Do you believe in miracles?
Australia is less than twenty-four hours away from it’s biggest football match since that night in Sydney in 2005.
What looms against Argentina is historic — berths in the knockout stage don’t come around very often, least of all for an Australian side that has been ridiculed and written off more times than can be counted. That this mob will be now be mentioned in the same breath as the ‘Golden Generation’ of 2006 is remarkable.
For many watching on, 2006 occupies an almost mythical in their footballing imaginations. I was seven when Mark Schwarzer’s heroics sent us to the world stage for the first time in thirty-two years, and for months after that night in November my friends and I would impersonate our heroes in the playground at lunch. Kewell, Cahill, Viduka (he was less popular, since he missed his penalty), Bresciano, and Aloisi were the stuff of legend.
In 1993 a young Socceroos side faced off against Argentina in a two-legged playoff at the Sydney Football Stadium for the right to head to USA ’94. An ageing Maradona gave the crowds — including my father and grandfather, who had queued for six hours before the game — a night to remember as he set up Abel Balbo to put Argentina ahead. The scoresheet will say that Australia equalised just five minutes later and that Argentina only shaded the second leg 1–0, but in truth Australia were a long way off the pace.
Fast forward nearly 30 years and the odds are similarly stacked against the unfancied Socceroos. They face a side that enter as heavy favourites not only for this match, but for the entire tournament. Pound for pound, the Australians are outgunned across the park.
But if this world cup has taught us anything, it’s that the odds rarely matter. Australia have already beaten Denmark, while Japan have improbably bested recent champions Spain and Germany, sending the latter crashing out in the group stage again. Cameroon beat Brazil, and France were upset by Tunisia. For the first time since 1994, no team has emerged from the group stage unscathed — they’ve all dropped points.
The impact of this cannot be understated. Those who have watched team sports for far longer than I will tell you that tournaments sometimes have a life of their own; that one underdog triumph is enough to upset the applecart altogether.
Graham Arnold will know how to use this. He has had more than his fair share of critics, but the results speak for themselves. Tomorrow the Socceroos will walk into the Al Janoub stadium for the first time since Andrew Redmayne’s grey wiggle routine sent Peru packing in the playoffs. They walk in with nothing to lose, facing a team and a man that has a whole country riding on their shoulders.
It was Maradona magic that undid Australia in 1993, and tomorrow another diminutive left-footer bearing the tag of the GOAT will stand before the Socceroos.
But World Cup fever means those odds don’t matter much, and that miracles, far from being the stuff of dreamers, are to be expected.
