yet you come off like a pork chop. Herbert, meanwhile, is a consistently a study of cool and composure.)

Then another scribe made the mistake of interrupting Kosmina while he was midflow in answering a question. Perhaps not totally professional, but hardly something not repeated in any press conference anywhere in the world.

Kosmina looked at him like he’d shat on his lawn.

“Now I’ve interrupted my train of thought so you can miss out. Who’s next?” he said, trailing off with breathtaking arrogance.

But the funniest bit came at the end when Kosmina eyeballed a reporter from the website Back of the Net.

Kosmina feigned complete ignorance then had it explained to him it was a website that could be found on Google.

“Ah, internet,” he said, rolling his eyeballs and letting a Dr Evil-like grin crease his lips like he’d just come up with the joke to end all jokes. “Lets the lunatics out the asylum. The lunatics run the asylum.”

Does this man have any idea about the way the modern media works? Or does he still think people wait with bated breath at the corner tuck shop for the latest Michael Cockerill column in the Fairfax press?

The best and most up-to-date football journalism, whether traditional outlets, blogs, podcasts or even in forums, is found on the internet, here and abroad. I don’t know one football fan who doesn’t get his or her football information from the internet.

But, more importantly, as Craig Foster said on SBS’s The World Game TV program afterwards: “We’ve been wanting the media to be involved in the game for years and years… it’s not acceptable what [Kosmina's] doing [in this press conference]… when the pressure is ramped up on these coaches, it’s not acceptable then to start attacking the media; that’s their job.

“They’re an important part of the game; in fact they’re a highly valuable part of the game. The internet, and the amount of coverage this game gets, is something we’ve been asking for for 30 years… the FFA has to sanction Kossie [for this].”

Exactly. If it weren’t for the internet, for example, I don’t think we’d ever have had a Crawford Report, we wouldn’t have Frank Lowy running the FFA, we wouldn’t even have an FFA, there wouldn’t be half as much corporate interest in the sport or sponsorship revenue, and there wouldn’t be an A-League for Kosmina to get a job in. Or a Fox contract so that he could get his face and spill his mouth on pay television.

(I know this first-hand because I was deeply involved in the fight to bring some transparency to the game in the Tony Labbozzetta years, and much of that fight was waged undercover on the internet.)

So don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Kossie. It’s not becoming of an A-League coach.

But if you want to be a comedian, it’s never too late to switch careers. I think you’d have a bright future.

Well, so much for that. Gamba Osaka underlined the gulf in class between the A-League and J-League on Wednesday night with a performance in the first leg of the Asian Champions League final that was as comprehensive and crushing as Operation Urgent Fury, the US invasion of Grenada in 1983.

I wrote a column for The Roar on Wednesday morning that tried to give some credit to Australian teams for our “physical” style of play, but Aurelio Vidmar’s team, puzzlingly, didn’t even look to fall back on that tactic. The entire XI, plus the coaching staff (who, it must be said, cast a faintly ridiculous air with their walkie-talkies; fat lot of good they did) appeared completely at a loss about how to counter the fast, controlled, economical and astonishingly attractive play of Gamba.

What passing. It was a joy to behold.

There wasn’t one minute of the match where Adelaide looked in the hunt, which is a massive credit to Akira Nishino’s side. Adelaide aren’t chumps, but they looked third rate against Gamba, who dazzled Melbourne Victory away in similar fashion back in April, which I wrote about for The Roar.

Back then, speaking of an interview I did for Pim Verbeek for a magazine, I wrote: “Verbeek was nostalgic about Japan, waxing lyrical about the facilities available to coaches, the money invested in the development of junior players, the infrastructure of clubs, but mostly the technical ability of Japanese players. They didn’t always score goals, he said, and that wasn’t always a positive, but they could produce some beautiful possession football.

“The Japanese play combination football,” he told me. “More Brazilian influences than European … in Japan, they always try to build out from the backline to the midfield to the striker and back and that’s the way they prefer to play.

“[Against Melbourne in April] the Japanese side treasured the ball (55 per cent possession is telling), not wasting it for a moment, conjured some magical passing in midfield, were quicker, defter with their trapping, and overall their touch all over the park was superb.”

Half a year on, nothing had changed on the evidence of what we saw on Wednesday night. They were in every way superior to Adelaide.

The Australians didn’t produce one shot on target in 90 minutes and not even a decent one off target.

Apologists for Adelaide will point to the two basic defending errors that resulted in the Japanese side’s two goals before the break, but that does Gamba a disservice and casts a flattering light on Adelaide’s performance where there should be none.

It was a horrible effort from the Reds. Their worst game since the 6-0 demolition by Melbourne Victory in the grand final of “Version 2.0″ of the A-League.

Michihiro Yasuda on the left was utterly dominant and his goal, Gamba’s third, was richly deserved and beautifully taken.

Hayato Sasaki on the right was equally a handful, and repeatedly left Adelaide defenders eating his dust with his explosive turn of speed and magical footwork.

Both men are tiny. Yasuda 173cm, Sasaki 167cm.

(Another lesson for the A-League here? Who needs tall timber when veritable homunculi can cut apart a storied and towering defence like Adelaide’s with consummate ease?)

The talk of an Adelaide fightback next week is patent nonsense if they play anything like they did on Wednesday, and they’re going to have to do it without Ang Costanzo and Eugene Galekovic, who will be
suspended.

Something Vidmar needed like a hole in the head.

Australians love a scrap, we revere the talk of “fighting spirit”, but frankly I think Gamba has already won the title.

There wasn’t one player or one aspect of Adelaide’s play that I thought could present problems for the Japanese side in the return leg.

They had the Reds’ measure in every conceivable way and, most impressively, it was a win arrived at almost entirely with Japanese players. Gamba’s Brazilians, Lucas’s opener aside, felt almost peripheral to the action generated by Gamba’s stellar midfielders.

We have much, much more to learn from Japanese football than even I thought.

On Monday evening, at a five-a-side kickaround game in my neighbourhood, I caught up with a friend, a personality manager-agent with lots of footballers on his books. He’d just got back from Japan after having meetings with J-League clubs about one of his players.

The player was perhaps short of European quality but ideal for Asia; Japan was going to be an important rung on the ladder of his career.

In the short time he was there – it was a veritable whistlestop – my friend managed to catch a J-League match live.

He wasn’t that impressed. “I tell you, our A-League is just as good,” he said.

I was surprised; mostly because in the past I have seen myself the yawning gap in technical standards between our top respective J-League and A-League teams.

“Yeah,” he went on, “but football isn’t all about technical skills; it’s also about a bit of this.”

He threw out his elbow and mimed a popping sound. “Japanese players just don’t know how to handle it.”

Which, in truth, faintly appalled me but my friend was right. In the hour that followed I got muscled off the ball repeatedly by a player, an ex pro, who had no qualms using his body to stop me getting up the
field.

It happens every minute of every A-League game. Australians are very good, it must be said, at physical football. Our opponents, club and international, have long bemoaned our style of play, especially in the days before Guus Hiddink and Pim Verbeek.

Some of our storied players were, in virtual effect, thugs.

In the Asian football firmament, we are known as the tough guys. And because of this, our Asian rivals don’t like playing us. It’s never fun to be on the wrong side of the pitch when coming up against an Australian footballer.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve long derided this characteristic of our national football character and craved the opposite – it is a major theme of my book 15 Days in June – but perhaps there is some mileage to be gained from it when it comes to advancing our progress as a football nation.

If Japan remains the technical benchmark for Asia (which, I’m sure we can all agree on is correct; only Korea comes close), and Australia flies the flag for biff, surely some sort of mutual benefit could be derived.

Leaving aside the obvious issue that we would be aiding and abetting our main World Cup rival (and vice versa) but keeping in mind the overall aim of raising the level of Asian football in general, I think
there is room for an exchange of wisdom between A-League and J-League clubs; specifically handing over some J-League players to A-League clubs to “toughen” them up and returning the compliment so that some of our less technically adept players can improve their base skills.

Short of being regarded as official transfers as such, it could be something that is treated as a quasi-exchange program, two-way traffic that takes place in the off-seasons of both leagues.

It is perhaps fanciful, as it would involve Australia ostensibly admitting we fall short of the Japanese when it comes to o jogo bonito, but the whole point of the exercise is our young players becoming better all-round footballers, and that is worth showing some humility for, is it not?

The Japanese have shown more than enough of that since 1945. Now it’s our turn.

A coffee mate of mine, an Italian called Giovanni Mele, who from time to time gives me the goss on Serie A I’ll never glean due to my extremely poor to non-existent grasp of the Italian language, sent me this YouTube clip during the week.

It shows Inter coach Jose Mourinho mouthing off at one of his players, striker Julio Cruz. At about 2:30 on the tape you can clearly see the former Chelsea and Porto boss say “vaffanculo to Cruz, which according to Giovanni, means “f**k off.”

According to the English edition of La Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy’s famous sporting daily, “Rather than directly disobeying the coach, who wanted him to play just behind [Zlatan Ibrahamovic], the Argentine player (whose tactical awareness has been amply demonstrated in the past) played his own game.

It is well known that he is unhappy at how little he is playing; now the issue of his contract may arise. It expires in 2009 and the club has never offered a renewal, so from next January ‘El Jardinero’ will be able to agree a free transfer to another club.”

Mourinho wasn’t censured for his outburst, did not get slugged with a fine of any sort, from federation or club (Inter boss Massimo Moratti didn’t want to know about it), which prompted Giovanni to ask me: “Was that a good example for the few million people including kids who were watching the game on TV? In Italy everyone probably already forgot about that little incident but would they in Australia?”

Giovanni raises a good point, especially in light of the recent disciplinary penalties handed down to Queensland Roar coach Frank Farina and, before him, notably, John Kosmina and just about any A-League coach you care to name.

Football Federation Australia is so intrinsically conservative in its handling of incidents that are perceived as harmful to the image of the game that it has a habit of overstepping the mark.

In the case of Farina, of whom I have never been a huge fan but respect immensely for his straight shooting (albeit when he’s not talking to SBS), the FFA came down on him with what I regard as unnecessary force.

All he did, need readers be reminded, is lament that Mark Shield and the assistant referee had made a gaffe in not calling back Adelaide’s Cristiano for offside in a move that resulted in a goal to Robert Cornthwaite and won the Reds the match 2-1 over Farina’s side.

He did so albeit rather colourfully, going on record in the post-match conference as saying “two blind mice missed it” and “[Shield] must be blind Freddy”, but it was pretty tame stuff all the same, hardly warranting the $2000 fine that was imposed.

Farina then turned around and said he wouldn’t tell it how he saw it any more: “The biggest lesson to come out of [this fine] is make sure you don’t tell the truth.”

Which is ultimately a bigger loss for the game than the money filched from the Roar’s pockets.

I don’t condone Mourinho telling Cruz to “f**k off” any more than I condone Farina having a veiled swipe at Shield – both incidents could probably be handled differently – but I do think coaches should have the right to say what they think without being whacked with ridiculous sanctions from overly stitched-up bodies overseeing the game.

In Italy, clearly, it’s allowed to ride. In Australia, it’s not. And as a result we lose a little part of the soul, colour and character of the game.

The names and shirts of the eight A-League franchises are antiseptic enough. There are more by-laws, articles and codes of conduct in the game than are necessary. The football we’ve seen this year in the A-League has been comparatively dull to that seen in recent seasons.

So please, FFA, for the sake of the sport and the interests of fans, stop asphyxiating the life out of it.

Shield is a big boy and should be handle to some scrutiny of his decisions. Farina lost the game because of a contentious decision and should be able to express his mind, colourfully or otherwise.

The kids of Australia aren’t going to be permanently scarred. Hell, they might even come to like the A-League a bit more.

And that’s the whole point of promoting the game, isn’t it?

When it comes to reporting on Adelaide United’s exciting fortnight ahead, we at The Roar have been leading a one-website rearguard against the fog of indifference afflicting the mainstream media. Well, according to one of my regular readers-friends, who I will keep anonymous and who sent me this email last weekend.

“I’m very pissed off, he began, “and the more I think of it the worse it gets. What’s with the FTA networks, both TV and radio? Firstly Adelaide make Australian football history and my local TV and radio stations barely gave it a mention; 102.9FM Hot Tomato [a Gold Coast station] waffled on about league then rugby and ended the sports stories announcing Pieter van dan Hoogenband is announcing his retirement, a f**king swimmer from Holland and no mention of Adelaide’s efforts!

“You just a wrote a blog on Adelaide and I swear if you’re not living there or you don’t religiously follow football you’d be lucky to know it happened.

“Now today I was watching the news and had to endure at least three minutes of news on the [rugby league] World Cup, where I learned they have included sides such as Indigenous Dream Team and New Zealand Maoris. What a farce …

“Sorry to rant at you, but it seems that while the FTA networks have their finger in the AFL and NRL TV rights pie they’ll do anything to help us forget football and it seems they are all in it together.”

I’m not completely sure about the veracity of those statements, because I’m afraid I don’t watch the commercial networks these days much beyond my need for the occasional hit of Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, but SBS, at least, was getting behind the Reds Express on the weekend, with a long interview with Ange Costanzo and pretty thorough coverage on its World Game website (which, yes, in the interests of disclosure, I write for).

But having followed Australian football since the late 1980s-early 1990s, I know where my friend is coming from (as did my readers in my last blog, who vented their anger at FTA TV’s blank on Adelaide).

The mainstream media’s understanding of football remains frustratingly superficial, its coverage token. But why should we expect anything more?

For instance, FTA TV’s idea of a good news story (outside of the ABC and SBS) is showing sneak peeks of the new Pink or Kylie Minogue video.

In a week where James Packer divested himself of his family’s last remaining interests in FTA TV and magazines, media is becoming more and more segmented, tailored to niche interests. The pace of change is breathtaking, especially with the slated high-definition channel reforms slated for January 1 next year.

And, inexorably, advertising spend is following it.

The internet has blown open all the paradigms that use to apply to the media industry in this country, and, if I’m an example of a typical football fan, I can tell you I get 95 per cent of my football information from the web, where the analysis is better, the information more up to date and the choice unlimited.

So if Channel Nine or whoever wants to blow hot air into the Rugby League World Cup at the expense of giving coverage to the irrepressible march of Adelaide United to Asian Champions League infamy, then I couldn’t care less.

It just proves again how incredibly irrelevant and inadequate a source of information the FTA TV networks are, not just for football fans but thinking, demanding, tech-savvy people in general (anyone with a laptop, BlackBerry, iPhone, 3G-enabled mobile phone).

As for the Rugby League World Cup, which my friend rightfully disparaged, I couldn’t help but guffaw at a quote from Colin Love, the chairman of the Rugby League International Federation, over the controversy regarding the eligibility of NRL players Fuifui Moimoi and Taniela Tuinaki to play for Tonga after representing New Zealand (since declared lawful by the NSW Supreme Court).

“We’d love to see all the best players in the tournament, he said. “But you can’t just break the rules, you can’t turn it into a farce.”

A statement predicated on the assumption that the RLWC wasn’t already just that.

If Channel Nine or any of the FTA networks really think otherwise, at the expense of having the opportunity to follow and report on the truly significant feats of Adelaide United, they deserve to rot for their ignorance.

Viva la revolution!

Sharp fans will remember Fenerbahce and former Spain coach Luis Aragones got in a spot of bother in 2004 when he called France striker Thierry Henry a “black shit” while speaking to the “gypsy” José Antonio Reyes and was caught on camera doing it. Not something you can easily explain away.

But Aragones, being a stubborn old goat, never tried.

When asked in 2006 his famous comment and whether he would apologise, apropos of Spain’s clash with France in Germany, he wasn’t about to back down.

“No, no [I won't apologise], don’t go down that road,” he said. “Henry knows through Reyes, through everything [how I feel]. I won’t talk about it for another second. It’s a topic that isn’t worth talking about. Why? Because it’s not like that. I have black, Gypsy and Japanese friends, including one whose job is to determine the sex of poultry.”


Which cleared everything up.



This week, though, with his Turkish side facing Arsenal in the UEFA Champions League at home, Henry’s good friend Arsene Wenger was prepared to forgive.

“Will I shake hands with [Aragones]? Why not?” he said. “He is not a racist, I have that information. Samuel Eto’o came out and said that he had him as a coach and that he was not racist at all.

“I think he wanted to motivate Reyes during the training session but it was a very clumsy sentence.”

Clumsy and stupid, and let’s be frank, offensive, but it was big of Wenger to try to consign the incident to the scrapbook. Aragones, meanwhile, has stuck to his guns.

Says a lot about Wenger and less about Aragones.

So I’m sure I wasn’t the only happy chappy to see the Gunners thump Sari Kanaryalar 5-2 on the Turks’ home turf.

On to Australian football.

A big backslap to Adelaide United coach Aurelio Vidmar and his team for leading their redoubtable side into the final of the Asian Champions League, where they will meet Japanese team Gamba Osaka in a two-leg, home-and-away tie. Overnight the Reds overcame Bunyodkor in Tashkent, losing the match 1-0 but winning on aggregate 3-1.

The decider is set down for Adelaide on November 12, a week after the first leg is played in Osaka. 
Adelaide has also qualified for the lucrative FIFA Club World Cup in Japan in December, irrespective of whether they lose.

A massive achievement.

It’s something of a shame that they won’t be getting to play Urawa Reds, given that club’s extraordinary home support which leaves Gamba for dead, but there’s going to be plenty of atmosphere all the same.

In the run-up to the two big games I can recommend two blogs on Japanese football, Aussie expat Mike Tuckerman’s and Ken Matsushima’s, for anyone wanting in-depth coverage of the J-League you won’t find anywhere in the Australian media.

There’s nothing these two blokes don’t know.

Unfortunately for football fans wishing for a bumper crowd, Adelaide United will playing its home tie at the 17,000-capacity Hindmarsh Stadium, so there is no chance of playing the home tie at the much bigger Adelaide Oval.

The club’s stated wish, and an understandable one, has always been to keep it at Hindmarsh and not give away any conceivable advantage to Gamba.

Football Federation Australia should give the club the A-League fixture reprieve they’re seeking in having their clash against Central Coast Mariners in Gosford on November 8 moved to another date.

Adelaide have asked for favours from the FFA before and got no joy. They’ve excelled despite all sorts of obstacles being put in their way.

This time round they’ve more than earned being cut some slack.

The announcement yesterday that Mark “Where’s Wally” Milligan was signing for the Newcastle Jets in the A-League has brought an end to one of the most absurd football sagas in recent memory and left the player pretty much exactly where he started, albeit on a short-term deal which leaves him free to rack off again when his agent takes another call from Europe.

For eight months, Milligan has been wandering about the globe since his acrimonious split with Sydney FC, stumping up in France, Germany, England, Portugal, Greece, and the Outer Hebrides for all I know, desperately trying to secure a playing contract in Europe and make good on his oft-stated ambition to be a European-based Socceroo.

But it’s all come to nought.

Not that it stopped his svengali, Graham Arnold, picking him for the Olyroos’ pathetic campaign in Beijing.

However, when Pim Verbeek, Australia’s coach, declared recently that he could no longer justify including Milligan in his squads if he was not playing regular football, something had to give.

I’ve had a few conversations with Verbeek over the past few months and it was made pretty clear to me he had great concern for Milligan’s career and some of the advice he was getting.

Early on, especially, Milligan was taking some diabolical liberties with his position in the team: not letting the national coach know where you are, for instance, is pushing the working relationship between master and apprentice.

But Verbeek had no complaints with Milligan’s recent conduct. The player was giving him regular updates on his search for a new club and the communication lines with the national coaching staff were transparent and open.

Sending a few text messages, though, wasn’t keeping him match fit and, after all the hype and palaver, he’s had to settle on the Jets to relaunch his grounded career, both club and representative.

The irony is delicious, of course, that it’s the Jets who have come to his rescue after Sydney FC raided the Jets’ playing roster at the end of last season, picking up club icons Stuart Musialik and Mark Bridge.

If there were any hope of Milligan returning to the harbour city, they were snubbed when John Kosmina stated emphatically he was not welcome anywhere near the club, even if they could well have used his services.

“You don’t go out with old girlfriends and you don’t take old players back,” he said.

(News for you, Kossie: old girlfriends can be hell of a lot of fun).

Milligan might have had his head in the clouds for far too long, brought on, probably, by his good efforts at the 2007 Asian Cup and un-needed gee-ups from his business associates. But he is a promising youngster and he has found a club and a coach that will bring him back down to earth.

If Gary van Egmond can’t, Sydney’s fans, livid at the circumstances of his original defection, certainly will.

It would be easy to keep on making fun of Milligan, but he’s only 23 and this whole experience will have made him a wiser if not better man.

The importance of club loyalty is one subject he should be right up on.

If not, his woes are only just beginning.

Here’s an interesting one, a nice rejoinder to all the bad press European football has been getting in recent times for its problems with racism, on the pitch and in the terraces.

Mario Balotelli is another phenom off the production line of hot Italian strikers and already, at barely 18, been linked with a move from his club, Inter Milan, to the Premiership, most notably (predictably) Chelsea, and the Primera Liga with a rejuvenated Réal Madrid.

Italians in England or Spain are not news.

What, however, is news is that the very mummy’s boy-sounding Balotelli, nicknamed “Super Mario”, is black.

Balotelli was born in Palermo, Sicily, but his birth parents, Thomas and Rose Barwuah, are Ghanaian.
At the age of two, with his parents concerned for his health living in a cramped one-bedroom flat with other immigrant families, he was fostered out to an Italian family, the Balotellis, outside Milan following a court order.

He never went back to them.

Balotelli only gained Italian citizenship in August this year when he turned 18, so despite sterling performances for Lumezzane and Inter’s youth teams he could not play for Italy’s junior rep sides because he was officially classified as an alien immigrant, his adoption not legally ratified.

Balotelli made a huge splash this week when he scored twice for Pierluigi Casiraghi’s Italy under-21 side in its do-or-die qualifier for the Euro under-21 championships in Tel Aviv, the first an incredible 30-metre free kick that Roberto Carlos or Ronaldinho would give their right arm to score.

The second, perhaps not as spectacular and certainly not as far out, was scored in open play but is notable for the insouciance with which he traps the ball outside the box, takes aim and fires, leaving Ohad Levita, the hapless Israeli goalkeeper, clutching at air.

The Israelis had drawn the first match of the two-leg tie 0-0 in Ancona and fancied their chances of going through in a big upset at the expense of the Azzurini, but that first time around they didn’t have to counter Balotelli, who missed the match through a bout of flu.

With Balotelli, the Italians were a class apart.

I’ve written much over the years about the problem of football racism in Italy, Spain and the Balkans, but nothing ever seems to change, despite all the Nike-, UEFA- and FIFA-promoted anti-racism campaigns.

Perhaps it’s because Italy, Spain and Croatia in particular, unlike France, lack identifiably black faces in their national senior sides that the boo-boys and banana throwers can actually look at, or up to, and say “he’s one of my own”.

Let’s hope Balotelli, Italian born, Italian raised, and at least on national men’s team coach Marcello Lippi’s radar if not in his plans, can be the start of some real and profound change.

Rock out! It’s time to put Airbourne’s Runnin’ Wild on the iPod boombox and count down the hours. Tonight, in Brisbane, the Socceroos resume their World Cup odyssey against Qatar, after whupping some Uzbeki ass in Tashkent.

It was an historic victory in Central Asia, arguably the best win of Pim Verbeek’s career as Socceroos coach, which is beginning to assume the firmness and thrall we’ve all wanted to see in that position since the departure of Guus Hiddink in June 2006.

Qatar shouldn’t even be here, of course; but that’s by the by.

Politics assured their survival and they’re here to give us a shake.

This Middle Eastern paperweight is deadly serious about qualifying for the World Cup and there are two important items in their luggage this time that weren’t with them when they last paid us a visit.

Bruno Metsu and Sebastian Soria Quintana.

Metsu, a stand-in for the “ill” Jorge Fossati, is one of my cult heroes: his charismatic and explosive Senegal side was one of the highlights of Korea-Japan 2002, beating world champions France and going to the quarters before meeting a roadblock in the form of Turkey, and he’s got a Choirboys-style bonnet going on that is so unhip it’s positively happening. Teamed with a T-shirt and linen suit jacket: dynamite.

Marseille Vice.

Uruguayan born, Qatari-naturalised Quintana, or Soria as he’s often called, is the superstar of Qatari football and the one player I’ve always sense the Australians have never quite had the measure of.

Last time I saw him play against the Socceroos, in Doha in June, he got more joy down the right side of the pitch than I do with a bottle of Chartreuse and a Jenna Jameson DVD, so don’t expect a repeat of the Qataris’ tactics from their visit to Melbourne in February next year.

They’ll be looking to score early through Quintana and his naturalised Brazilian-Qatari team-mate Fabio Cesar Montezine, and, if they do, it’ll be an interesting test of Pim Verbeek’s coaching. He’s rarely had to pull back a goal – the Socceroos are usually level pegging or defending a lead – and in terms of creative weapons at his disposal his stocks are slim, with Harry Kewell and Mark Bresciano out, and He Who Shall Not Be Named regarded as surplus to requirements.

Tim Cahill is going to carry a lot of weight on his shoulders.

Going into this match of the final round of qualifying, the Qataris are on four points to Australia’s three, and four goals to Australia’s one, albeit from two matches to the Socceroos’ one.

They’re in form, been given a World Cup lifeline by their buddies in high places, got what appears to be their first-choice team on the park and playing under a bloke with more Gallic personality and infuriating aloofness than Eric Cantona.

It’s gonna be a hell of a show.

C’mon Pim. You’re a top bloke and all but it’s all getting a bit rich. To say the last time Nicky Carle played a decent game of football was in the A-League two years ago is like saying Lorenzo Lamas is one of the great male action stars of Hollywood. Give us a break.

Carle was man-of-the-match for the Socceroos against Nigeria in London in late 2007.

He has starred for Bristol City and won raves at Crystal Palace. He sits at the top of Palace’s goalscorers’ list with three goals from 12 games and has amassed on-pitch time third only to Danny Butterfield and Clint Hill, the only other player on Palace’s 33-man roster to start every match this season.

Even Palace’s manager Neil Warnock has said: “He was one of the best players in the Championship last season.”

Would Palace pay $2 million for someone who was crap?

Palace’s thump-it-and-pray-for-the-best style of football might not suited to Carle’s undoubted abilities, but since when were clubs supposed to be 100 per cent tailor-made for players?

It’s the player who must adapt to the club.

The ball might be flying over his head more often than he would like, but at least the bloke is playing for his club and got his gaffer’s unqualified and fulsome support.

Mile Sterjovski is signed to but doesn’t play for Derby yet hitherto that hasn’t stopped him from being picked by Verbeek for a run in the green and gold.

Up until his position became untenable, Verbeek was offering the same get-out-of-jail-free card to Mark “Where’s Wally” Milligan.

The argument is flawed, the reasoning faintly ludicrous.

Possibly our national coach said it just to get a rise out of Carle’s supporters, which include me.

I’m not about to rehash any of my theories about Carle and why he could be valuable to the national team, but what I fear most about Carle’s continued and baffling exclusion from the Socceroos is that it’s sending a message to young players who might ever want to play for Australia that flair is not wanted; if you’re gonna try something special with the ball, go home.

If you wanna play like Ruben Zadkovich, however, step up. Come to papa.

Flair players are a dying breed around the world and the number we have in this country could be counted on one hand.

With our stocks so low, is a player like Carle really that dispensable?

I don’t give a stuff what anyone says: Carle is one of our most gifted players and he deserves a lot more love than he’s getting at the moment from Verbeek and his coaching staff.

I’m as tired as you are reading this as I am writing it but the curse of Nicky Carle is becoming farcical.

One friend of mine, a respected football historian, joked to me during the week that he must have slept with someone’s missus; that Carle’s malaise reminded him of one our more naturally talented cricketers of recent times (I won’t name him), who played less Tests for his country than he probably should have.

The fact he exposed himself at a team barbecue had a lot to do with it, not his ability or form.

Whatever Carle’s personal relationship with Verbeek, Henk Duut, Graham Arnold, Tony Franken and everyone else in the FFA inner circle, let’s hope that isn’t coming into play when they select their teams.

Australian football, and Australian football fans, are being robbed of seeing one of our great talents.

Verbeek could at least name Carle in a provisional squad, something to which he should be a walk-up starter, and not play him. It would be some encouragement.

Just as he’s giving to the clutch of Adelaide United players still in the 28 named for the October 15 clash with Qatar.

But he’s not even giving him that.

I suspect the truth about this whole saga has a lot more to do with the coaching and cultural background of Verbeek and Duut than it does Carle.

So head’s up, Nicky: you’re not doing anything wrong and you’re not being forgotten.

Well, I can put one lingering unsolved mystery to bed. Graham Arnold has no intention of quitting his assistant coach role with Pim Verbeek and wants to go to South Africa 2010. I have this on the best authority next to Arnold himself and that is Verbeek.

Arnold is not exactly a drinking mate of mine for reasons well known to regular readers of this column so rather than ring the man himself I’ll take it from the Socceroos coach as gospel.

There was a suggestion just before the ill-fated Olympic campaign in the Fairfax press by Michael Cockerill that Arnold was on his way out of the FFA and on to Europe after Beijing and when that didn’t materialise there were reports he was likely to take the coaching reins of the new North Queensland franchise in the A-League.

That didn’t bear fruit either.

In fact, so I’ve been told by Verbeek, Arnold’s intention was always to stay on with the Socceroos till 2010. At least it’s settled then.

We would have preferred, of course, to have heard from the man himself and his reasons for staying on, but two months on Arnold has said nothing about the Olyroos, Socceroos, anything.

I’m not going to use this column to bash the bloke but is it really out of line to expect from a coach of a publicly funded sporting team some explanation for what went awry in China?

He’s the coach of a men’s national team, our penultimate collection of football talent. Huge responsibility but, it appears, no accountability.

Amazing. The guy is untouchable.

One other thing I can also dispel. From first-hand discussions with Verbeek, it’s clear to me Arnold
picked his own side.

During the week in Sydney, we spoke. The name Bruce Djite came up. Verbeek inferred that he was informed of Djite’s omission rather than having input into omitting him.

So this talk that the Olyroos squad was selected by a committee and not Arnold appears to not be correct. If anything, the committee - Verbeek and other FFA hitters - approved Arnold’s selection; that is quite different to selecting them.

So it was Arnold’s baby, and it was another failure.

Verbeek clearly holds Arnold in high regard and wants him by his side in South Africa. He says Arnold is aware of the criticism and expects nothing less of the media in this country; he has a tough skin and can handle the scrutiny.

It’s Arnold’s family and friends who are most affected by negative press.

All well and good.

Arnold, though, would likely present a more forgivable and sympathetic character if he had the courage to face down the questions the Australian football media want to ask of him.

Nobody is perfect; people make mistakes.

To own up to an error is admirable. Australians respect candour and humility. But to take a team comprising some our best under-23 male players to the Olympics with the stated aim of winning a medal, win nothing, and then skedaddle off into well-remunerated obscurity without the will, inclination or otherwise to say one word to the public about what went wrong is the height of hubris.

The protection of Australian football is worth more than the protection of Arnold’s ego.

Factoring in the usual myopia of the Australian sporting press, it’s not surprising that potentially one of the biggest football stories of the year has flown under the radar in these parts.

There’s a fascinating article in the German magazine Der Spiegel regarding the case made by a Canadian journalist, Declan Hill, that the Ghana vs Brazil match at the 2006 FIFA World Cup was fixed.

Hill, well regarded internationally for his work investigating corruption in ice hockey, makes the sensational claim in his book The Fix, published in Germany, and has set up a website to promote it.

“This book will forever change the way you think and feel about professional sport,” it puffs. “The Fix is the most explosive story of sports corruption in a generation. It presents compelling evidence that some of the highest soccer matches in the world may have been fixed: European Champions League, Olympic and World Cup tournaments.”

Now we all know match-fixing is a cancer afflicting the Asian game and some smaller European leagues; that is not new. But a World Cup fix is a major story.

In the book, Hill claims to have met a Malay Chinese man he calls “Lee Chin” back in November 2005 and kept in close contact with him over the following six or seven months, during which time he was allegedly informed a thrown game was on the cards at Weltmeisterschaft 2006 featuring Ghana.

“[Chin] told me that people from his syndicate had already been in touch with a few of Ghana’s players during the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and that he had succeeded at the time in getting Ghana to lose the final match against Japan,” Hill tells Der Spiegel.

“He claimed contacts existed now and that things [at the World Cup] would go ahead.

“Then, on 25 May 2006, he told me to come to a Kentucky Fried Chicken branch in a shopping centre in the north of Bangkok. I was to witness the deal being negotiated. Why was I allowed to be present? No idea. I sometimes got the feeling that Chin viewed my scepticism as a personal affront.”

Hill describes how one of the men present was a junior coach for the Ghanaian FA who “needed an initial down payment in order to secure the team’s trust”.

“Chin said the man had obtained the consent of eight of Ghana’s players. A few days earlier I had read in the newspaper that Ghana’s team would receive $20,000 for each victory at the World Cup. I asked Chin whether that wouldn’t be more important to Ghana’s players. He replied: ‘But a victory is not 100 per cent certain. And each player is guaranteed to receive $30,000 from me. Get it?’”

When Hill got to Würzburg in Germany for the match, he was told “the deal with someone in the Ghana camp was on, 100 per cent” and the team would ensure they lost by two goals.

Hill was sceptical, but watching the game he observed, “The Ghanaians played as though they were putting their whole heart into it, but then there were a number of stupid mistakes: passes didn’t succeed, the defence was careless, the team collected three stupid goals. After the game I was in the stands in Dortmund with tears in my eyes because I was convinced, at least emotionally, that the match had been fixed.”

My first thought reading this was that Hill hadn’t watched enough African football, but I digress.

Hill, wanting to confirm his hunch, thus flies to Ghana to meet the black guy from the KFC in Bangkok, who it emerges is Abukari Damba, former Black Stars goalkeeper and national under-17s coach and assistant to under-23s.

“[Damba] admitted that he had gotten the Malaysian access to the team and that the match fixer also approached the team captain Steven Appiah … [but he didn't] know what happened after that.”

Hill must have thought he had won the Pulitzer even before meeting Appiah, because nothing Appiah told him during their meeting in Accra, the capital of Ghana, added any credence to the story. What he did get Appiah admit to was taking money to win games, sort of like Shane Warne pocketing cash to give weather forecasts.

Appiah regarded them as match bonuses, incentives to perform. He did not make any admission regarding fixing the Ghana-Brazil match and if you read the transcript of the interview on Hill’s website it seems to back him up.

So it’s odd that Hill went ahead with the book without what I would regard as solid evidence and effectively makes the allegation anyway.

Appiah, rightfully, is livid and claims to have been quoted out of context.

His federation, the Ghana Football Association, is threatening to sue.

“What Declan wants [is to] create publicity for the book and drive up sales,” says Appiah. “The truth of the matter is that I have never accepted money to influence the outcome of a game and never will. If
anyone has doubts, they should look back at the game and what it meant to us. To suggest we will throw all that away for some $20,000 is ridiculous … the amount of money [Hill] talks about compared to the money we made from reaching the second round alone makes his claim even more laughable.”

I tend to agree, and for the first time in memory, I agree with FIFA, who have poured cold water on Hill’s claims.

From what I’ve read so far, his argument is weak and the evidence, truth be told, isn’t that compelling; when your star witness, Appiah, says he’s been misrepresented, it’s not a good look, and the real identity of “Lee Chin” is never disclosed. Hill says he will be killed if he spills the beans.

Football is a sport full of dodgy operators. Games are frequently thrown and it’s happened at the World Cup before (think Argentina 1978). I hear stories all the time from people in high places in football about very important matches being fixed. I wrote about the controversial Iraq-Qatar WCQ here and when I first heard the Qataris had thumped Uzbekistan 3-0 last week I thought a fix was in again.

But I have no evidence. Nothing but suspicion.

In my opinion that’s not enough information to go on with to write a book making such a claim, but Hill clearly feels otherwise.

I don’t know what the German libel laws are but they would have to be a lot more lax than they are here for him and his publisher to emerge from this without being taken to the cleaners.

I’ve made a point of singling out Harry Kewell for his bravery in joining Turkish giants Galatasaray. Now I’m extending the compliment, and deservedly, to Luke Wilkshire for his extraordinary move from Dutch side FC Twente to FC Dynamo Moscow, home of the great Lev Yashin.

Extraordinary for two things.

First, the size of his fee.

$10 million is a gobsmacking amount of money for a player that only a few seasons ago was wasting away in lower-tier English football. Second, the choice of destination. Wilkshire becomes the first Australian to play in the Russian Premier League, so he becomes yet another of the great trailblazers of the Australian football diaspora.

Years ago I edited my SBS Sport colleague Matthew Hall’s excellent book about Australian players abroad, The Away Game, which documented the paths of Joe Marston, Craig Johnston, Eddie Krncevic and Robbie Slater, among many others, to English and European football.

The first wave of football migration was to England. Then to western Europe. For a brief while it was South-East Asia and Japan. Then it became eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Now it is becoming western Asia and Russia.

Far from being a comedown from the leagues of western Europe, the recent performances of Zenit St Petersburg in the UEFA Cup and Russia at Euro 2008 has shown the Russian game measures up. So, from a career development point of view, this is far from a bad move for Wilkshire and also, crucially, brings him closer to his great mentor, Russia coach Guus Hiddink.

It was Hiddink who recognised Wilkshire’s qualities when he was flapping about as a squad player for the Socceroos in 2005.

Hiddink fast-tracked Wilkshire into the first XI as a utility player, able to switch from defence to attack to virtually anywhere on the field, and made a virtue of his fitness. Other players with similar traits – Brett Emerton, Jason Culina, just two examples – have gone on, like Wilkshire, to be vital cogs in the Socceroos machine.

(Whether that has been to the detriment of creative mien in the side – to wit: the continuing omission of Nicky Carle – is not for me to debate. I will just get my head shot off if I dare raise Nickygate again, though I will say for the record here that his absence from the just-announced squad for the Netherlands friendly and Uzbekistan WCQ really is beyond the pale.)

But it’s clear to me, from watching the game and my own insights gleaned from discussions with Pim Verbeek – tha