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Mark Rudan said it better than anyone when he told reporters he didn’t want to talk about the football following Wellington’s 3-1 win over Western Sydney.
Rudan’s a fantastic coach doing a superb job at the Phoenix, and if newcomers Western United have nabbed him for next season then they’ve signed one of the best in the business.
But all of that is immaterial. The unfathomable attacks in Christchurch on Friday reminded us that at the end of the day, football is just a sideshow.
How do you find the words to sum up what happened in the picturesque city on New Zealand’s South Island? It will simply never make sense to me.
(Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
I’ve been to Christchurch. There’s a photo on my mantelpiece of my wife and I punting on the Avon River – me with a harried look on my face, her grinning broadly at the camera.
I can’t imagine anyone being so arrogant as to take something like that away from us simply because we might hold different beliefs.
But that, sadly, is the world we live in. One of the victims in Friday’s senseless act was Atta Elayyan, the goalkeeper for New Zealand’s international futsal team.
So I didn’t watch the A-League with any real relish this weekend. I tuned in like I always do, but it was more a matter of routine than something I felt excited to do.
I watched Perth Glory beat Adelaide United on Friday night and wondered what – if anything – Marco Kurz could do if he had a decent striker in his squad.
Would Kurz fare any better at a club like the Brisbane Roar? The Roar Supporters Federation posted a fantastic Q and A session with the club’s chief executive David Pourre on Saturday that went into specific details about the Roar’s recruitment process.
I only caught the tail end of the F3 Derby – although that was clearly the best part of the game to catch – as Ben Kennedy saved not one but two Roy O’Donovan spot-kicks in stoppage-time.
Should Daniel Georgievski’s equaliser have been chalked off for encroachment? It certainly should have if you’re following the letter of the law.
There were reports a couple of weeks ago that FIFA was to change the law for penalty kicks and no longer allow rebounds, although those reports appear to have been incorrect.
At any rate, the Central Coast Mariners and their interim coach Alen Stajcic deserve plenty of plaudits for their backs-to-the-wall 3-2 win over the Newcastle Jets, although it does beg the question of why they haven’t put in that sort of effort every week.
Kosta Barbarouses’ opening goal celebration was the best thing about Melbourne Victory’s 2-1 win over Brisbane Roar on Saturday night, although how the Kiwi international didn’t finish with a hat-trick only he will know.
Substitute Kenny Athiu was unlucky to hit the post with a fantastic back-heel late on, but Victory’s inability to run away with that game said more about their finishing than Brisbane Roar’s resilience.
Anything could have happened at Westpac Stadium, but the fact that the Phoenix scored three goals inside the first 33 minutes spoke volumes for their mindset.
They did New Zealand proud, with Mandi’s spectacular free-kick undoubtedly one of the goals of the season.
Melbourne City managed to bore Sydney FC out of the contest in the late game at Leichhardt Oval, with on-loan Tottenham striker Shayon Harrison doing most of the damage in City’s 2-0 win.
The Sky Blues’ loss all but hands the premiership to Perth Glory, but in truth that’s nothing less than Tony Popovic’s team deserve.
It all matters little in the grand scheme of things anyway.
Football is a wonderful diversion from our day-to-day lives, but it is just a game after all.
We’d all like to believe it’s a matter of life and death, but Friday’s events prove that some things are much more important than that.