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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?
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