Once again, Australian football has been done over by those in charge. Adelaide United have had their season and their finances thrown into uncertainty by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The court ordered that the Reds must play off against Indonesian club Persipura Jayapura for a spot in the group stage of the Asian Champions League.
Adelaide had been granted direct entry into the group stage of the tournament as the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) had deemed Jayapura ineligible. The Australian club has already spent over $100,000 on arrangements for their first away match in Uzbekistan.
The AFC had strong justification for kicking Jayapura out of the Champions League, as they compete in a rebel competition sanctioned by neither the AFC nor the Indonesian Football Federation.
This should be a no-brainer for any person with knowledge of sport, let alone the body with the ultimate arbitrative power.
Australia has a long history of this sort of treatment. It was only the other week that the FFA were forced to change the kick-off time of the final game of the round three World Cup qualifiers to a ridiculous 9.30.
Who is going to take their families to see a game that will finish at midnight on Wednesday? How many of the 22,000 people who had paid for tickets will attend?
And why do we keep having these sorts of decisions go against us? Why do we only end up with one vote to host the 2022 World Cup?
Hopefully some common sense comes into play. Hopefully the FFA gets an exception and the game begins as scheduled at 7.30, while Adelaide win by a huge margin before receiving an apology from all involved. Finally, hopefully Qatar has their hosting rights stripped after a FIFA investigation confirms allegations of corruption.
Will any of this happen? Of course it won’t. Sam Keckovich is right: un-Australianism is rife among the world body. You know it makes sense.
And nothing will change until one of two things happens: either we win the World Cup, or Sepp Blatter and his bunch of cronies are removed from power.
Neither of these possibilities looks likely for at least a couple of decades.
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