Legend has it that Marco Polo visited Hangzhou around 750 years ago and described it as “the finest and most splendid city in the world”.
Hangzhou, “City of Heaven”, was apparently Marco’s favourite city in China, and the West Lake reminded him of Venice. With Saudi Arabia a single point behind the Socceroos and final round matches against Japan’s Blue Samurai at home and Saudi Arabia’s Green Falcons away, Socceroos fans will be in Hangzhou heaven if the Socceroos come away with a win and Japan beat Saudi Arabia on Tuesday evening. That would put the Socceroos four points ahead of Saudi Arabia before those final two qualifying matches.
The Dragon Team will be hoping for an unlikely upset against the Socceroos at the 80,000 capacity Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre, although confidence is not high among Chinese fans after China’s most recent 1-0 loss to Saudi Arabia in Riyadh last week and average to poor national team results going back basically forever. More on that later.
In last Thursday’s match, possession stats were 80-20, shots 19 to 4 in favour of the Saudis with seven on target to China’s zero, and China made only 187 passes at 67% accuracy compared to Saudi’s 743 passes at 90% accuracy. In mitigation, winger Lin Liangming was sent off just before half-time, so playing a half a man down and with that kind of statistical dominance, perhaps losing only 1-0 was not such a bad result.
Australia on the other hand, head into this match full of confidence after a somewhat lucky, though comprehensive, 5-1 victory over Indonesia on a poor pitch at Sydney’s Allianz Stadium last Thursday.
Indonesia, with newly appointed Dutch legend (albeit as a player, not coach), Patrick Kluivert, and a starting line-up featuring ten Dutch-born players with just one Indonesian-born player on the pitch, brought back memories of the “Dutch East Indies”.
The newly-naturalised Dutchies, bursting with top flight Eredivisie experience in Holland, demonstrated enough industry and promise to show that Indonesia will be a force in Asian football. Fortunately for the Socceroos, many of these players were playing together for the first time, and their exuberant pressing, mistakes at the back, and poor defence on set pieces – especially corners where three goals were conceded – gave Australia’s goal difference a big boost.
Jackson Irvine of Australia celebrates scoring a goal with team mates during the round three FIFA 2026 World Cup AFC Asian Qualifier match between Australia Socceroos and Indonesia at Allianz Stadium on March 20, 2025 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
Australia’s biggest headache going into this match was the announcement of injuries to forwards Keseni Yengi and Adam Taggart on Sunday, which meant Mitch Duke was rushed over from Japan as cover, to groans and moans from the armchair experts.
“Why not current golden boot leader Noah Botic?” many pundits asked. The short turnaround between matches, a fight time of just over three hours between Tokyo and Hangzhou, and a familiarity with Popovic’s systems understandably meant the SOS was sent to Duke not Botic, whose flight time from Melbourne would have been 11 hours. Had Botic flown over he would have had perhaps just 36 hours to prepare.
Chinese fans pessimism about their national football team arguably comes from four main causes:
A lack of grass roots and youth participation
Despite China’s huge population and the public’s passion for football, China lacks participation at youth level through a combination of: a lack of football pitches, a traditional family culture that places importance on academic success meaning that the average kid spends a lot of his/her free time doing homework and being tutored after school rather than playing football, the popularity of basketball, in particular the NBA, and the lack of national team success, among other reasons.
Deep-rooted Corruption
At the top level, the Chinese Super League is still and has always been plagued by scandals. Corrupt referees are commonly known as “black whistles” in Mandarin Chinese. In a crackdown on rampant graft, Li Tie – a Chinese football legend who played for Everton in the 2000s and coached the national team from January 2020 to December 2021 – was sentenced to 20 years in prison in December for fixing matches, and both accepting and giving bribes. In March 2024, Chen Xuyuan, the former head of China’s Football Association, was sentenced to life in prison. A dozen officials were caught in the crackdown. In 2010, another crackdown resulted in a similar outcome, with a dozen or so high-level officials ensnared and sentenced.
Poor Financial Decisions
From 2016, the Chinese Super League went on a massive spending spree buying international talent, similar to the Saudi Pro League in the past few seasons. It all started with Shanghai Port buying Oscar for US$82 million (although to be fair he ended up playing for them for nine years so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad investment after all). In 2017, a 33 year old Carlos Tevez signed with Shanghai Shenhua and became the highest-paid player in the world, scoring only four goals in just 16 matches. It all came crashing down when the global economy faltered when Covid hit at the end of 2019. So much so that 2020 premiers Jiangsu Suning, went bankrupt and folded in early 2021 which forced former and current Central Coast Mariners player and Graham Arnold’s son-in-law, Trent Sainsbury to look for a new club. A salary cap was introduced in December 2020, limiting foreign players earnings to US$3.6 million per season which resulted in an exodus of foreign stars.
Poor national team results
Team China has qualified for the World Cup just once, in 2002. As Japan and Korea were hosts, this meant that China had a much easier qualifying path in the absence of their two fiercest regional and historical rivals. Imagine if Australia had not qualified in 2006, and every World Cup since then, and our sole appearance was in 1974. It would seem scarcely possible but the notoriously malcontent Australian football public would be even more negative and pessimistic than they already are now. Imagining that single World Cup appearance scenario, it’s easy to understand Chinese football fans’ low expectations.
Many Socceroos fans are nervous about Tuesday’s must win game against Team China, although perhaps slightly less so than they were before Indonesia match after the goals went flying in, and even with the dreaded return of Mitch Duke to the squad. I expect Coach Popovic to stick to a very similar starting line-up and formation as the one that started against Indonesia, with the hard-working, though controversial squad choice, Brandon Borello coming straight in for the injured Adam Taggart, and Craig Goodwin in for Martin Boyle, not because Boyle had a bad game against Indonesia, but because of Goodwin’s dead ball ability, and the cracker he scored against China in Adelaide back in October.
Kitwallyhttps://https://ift.tt/ztvmUBE it be heavenly Hangzhou for must-win Roos?
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