Australian Soccer

Australia has made into 2010 World Cup, in 2006 the made through to the 2nd round. Now they have a tougher challenge ahead without their superstar Dutch coach.
He did it tough having had to go through Oceania, then Asia and then finally South America. That just made it sweeter for when Australia defeated Uruguay in one of the most incredible moments in Australian Soccer.

This time around they Pim Verbeek who's also dutch and he glided the Australian team easily past the Asian qualifiers.

We're going to follow Australia into the World Cup and jot down how the progress through the stages.Its really quite exciting times.

Looking at this squad we can see that most of the players are actually playing in Australia, that will change when the overseas players
take their place.

Latest Australian Soccer News

The Australian Soccer team has just arrived in South Africa, 14 days ahead of the competition and have started training in Johannesburg.
They are currently training in High Altitude in preparation for their first match against Ghana.
They've received a gift as Michael Essien from Ghana who plays for Chelsea will be out of action due to a knee injury.
This is a huge boost as he is one of Ghana's main players.

Australia has been granted the role of undergroup in their group.
This is partly due to the ageing squad and not having the kind of quality players that they had at their disposal in 2006 World Cupo.
Goalkeeper Mark Shwarzer has said that they are looking to sneak into the 2nd round.

Australia's current ranking is 20th in the world which is largely due to the Asian Club qualifiers, whoever most will
say that the quality of the competition is not quite as high as other confederations. In either case it is an improvement from
the Oceania qualifying group, which has seen New Zealand make it onto the final stage.

In Australia's latest match they took on New Zealand, it was a rusty performance by Australia which saw the team just defeat New Zealand, in
stoppage time, thanks to a late goal by Holman. Australia's coach Verbeek was unimpressed by some of the tackles by Australian players which he was
quoted as saying, that he was dissapointed and hopes that the team will not repeat those sort of tackles in the World Cup.
He also hinted at some organisational problems which he hopes to fix in two weeks. Personally that really should have been fixed already.

Some of the worst players in that match were from:
Craig Moore who hadn't played in 2 months.
Scott Mcdonald who still hasn't scored in 16 matches for Australia.
Lucas Neill, that allowed the goal to go through and as a central defender didn't organise his defense well enough.
Adam Federici who was replaced at half time, due to the goal he let in.

Best Performers from the night were from:
Jason Culina: He helped create the equalizer and did lots of running wide on the right.
Tim Cahill: Was very busy and involved in alot of Australia's great play in the first half.
Brett Holman: Who scored and was quite active.

Due to the result, Pim Verbeek cut a few players from the squad, suprisingly Scott McDonald was left out.
Midfielder Nicky Carle and Jade North were also excluded. The reason Scott McDonald was not included was due to Australia's team tactics, which play
with a sole defender. Scott Mcdonald is suited to a more 4-4-2 formation.

In other news, some bad news for fans is that Federation Square will not be showing any games and fans need to head out a little futher to watch the game at
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birrarung_Marr,_Melbourne">Birrarung Marr</a>