Home › Australia/Asia News

Next stop Qatar for Socceroos

Submitted by Andrew Slevison on Wed, 09/08/2010 - 23:33

The Australian national team are now pushing towards the Asian Cup to be held in Qatar in January 2011.

Two friendlies this week against Switzerland and Poland have netted a draw and a win under new manager Holger Osieck and there is a little more to crow about in regards to style of play in the early stages of the new Socceroos era.

The German tactician has the team playing with a slightly more fluent game plan than Pim Verbeek did but as captain Lucas Neill pointed out, it is only in the infant stages and there is plenty to work on moving towards Asia’s biggest competition.

''The character and the determination we showed were great signs,'' he said after the Poland win. ''We still have a lot to work on. We are not going to kid ourselves.

''The talent is there and the potential is there and we need to learn from our mistakes and hopefully we start peaking as we get closer to January.''

Despite the more attacking game plan, the Socceroos’ defence looked shaky at times but Osieck has a lot to work with ahead of friendlies with Paraguay and Egypt in October.

Read more:

Comments (1)

Submitted by Kiat c Ong (not verified) on Thu, 09/09/2010 - 04:59.

I like what I have seen of the two games
the Socceroos played under the new coach.
I am confident that the new generation of players
can be coached by Osiek to play entertaining
football and have a result as well. All the positive signs
were there. I will even dare to predict that by 2014,
the Soccers will qualified for Brazil and progress to the
next stage of the final.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Filtered words will be replaced with the filtered version of the word.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <i> <b> <a> <p> <br> <dd> <blockquote> <q>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Glossary terms will be automatically marked with links to their descriptions. If there are certain phrases or sections of text that should be excluded from glossary marking and linking, use the special markup, [no-glossary] ... [/no-glossary]. Additionally, these HTML elements will not be scanned: a, abbr, acronym, code, pre.

More information about formatting options