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Are Perth Glory the best team in the A-League? Last season they led the grand final for more than half an hour and snuck into this year’s finals campaign on goal difference from Sydney FC.
The key result for the Glory in the run to the finals ended up being a 2-1 win over 10-man Sydney at NIB Stadium back in Round 23.
Including that match, they went on to take 10 points from a possible 15 in their final five games of the regular season, registering vital wins over Newcastle Jets and Melbourne Victory in the process.
So given that Perth reached a grand final last year and go into this year’s finals campaign in a relatively decent run of form, does that qualify them as the best team in the country? Probably not.
What about Brisbane Roar then? After coughing and spluttering their way through the regular season, in a run which included the unceremonious dismissal of coach Rado Vidosic, the Roar found some form towards the back end of the campaign to ultimately finish fifth.
They too beat Sydney FC in a vital match – the final game of the regular season – and likewise collected 10 points from the 15 on offer from the final five games.
And after winning back-to-back A-League championships, the Roar have already come out and claimed they are undeserving of the ‘underdogs’ tag given their recent experiences in winning the competition.
Last year’s grand finalists both face sudden-death elimination finals this weekend, as Perth travel to Etihad Stadium to face heavyweights Melbourne Victory tonight, while Adelaide United welcome the Roar to the atmospheric Hindmarsh Stadium for a Sunday afternoon showdown.
After much conjecture surrounding the relevance of both a six-team finals series and the format of the knock-out rounds themselves, suddenly both teams go into the finals with a genuine chance of being crowned A-League champions.
Glory go into their encounter against Victory as underdogs, while on current form the Roar will probably fancy their chances of knocking Adelaide out of the competition on their own turf.
The question is; is this not what finals football is all about?
Anyone who has ever spent time in the Japanese port city of Shimizu – and in Australia, that’s admittedly not many – knows there’s one topic around town which remains a sore point for most locals.
It’s explained in surprisingly gripping detail in a book by Jonathan Birchall called Ultra Nippon: How Japan Reinvented Football, in which Birchall ostensibly follows Shimizu S-Pulse around during their 1999 campaign in a bid to get a better understanding of Japanese football in the build-up to the 2002 World Cup.
Birchall could hardly have picked a better season to document, as S-Pulse and their prefectural rivals Jubilo Iwata slugged it out in an epic duel for J. League supremacy.
Back then, the competition was split into two separate stages in a mirror image of many South American leagues – in particular the Argentine apertura and clausura championships.
Jubilo won the first stage, finishing ahead of disappearing act Verdy Kawasaki and third-placed Shimizu in the standings.
But after a decent showing under their English coach Steve Perryman in the first stage, Shimizu suddenly took the second stage by storm, finishing top ahead of Nagoya Grampus and the newly-merged Yokohama F. Marinos.
And where did Jubilo finish the second stage? 12th.
The point is, though, that to decide an ultimate league champion, the J. League for years employed a two-legged championship playoff between the two stage winners.
And who do you think ultimately won the title decider on penalties in a two-legged showdown so gripping it’s well worth hunting down Birchall’s book just to experience the tension? Jubilo Iwata.
Fourteen years later, Shimizu S-Pulse are still waiting for their first J. League championship.
Finals football is all about handling pressure.
Whoever does that, in my humble opinion, deserves to be crowned champions of Australia.