All time low

Yeah him and Mundine at the moment.

 

We need to move Cool Willie Kicket along, the man has some talent

 

what he needs is some media exposure. anyone here got ties to eddie maguire???

 

There was a 3 month period in 2005 which was more depressing than now.
Green was an unbackable favourite to beat Beyer in March, while Briggs was supposed to beat Adamek for the vacant WBC belt, we also had the outside chance of Mundine beating Kessler, and Tszyu was supposed to dispose of Hatton and set up a fight with Mayweather.

We lost all of them. :-(

 

Yeah they were lean times. Vic and Peden won though.

 

we have WBA regular world super middleweight title holder mate.his name is anthony mundine.not surprised you've never heard of him hes a quiet unassuming type who rarely gets a mention on this forum.

 

I dont have that high of expectations for our boys when it comes to boxing.

Where the sport sits on the pecking order of national sports and how much $$ is thrown at guys to prepare them for the world scene isnt good, I think we do pretty well.


Drawing and getting outplayed by Oman is far more shameful.

 

We were awful against Oman. I didn't see our last friendly against Singapore, but apparently we were getting outplayed for the first 50 minutes in that game too.

Wilkshire's marker defence is very poor, and most of his free kicks were poor too (one he hit was pretty potent though). Someone else has to take up the reigns, he's just not up to International standard.
Schwarzer was good, and if we had any of our other keepers playing instead we would probably have conceded 3.
It's worrying that Oman looked technically better than us as well. I will say that their structure in defence was actually pretty good.

One positive was seeing Kewell play the full 90 in that type of heat.
Hopefully he'll get better as the tournament goes on, and come semi finals time (assuming we make it) he will be better. I think he needs to have a good tournament to keep his spot at Liverpool as well.

 

Viduka just doesnt have his heart in it anymore.


He looked slow and uninventive, the omani defence was all over him.

But what got me is that its was mostly because Oman wanted it more. They played as a team and contested every ball, and they appeared very fit. Oz is know for their fitness but they looked slow and underdone.

Whe oz was taking on the big names during the world cup, it was their ability to put pressure on, push hard for the full 90 and to outhustle the opposing team in middle, that made them so competitive.
Oman turned that around on them.

That being said my cousin, who is a big soccer fan, warned me that Oman was better than people made them out to be. He told me basically what the commentators were saying, that Oman was an excpetional youth team and that they had been a unit for a while. Unlike Australias mix of two generations of player basically. He said he wouldnt expect it to be anymore than a 2-0 victory.

Individually our defenders are awesome players but as a unit they struggled. They gave no respect to the Omani counterattack and nearly paid the price. When Schwarzer saved that header from that midget who was surrounded by 3 players i nearly kicked the T.V. These guys get paid to do this **** but they looked like Blacktown C grade out there.

I always thought Australia being favourites was a bit optimistic but they need to at least make it out of the pool stage, otherwise this comp would have been a waste of time, and maybe we might get expelled from the asia federation.

 

thats the worst thing about playing these **** type sides.

i mean Oman were always going to defend with 10 men everytime the Aussie got the ball down there end.

and then they were going to use there pace with no other tactics than Counter attack.

Italy play this way and have since the 1950's. Oman and other teams probably know as i do Italy was affective with this with 10 men in the World Cup.

so of course Oman and every other team will play this way. the problems is we havnt found a way to beat it.

Oman isnt as good as people are making out they just did what they knew would beat us and they played that way very well.

95 times out of 100 we beat Oman its just Australia are going to struggle to find a way to beat counter attacking teams that use this style against us.

why because its like Aussie Rules its easy to flood everyone back then defend and make the game scrappy for a team that now in Australia is starting to play possesion football like Holland and France aswell as Brazil Play.

i feel the only way to beat the teams that play this way instead of play 1 striker and 2 wingers like Holland does you play 4-4-2 against counter style teams.

i would have giving Viduka - Aloisi up front with Kewell playing just in behind them.

 

Viduka was almost non existant in the 2nd half. he has a habit of going quiet like that at times. I don't think he's a 90 minute player in this kind of heat.

On paper, this team is probably our best ever fielded (considering that Kewell, and Cahill are over their injuries that had during the World Cup), yet we played so differently to how we did in the World Cup against much tougher opponents.
We just didn't have that desire in us. We weren't chasing loose balls that much, we weren't focussed really.
Our usual 'Get in their faces' style went missing, and it was the Omanians that were getting in our faces.

The commentators mentioned something about Oman's under 20's beating Brazil in the World Youth Cup in 97. They did seem potent in their attack a lot, more than we did too.

We've had a few draws since the World Cup (Paraguay, and Ghana), but usually it's been us that have out player the opposition and have had to settle for the draw. This time the draw flattered us.

We need to get a clean sheet against Iraq.

 

I think Australia needs to start seeing that.

We take positives out of playing a wide open style and beating better sides in open play but Euro teams, especially Italy, dont give a **** if they look like crap for 89mins and put people to sleep, as long as they get the result they want.

Thing is though Australia just kept pushing it to Viduka where he had no space, they should have been outflanking Oman a lot more or even taking the occasional long shot to rattle the defence. Getting them shifting tactics a bit, Oz tried mostly the same **** all game and when Oman saw they could handle it they just kept playing that way.
A professional team like Oz should have some more tricks in the bag

One thing also is that Oman, like a lot of Euro teams, knew the tricks of the trade when it came to slowing down play, diving and wasting time etc. I think some Aussies dont want to do that ****, which I like, because they know we hate that about the sport at home. But in reality it is how the game is played at the elite level.