The Roar
The Roar

Advertisement

Melbourne Victory and the awoken dragon

Roar Rookie
27th February, 2014
Advertisement
Kevin Muscat.(AAP)
Roar Rookie
27th February, 2014
35

Dear the million or so ‘Eurosnobs’ living in Australia who ‘love’ football. You may or may not have witnessed/noticed the magnificent performance of Melbourne Victory against Guangzhou.

Yeah we lost, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

I’m here to explain why, even with our magnificence, we still managed to get beat rather soundly in the end.

See Guangzhou are an unbelievable outfit, they would have the best players in Asia, probably the best facilities and the best manager.

Even still, our grassroots team with our good facilities and our home grown manager gave them a bit of a wake-up call.

And wake up they did, after their near world-class players were given what I can only imagine being a monumental tongue lashing by their World Cup winning manager.

Six or seven years ago I remember Melbourne going to the Asian Champions League for the first time and painstakingly finishing second in our group.

But this is not just about Melbourne – in those days there was no Chinese powerhouse, Changchung couldn’t overcome mighty Adelaide United and Beijing were certainly no match for their Japanese rivals.

Advertisement

Guangzhou were only just being promoted from China division two.

So what changed?

Well China got fair-dinkum about their local league.

No, not just their business billionaires (billionaires own A-League clubs too!) but their local supporters as well.

For so long considered Asia’s ‘sleeping dragon’, so to speak, China is waking up.

The sponsor on Guangzhou’s shirt is worth more than all of Melbourne’s roster, because they have people watching them on TV and following them in the stadium – it was purely buzzing with ‘newbie’ supporters enraptured by the experience of a real football atmosphere.

And you know what? They’re well worth the price of admission.

Advertisement

Having a bit of money to throw at managers like Marcelo Lippi and players like Alessandro Diamanti and no salary cap helps.

But what about us?

What about our tiny comp with its salary cap and its terrible players who are slow and could never match it at premier league level?

Well at least one of our sides in Asia took it to a team with premier league quality and we only came off two goal losers – much like earlier in a pre-season hit-out with a premier league team.

The sad thing though is even blind Freddy can see where they exceed us is the only place we mostly fail – their club is self-sustainable, they need not live by the blessing of some generous business billionaire and they’re the darling of football fans in Guangzhou.

Melbourne 2-4 Awoken Dragon.

Australia 1-2 China.

Advertisement
close