australia

The big test against South Korea ended in a frustrating 0-1 loss. But what does this say about Australia?

The Socceroos played their best match in a long time. They completely dominated this match and dished out a 4-0 hiding. Do we need to recalibrate what they're capable of and how far they can go in this tournament?

From the perspective of results, this was the perfect start for Australia. There's still work to do, not least managing the expectations of supporters, but you'd take this any day.

You can't always read too much into a friendly, but I think we can say that Australia is going to struggle at the Asian Cup.

The Sydney derby has become one of the great sporting highlights in Sydney. This was just the seventh one ever, but it was an absolute cracker (esp. if you're a Sydney FC fan).

An uninspiring match. Australia probably had the better of it, but were wasteful in the heat and humidity. It was nice to keep a clean sheet, but you can't win matches (our tournaments) if you can't score. Still more to do.

Australia broke an almost year-long drought with a scrappy 3-2 win over Saudi Arabia. It was a bit of an odd match. We got off to a flyer, up 2-0 after just six minutes. We improved in some areas, but dropped off in others. Saudi Arabia made a game of it, fighting back to 2-1 and 3-2, but we held on. Our 'keeper can consider himself lucky he wasn't sent off. A penalty was given which suggested a red card, not a yellow card to me. Still plenty more to do, but a win will help the confidence.

Postecoglou continues to experiment and try new players and combinations. It's important to re-build, but it would be nice to win a game, given the Asian Cup is only a few months away. Belgium, ranked 5th in the world, were too strong and ran out comfortable winners. We struggled on the attack, especially when Bresciano and Cahill went off. Defensively we seem to have more options than in attack. Our best defence should do reasonably well in the Asian Cup, but we need some goal scorers if we're going to progress.

Our third and final match played out as many would have expected before the tournament. It was always going to be difficult to score without Cahill and we lacked some of the energy and verve of our first two matches. In the end Spain won comfortably.

This game will probably remembered as one of the all-time World Cup classics. Ultimately though, for Australians, we'll look back at one that got away. The margins of error were tiny, but we were on the wrong end of them.