ACL Aussies

It was this week confirmed that the Minor Premiers and Grand Final Champions from LAST season will be Australia’s Asian Champions League representatives for NEXT YEARS competition. That’s right, the teams that qualify could finish dead last the next season and would still compete in the ironically named “Champions League.”

Now in Australia we are different to everywhere else in the fact that we play our season as a summer comp rather than a more traditional winter time slot. This means we end up out of whack with everywhere else, hence why the problem with who qualifies for the ACL arises only for us.

Surely the smart and rational thing to do would be to just simply have “Australian team A” and “Australian team B” for the draw with the teams to be advised once the season here has been finished. This is what the FFA has been pushing for but the AFC stood stubbornly firm and would not budge.

As a Sydney fan I am struggling to say this but in all seriousness, they don’t deserve to be there yet. If they go on to win the Grand Final again then the FFA and AFC should breathe a sigh of relief but the big loser in all of this will be Melbourne. They are runaway leader in this year’s regular season and the way they play reflects the table.

Sunday’s game between Sydney and Adelaide once again continued the trend of exciting and skillful encounters which shows both teams have not dropped off too much from last season. This will at least save the FFA from an embarrassing situation where one of Australia’s ACL representatives has lost half their team or are languishing at the bottom of the domestic table.

Both Sydney captain Mark Rudan and Adelaide coach John Kosmina have declared that early acceptance will make them lift rather than slacken off but even so, justice has far from been done with this situation.

DANE