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There was no fairytale ending for Adelaide United as they went down 1-0 to Gamba Osaka in front of just over 38,000 fans at Toyota Stadium in the quarter-finals of the Club World Cup.
Gamba’s champion midfielder Yasuhito Endo scored the only goal of the game, and he was the first to concede that Adelaide were vastly improved from the team that was thrashed 5-0 on aggregate by Gamba in the recent Asian Champions League final.
“Adelaide were much more aggressive tonight,” admitted Endo. “They pressed hard and pressured us into mistakes.”
“I think we saw the real Adelaide United tonight.”
There was no false sincerity in Endo’s praise, with Adelaide giving the Osakans an almighty scare on a cold evening in Toyota.
As it has so often been in Australian football it was a case of so near, yet so far, and how different things might have been had Adelaide captain Travis Dodd not spurned a golden opportunity with a quarter of an hour gone.
Despite the vastly improved performance from Adelaide, the difference in class between the two sides was still apparent.
Five days before his 21st birthday Gamba full-back Michihiro Yasuda gave teenage counterpart Daniel Mullen a torrid time down Adelaide’s right hand side, and all the talk of the Osakans being a “cashed up club” is redundant when faced with the fact that Yasuda is a product of Gamba’s youth academy.
Suggestions that Japanese clubs are artificially strengthened by the number of Brazilian players plying their trade in the J. League also proved unfounded, with Gamba fielding just the one Brazilian – Lucas Severino – compared to Adelaide’s four.
Instead it was a cadre of Japanese-born players who contributed to Adelaide’s downfall, and Gamba demonstrated their strength in depth when substitute Ryuji Bando came off the bench to play an integral part in Gamba’s goal.
So it is Gamba who march on to a semi-final showdown with Manchester United in Yokohama, while Adelaide are left to ponder what might have been as they prepare for the 5/6 playoff with Egyptian outfit Al-Ahly.
And while many will point to the improvement in Adelaide’s performance, the Reds have now lost three straight games to Gamba Osaka.
That’s a worrying statistic given the Osakans recently finished eighth in the J. League, and are rarely considered one of the front runners for title honours in Japan.
Adelaide’s defeat of six-times J. League champions Kashima Antlers in the quarter-finals of the Asian Champions League was unhelpfully misleading.
In the past Kashima have openly spouted their contempt for continental football, with the most successful club side in Japanese football preferring instead to concentrate on domestic matters.
The reality is that Australian teams are still some way away from matching their Japanese counterparts.
As my colleague at The Roar Jesse Fink recently alluded to, I’m often asked what it is that Australian football can do to “catch up” to the domestic game in Japan.
My first instinct is that we need to catch on.
We need to catch on to the fact that the Japanese dedication to training and perfecting a craft – not money – makes Japanese teams so technically skillful.
We also need to understand that even when the financial resources available to some Japanese clubs dwarf those of teams in the A-League, it is how that money is spent that is key. J. League clubs plough considerable amounts into youth development every year.
But most of all we need to recognise that with the right tactics, Japanese teams are eminently beatable.
Aurelio Vidmar masterminded the right tactics – his team simply lacked the bounce of the ball on a frustrating evening in Toyota.