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Jesse Fink

I'm happy to see the Football Association of Malaysia is now paying for its own shortsightedness with the revelation that Selangor, the country's premier football team, was unable to hire any foreign players to join the club in its 2010 AFC Cup campaign, which begins on February 24 against Binh Duong of Vietnam.

Not because any weren't available, rather none felt the need to bother signing on with a club that was likely to be knocked out early. Who could blame them? It wasn't like they could fall back on earning a wage in the Malaysian Super League, either, because in Malaysian football, of course, foreigners are banned.

They were much better off looking to land contracts elsewhere.

"We are left with no choice but to field an all-local side in the competition," said club secretary Hamidin Amin. "We have tried looking for players but the good ones don't want to join us for a short stint.

We know [Binh Duong] have foreign players and we can do nothing about that. But I still think that our present batch of players can take us to the Round of 16 in which it will be very tough for us to advance."

You don't say. Selangor are due for a hiding. At this level of Asian competition, even a rung below the AFC Champions League, you don't get anywhere without foreign players, as the Malaysian sides that were dumped from the 2009 edition, Kedah and Johor, will attest.

Al Kuwait Kaifan, last year's winners, has foreigners on their books, as do runners-up Al-Karamah of Syria. In fact, you would have to go through all the 32 squad lists of clubs in the East and West zones but I'm pretty sure the only other side going it completely with homegrown players is lowly Victory SC of the Maldives.

So for the FAM to cling on to this notion that in excluding foreigners from its league it is bettering the cause of the Malaysian game is utterly delusional.

The interests of the Malaysian game, of course, would be served by having a Malaysian side progress deep into the finals of the AFC Cup, even winning the trophy and qualifying for the AFC Champions League.

That would involve playing club football at the highest level in Asia, against the best sides from Australia, Japan, South Korea and China.

But in six editions of the Cup so far Malaysia hasn't even been able to make the semi-finals. The best result was in 2008, when Perak and Kedah both made the quarter-finals, but they hardly covered themselves in glory: Perak got smashed 7-0 on aggregate by Safa of Lebanon and Kedah fared little better, whipped 7-1 over two legs by Qatari side Al-Muharraq.

Things have to change.

Malaysian football, despite the success of the Harimau Muda at the SEA Games in Laos, is going nowhere. It is being left for dead by the growth of football in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, and these are all leagues that wouldn't be where they are today without foreign players.

The world game is just that: the world game. It's time Malaysia opened its eyes to the fact and let the world in.

Is there any rhyme or reason in football in Asia? I've been covering the Asian beat for years now and not a week goes by where I'm not surprised by some of the things that occasionally bubble to the surface of the 46-member Asian Football Confederation gumbo.

Last week, in my ESPN STAR Sports column, I questioned how AFC president Mohamed bin Hammam could condone having a team of French mercenaries, Etoile FC, play in the S-League while hectoring Football Federation Australia to hook New Zealand-based side Wellington Phoenix from the A-League.

Now it's all got a bit ridiculous.

The Harimau Muda, a team of very good under-21 Malaysian players that recently won the SEA Games title in Laos, were knocked back from joining the very same S-League, despite the fact they were Asian (fancy that) and there is a sizeable Malaysian expat population in Singapore and not much of a French one.

So the team has instead opted to play in - this is not a misprint - Slovakia.

Last time I checked Slovakia was in the middle of Europe. But the exchange rate isn't bad.

The Malaysians will play 14 rounds in the ten-team Slovakian National League, the country's second division from February through to May. They are standing in for RU Sport Podbrezova, which couldn't finish the season. The league is currently in its winter recess.

Now fair play to the boys. This is a great opportunity for them. As coach Mohd Azraai Khor says, "It's a great move by the FAM to allow our young players to compete in a high-level environment in Europe. There are not many opportunities for Malaysian teams to compete in that part of the world."

You're telling me. But it makes a mockery of the restrictions that Hammam himself maintains are in place to prevent such inter-confederation exchanges and which he uses to back up his position on Phoenix.

Which is fine by me - I think it's fantastic to have teams playing anywhere they like with whoever will have them - and through precedent it opens up the very real possibility in the future of having a South-East Asian Super League, comprising the best teams from Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia. If a Malaysian team can play in Slovakia, the possibilities are endless.

So, please, Mr President, can you clarify what your position actually is?

As soon as we know that, the Phoenix and the A-League can get on with what they should have been entitled to do all along - building a football club - without being held to ransom by the AFC's apparent whims.

The biggest eruption over the Australian A-League weekend was not the right old barney between John Hutchinson and Michael Thwaite during the Gold Coast United vs Central Coast Mariners match in Gosford but the hullabaloo over the benching of Robbie Fowler before the North Queensland Fury vs Brisbane Roar derby in Townsville.

As has been exhaustively reported throughout Asia, Fury coach Ian Ferguson, a former Rangers man, thought Fowler was looking a bit "jaded" and wanted to freshen things up a bit by going to a 4-1-4-1 formation and the former Liverpool striker wasn't going to be the lead man. That job was for the Netherlands Antilles' Dyron Daal.

Essentially Ferguson asked for his marquee player - an A-League appellation for a player that is paid above the salary cap - to sit on the bench.

But Fowler, so it appeared, threw a hissy fit and refused, taking his place up in the terraces with his kid, where he spent most of the game talking on his mobile phone, presumably moaning to a friend.

Meanwhile his Fury teammates scrapped their way to a 1-1 draw and, had Fowler been riding the pine as he was allegedly asked, might have snaffled a victory. That's what he'd been put there for: to give Ferguson some bite off the bench if he needed it.

Seems fair sort of reasoning to me. Yet afterwards Ferguson was pilloried by former English Premier League players and now TV commentators Mark Bosnich and Robbie Slater for his decision. They couldn't believe he would have the hide to ask Fowler - a 34-year-old well past his prime - to be a reserve; that he hadn't had the good grace to give Fowler the option of not being on the bench at all and instead be left out of the squad altogether for some spurious made-up reason to save face.
Excuse me?

Who's the manager here? What's the manager's job? It wouldn't matter if it was Fowler or Lionel Messi or Cesc Fabregas on Ferguson's bench, the buck stops with the coach.

Guus Hiddink benched both Harry Kewell and Tim Cahill, Australia's biggest stars, at the World Cup and it was a masterstroke. But Ferguson tries the same tactic with admittedly less success in the A-League and he's condemned for embarrassing Fowler.

On Monday the club took the step of having both men air their grievances behind close doors, after which Fowler was ostensibly let off the hook due to "misunderstanding".

Said Fury chairman Don Matheson: "I've spoken to them today and realise there has been a misunderstanding - Ian wanted to play a particular formation and that included utilising Robbie as an impact player off the bench and Robbie believed he wasn't part of the squad - and there has been an unfortunate outcome because of that misunderstanding."

Right. So what was stopping Ferguson from cupping his hands from the sidelines and yelling, "Hey, Robbie, not up there, mate - down here"

And having Fowler run into the shed to put on his gear?

Don't misunderstand this, then, Mr Fowler: in my opinion, you acted like a right plonker. A five-year-old girl. And not, I believe, with the behaviour of a professional sportsman and, worse, not like a teammate.

You've let down your coach, your team, your club and the fans. No one's humiliated you. You've humiliated yourself.

Pardon me for asking, but just how is it that Asian Football Confederation president Mohamed bin Hammam can have conniptions about Wellington Phoenix being in the A-League, even threaten to take away Australia's Asian Champions League spots unless the New Zealand club becoming an "Australian entity", yet not say boo when a French team joins the S-League?       

In case you missed it, Etoile FC has joined the 12-team Singaporean competition, made up entirely of French players. Names attached to the project include David Ginola and Lucien Mettomo. It is the first European side to join Singapore's rather unconventional league, which over the years has played host with varying success to "satellite" club sides from South Korea, Japan and China, as well as thrown-together disasters such as Sporting Afrique FC. Chinese Super League champion Beijing Guoan is the latest Asian football club to give its imprimatur to a franchise in the island state.

But Etoile is remarkable even by Singaporean football's eccentric standards.

As Red Card's R. Sasikumar, a marketing consultant to Etoile, explained last week to MediaCorp: "It's fantastic, especially considering that we managed to put this together in such a short time... the players are still in Lyon, but they will arrive in Singapore on January 24. They are going through their medical and working out final contract details, important issues that we want to sort out before they get on the plane."

In short, a collection of mercenaries from another confederation with no connection to Singapore whatsoever. They haven't even arrived in the country and the season kicks off on February 1.

Yet Wellington Phoenix, a club with eight Australians (ie, Asians) on its books, is considered a dangerous intruder in the AFC by Hammam, and he has given the North Island side until 2011 to "re-register themselves in Australia as an Australian club under the law of Australia", in so doing being limited to employing just three New Zealanders (ie, Oceanians) as "foreign" players (they presently have nine in their squad), or be expelled from the A-League.

If Football Federation Australia, the umbrella organisation for the A-League, doesn't comply with his edict, Hammam will prevent Australia from participating in the ACL.

How does this compute?

Can we really call Etoile FC a "Singaporean entity" or "Asian entity" even if the operation were registered, which I assume it is, as a Singaporean company?

Hardly. All the players are French nationals. The coach, yet to be appointed, is likely to be French. France, of course, is a member of UEFA, not the AFC.

So why the double standard, Mr President?

Well, at least Afshin Ghotbi was spared another stoning of his car by steering Iran to a convincing 3-1 win over Singapore last week, a result that ensures Team Melli is going to the 2011 Asian Cup. What, however, is going to be the fate of Bryan Robson if he can't get Thailand to Qatar by snaffling a point at the very least against Ghotbi's men in Tehran? Having his buttocks dragged on gravel while harnessed to an angry elephant?

Already the list of casualties for Asia's premier football event is an alarming one: Indonesia and Vietnam, which delivered the best crowds and atmosphere at the 2007 edition, are out. Malaysia is also gone, but to the relief of just about everybody in the world, including most of the team's fans. Outside of their heroic SEA Games team, the country's football is atrocious and frankly doesn't deserve to be at the Asian Cup. Oman, meanwhile, which put Australia to the sword in Bangkok in 2007, has left its hopes of qualification to its very last game and needs to win against Kuwait in Muscat.

But it's not all grim reading.

Syria progressed through the qualifying round undefeated, and returns to the Asian Cup for the first time since 1996, and India, of course, brimming with momentum since winning the Nehru Cup if a tad fortunate to have been given a bye in qualifying (more on that later), will be the romantic's team: they return from over 25 years in the Asian football wilderness. Jordan, too, up against Singapore in Amman, have a chance to get to their first Asian Cup since 2004 if they beat the Lions and the Thais don't upset Iran.

So there are some nice stories to have come out of the qualification phase.

But the likely absence of South-East Asian teams and the conceivable non-involvement of DPR Korea, a team competing in the 2010 World Cup, means the tournament could fall well short of representing the rich diversity and astonishing breadth of football on the world's biggest continent.

The case of the North Koreans is most interesting.

The Chollima, World Cup finalists in 1966 and 2010, did not enter the group phase of qualifiers for Qatar 2011, despite playing in the 2008 AFC Challenge Cup won by India and the recently completed Doha International Friendship Football Tournament in Qatar, which it won. It has only played in two Asian Cups since they began in 1956.

Instead, it was given a free pass into the AFC Challenge Cup next month in Sri Lanka, pitted against India, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan.

All the Koreans (ranked #86 is Asia) have to do is finish runners-up, because if India (#134) wins having already won the previous Challenge Cup tournament, second place qualifies for Qatar 2011.

And to get there they have to tackle the might of... wait for it... Tajikistan (#165), Myanmar (#140), Sri Lanka (#151), Bangladesh (#149), Kyrgyzstan (#159) and Turkmenistan (#141).

The AFC Challenge Cup was supposed to be a tournament for emerging football countries in Asia but instead its being used as a way of sneaking in some of the most politically powerful football nations in Asia - North Korea, India - into the Asian Cup through the proverbial back door.

In my view it's a disgrace. And Indonesia (#120), Vietnam (#123), Malaysia (#160), Thailand (#105) and Oman (#79) - countries who fell or are about to fall trying to get there the hard way - should be as mad as hell about it.

And if they care anything for fair play, so should all Asian football fans.

Football is a business. And it can be a dirty one, as anyone who follows the travails of Asian football well knows. Usually the sleaze and muck is associated with betting, but as the Joel Griffiths saga taking place in Australia right now attests, it can encompass even the most mundane business transactions.

To bring you up to speed, Griffiths is a striker for a club called the Newcastle Jets, which plays in the Australian A-League. He is under contract to them till 2012.

In 2008 the Jets secured one of two spots in the 2009 Asian Champions League allocated to Australian teams, Joel catching the eye of their first-up ACL opponents, Chinese Super League club Beijing Guoan, when his brother, Ryan, joined them on loan from fellow CSL club Liaoning FC.

What followed was rather unusual: Newcastle, yet to kick a ball in anger in the ACL, was loath to release their marquee player but Griffiths wanted out. Beijing tabled an offer for a permanent deal. Newcastle rejected it, and when the two parties couldn't agree on a figure a compromise was reached: the Australian would be allowed to go to China on a AUD$500,000 "loan deal" for 10 months so long as he was ready to report for duty back at Newcastle in January 2010 to play the second half of the 2009/10 A-League season.

During that time there was also an option on the table for the Chinese club: they could have Griffiths for good after the 2009/10 A-League season if they paid $350,000 before the loan deal expired on December 31, 2009.

In March 2009, Newcastle duly played its first game in the ACL and lost 2-0 to Beijing goals scored by Ryan and Joel. Newcastle won the return leg and heroically made the ACL quarter-finals with a spare-parts team but finished the A-League season in last place.

Beijing was knocked out in the ACL group rounds, winning only one of six matches, but won the CSL title with the Griffiths brothers playing a pivotal part in their charge to the final.

So the Chinese side, not unexpectedly, wanted to keep the partnership intact for their tilt at back-to-back ACL campaigns and asked for revised terms from Newcastle, which (from the Australian version of events) entailed a reduced price and the striker's immediate availability. The Jets rightfully rejected it and continued their preparations to start the New Year with their star striker back on deck.

The Chinese club, according to Newcastle, then rejoindered by meeting the original $350K asking price, but on the caveat Griffiths be available to be registered on January 11 as a Beijing player for February's kickoff of the ACL. The Jets, sticking to their guns, again rejected the deal.

That should have been the end of it. But this week, sensationally, Griffiths decided to not turn up to training in Newcastle, not just once but twice, saying he wanted to go back to China. He's also enlisted the help of the Australian players' association, the PFA, and had them send a letter of demand to the Jets seeking a release. If the club fails to meet their demands, they are threatening to file a grievance procedure with Football Federation Australia.

Con Constantine, the bullish owner of the Jets, is livid about the impasse and claims if his club "lose this case it would be the end of contracts because they would not be worth the paper they are written on... if this thing has to go before arbitration, it sends the wrong message to every football player in this country. [It] means you can sign a contract today and a disgruntled player can turn around and say, 'Thank you very much but I'm going.'"

He's absolutely right.

Griffiths has behaved appallingly, as players often do when they get stars - and dollar signs - in their eyes.

At the very least he has an obligation as a professional footballer to turn up to training.

But Beijing, if Newcastle's account is to be believed, has also conducted itself poorly. The Jets might be a hick club in the wider Asian scheme of things but they are not mugs. They were good enough to let their most valuable commodity go in the first place when they didn't want him to leave, in so doing handicapping their maiden ACL campaign, and so deserved to have their original terms met to the letter. Beijing, it appears, has not done them that courtesy.

Worse, the saga has cast a pall over the merit of loan deals themselves.

From now on why would any club in the AFC agree to such temporary arrangements if this is the kind of trouble that goes with it?

Sadly the palaver between Newcastle and Beijing has done little to enhance the shaky confidence that already exists when doing club-to-club business in Asia.

Asian football is kicking along nicely in administration, coaching, commercial profile and overall quality and, in so doing, achieving new benchmarks of professionalism every day.

But, as the Griffiths case abundantly proves, trust remains a commodity in conspicuously short supply.

The next round of Asian Cup qualifiers on January 6 is offering up a welter of fascinating match-ups - Australia vs Kuwait, Japan vs Yemen, Vietnam vs Lebanon, Indonesia vs Oman - but none more so than the one taking place at Singapore's National Stadium.

The Group E clash sees leaders Iran take on second-placed Singapore and both teams are in a virtual must-win situation with just two games left to play to assure passage to Qatar 2011. Iran coach Afshin Ghotbi, however, has a little more riding on the result than his opposite number, Radojko Avramovic, who has already exceeded expectations by earning victories over Jordan and Thailand. Nothing short of Ghotbi's job is on the line and possibly his entire football career in the Islamic Republic.

When he came into the Iran coaching position in April 2009 with three World Cup qualifiers left to play, no one could begrudge Ghotbi for failing to get Team Melli to South Africa 2010. His predecessors, including former national-team star and coaching lightweight Ali Daei, had left him with next to no chance, two of those matches involving away assignments against DPR Korea and Korea Republic, which ended in stalemates. So Ghotbi's honeymoon with Iranian football fans survived the ignominy of qualification failure - something remarkable, because for years Iran has been the Bermuda Triangle of coaching jobs: many take it on, most disappear quickly without trace.

But after November's catastrophic 1-0 loss to Jordan in Amman, the hitherto supportive Iranian media turned on Ghotbi - an utterly preposterous state of affairs given he is only one result away from qualifying for Qatar and has managed to get this far with a bunch of talented but lazy slackers. Meanwhile Daei has quietly returned to the Iran coaching circus, taking over Ghotbi's old coaching gig at Tehran club Persepolis. Only a blinkered fool would discount his ambition to return to the top football position in Iran and supplant Ghotbi.

So far, the Iran Football Federation has given indications it will stand by its man. But Ghotbi will be under no illusions as to how quickly he will be removed from his post should he fail against the Serbian-coached South-East Asians, which Daei's Team Melli thumped 6-0 the last time they met, in January 2009 at the Azadi. Failing to qualify for a World Cup when you had scant preparation is one thing. Failing to qualify for an Asian Cup when you did is unforgivable. In a four-nation lead-up tournament in Doha this week, Iran fell to the hosts 3-2, losing right at the death after an egregious blunder from right-back Hossein Kaebi. They could count themselves unlucky except for the fact the first they conceded was also a comedy of errors. Excellent in attack, unbelievably awful in defence. Ghotbi must be tearing his hair out.

Iran should be good enough to defeat Singapore, which drew 0-0 with Oman yesterday at Bishan Stadium, but at home in humid, sticky conditions the Lions can be a tough proposition for any side, as Australia found out before the 2007 Asian Cup. They've also got nothing to lose by becoming the first Singapore side to qualify for Asian football's premier event. They can do that if they defeat Iran and Jordan draw with Thailand in Bangkok.

So by no means is it going to be a doddle for Ghotbi's men. Iran is going to have to play some good football against Mali and North Korea in Qatar in the next few days if they're going to help their harried coach get through this crisis.

Ghotbi has survived all sorts of things over 30 years - the Islamic Revolution, anti-American propaganda and the snakepit of Iranian politics - but nothing will save him if he fails in Singapore.

Congratulations are in order to the Malaysian under-23 men's team that prevailed 1-0 over Vietnam to win the 25th edition of the SEA Games gold medal in Vientiane, Laos.

For anyone who remembers the 2007 Asian Cup, when the senior side embarrassed South-East Asia by shipping 12 goals and scoring one, the result marks something of a remarkable turnaround for the tarnished reputation of Malaysian football. Credit to coach K. Rajagopal. Malaysian football fans, and there are only a few going around these days, have cause to celebrate.

Rajagopal says "the success of the Young Tigers proves that we are making inroads" and he's right. No one saw this result coming - I'm sure the coach and the players themselves are as surprised as anybody at having accounted for the might of Thailand and Vietnam.

But the result should not be allowed to gloss over some unpalatable facts about the Malaysian game, particularly the car wreck that is the national league.

Once a colossus in the South-East Asian football scene, the Malaysian Super League is going backwards at a rate of knots while Indonesia's Liga and Thailand's Premier League are booming: crummy standards, catastrophically poor crowds (bar the FA Cup final in April), minimal media coverage, accusations of racism and corruption.

A real anomaly when you consider just how passionate and knowledgeable most Malaysians fans are about football.

Scores of pages are devoted to the English and continental European leagues in the nation's newspapers.

And this is the bizarre paradox of Malaysian football.

Outward looking in one respect, keen to absorb the best football the world has to offer. Completely insular in another by forbidding foreign footballers to play in the MSL.

A real basket case.

The Football Association of Malaysia will likely attempt to use the success of the Young Tigers at the SEA Games and the national under-20 side, the Harimau Muda, in the second-division Malaysian Premier League as evidence that its decision to ban imported players is the right one.

In my opinion, however, if they're really serious about restoring Malaysian football to its former glory and bring back the fans they should be bringing in as many foreigners as possible.

Japan, South Korea, Australia and China - the best leagues in Asia - all employ foreign players and regard them as a necessity in improving the standard of their football. Young players and coaches learn from them and look up to them. Fans pay good money to see them. What on earth is possessing the FAM to think it knows better?

It might be worth pointing out to the FAM that the English Premier League, the competition Malaysian football fans worship, would be nothing without the legions of French, German, Italian, Spanish, East European, African, Russian, South American, Australian and Asian players that adorn it. It is a league that truly embodies the richness of the world game.

All the MSL embodies, arguably, is xenophobia.

It's time for change. It's time for Malaysian football to open up again.

Australia might regard itself as one of Asia's premier football nations - and at least on paper it is, being the number-one-ranked country in the Asian Football Confederation. But as events down under last week attest, it is a horribly divided one.

First Andrew Demetriou, the boss of the Australian Football League, announced his organisation would not countenance the idea of giving up use of Etihad Stadium in Victoria during any FIFA World Cup staged in Australia, either in 2018 or 2022.

Etihad Stadium is the premier rectangular arena in Melbourne and used as a home ground by the city's A-League side Melbourne Victory.

Then David Gallop, the chief executive of the National Rugby League, caused ripples of his own, demanding compensation to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars from the FFA for the disruption by any World Cup to his competition, which is the number-one code in the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

Football Federation Australia couldn't have asked for worse timing, the spot fires from the AFL and NRL coming at the same time the FFA was preparing to lodge its bidding agreement with FIFA, the document that contractually binds Australia to submitting a World Cup bid proposal in May 2010. This followed on from much schmoozing of FIFA heavies in Cape Town during the World Cup draw.

In fact Ben Buckley, the FFA's CEO, was so perturbed by the bad publicity and the huge public debate it ignited that he wrote an open letter to the media, letting them know "our bid for the 2018-2022 FIFA World Cup is well and truly on track" and it was "not constructive to go into detail about the media comments from other sporting codes".

To a point he is right. The issues concerning the chiefs of the AFL and NRL are ancillary and easily resolvable. Australia makes an impressive case to host a World Cup and there is no reason to think it does not have a very good chance of winning the 2022 tournament for Asia.

But the Australian federation needs to start putting as much effort into selling the World Cup to its own people as it is to FIFA's executive committee. There is, I hate to say it, a touch of arrogance in the way the FFA has rolled out its campaign so far, simply thinking that the AFL and NRL are going to be sold on the idea of having a World Cup because it's the biggest event in the world and, in the words of my SBS-TV colleague Les Murray, "a feast of global diversity, a quadrennial carnival of fun, an exposition of worldly cultural goods whose scent seduces the world".

It may be all those things but it's also a clear and present danger to their very existence. Having a World Cup played in Australia is the AFL's and NRL's worst nightmare. To all intents and purposes they are being asked to lay out the welcome mat to the agent of their own demise.

There are benefits for everybody, of course, but they need to be better articulated and enumerated. The Olympics got universal support from Australia's football codes because they threatened nobody. The World Cup, however, does.

So the FFA must address these concerns coming from the AFL and NRL as priority. There's five months to go before the Bid Book is due to be presented to FIFA and every detail has to be watertight, locked in, with universal support and without caveats.

You don't judge books by their covers but by content. Australia's still has way too many blank pages.

So what to make of Asia's prospects after the World Cup draw held in Cape Town last weekend?

Well, they are very dim. All four Asian teams - Australia, Japan, Korea Republic and DPR Korea - have been dealt "groups of death", the worst probably being DPR Korea's Group G: Ivory Coast, Portugal and Brazil. A true nightmare. Japan follows close behind in Group E. Netherlands, Denmark and Cameroon. Korea Republic, meanwhile, is pitched against Argentina, Nigeria and Greece in Group B.

The amusing thing is the media in Australia is talking of the Socceroos' draw in Group D - Germany, Serbia and Ghana - as being one of the two toughest at the World Cup, but from an Asian perspective I think they've got off lightly.

Of all the Asian entrants, then, as in 2006, they are the most favoured to progress to the second round but it will be a big ask.
Australia has never beaten Germany in two meetings (1974 and 2006), never played Serbia (excepting its earlier incarnation as Yugoslavia), but has the wood over Ghana since they first played in 1995: in six meetings, Australia has won four, drawn one and lost one, their last meeting a 1-0 victory to the Socceroos in Sydney in May 2008.

The Ghanaians, however, are playing on African soil in an African World Cup and this has to be a factor that is going to tip favouritism their way. In fact, the Socceroos' toughest match could well be their second one against Ghana on 24 June in Rustenburg.

Korea Republic, Asia's form team, has never beaten Argentina in three meetings since 1984, but defeated Nigeria two times from the same amount of matches and remains unvanquished against Greece in two, the last their famous 1-0 victory over the Euro 2004 champions in London in 2007.

Japan has defeated Cameroon twice in three meetings, the most recent in 2007, only played Netherlands once (this year, in Enschede) losing 3-0, and has to go back to 1971 to find the last time it played Denmark, a 3-2 victory to the Danes in Copenhagen.

North Korea has never played Brazil or Ivory Coast but pushed Portugal to the brink the last time they met, losing 5-3 after leading 3-0 at the 1966 World Cup. That match, which was also remarkable for Eusebio scoring four goals, was one of the greatest in Asian football history and the rematch in Cape Town will mark almost 43 years since the Chollima shocked the world by making the quarter-finals. They won't have the advantage of being total unknowns this time around.

So it's a fairly sobering outlook for Asia at South Africa 2010, which is not totally unexpected but at World Cups no one gets an easy ride, especially minnows from this part of the planet.

Well, except New Zealand, which only has to play Italy, Paraguay and Slovakia in Group F.

On top of Bahrain's playoff defeat it's another slap in the face for the Asian Football Confederation and serves another reminder why absorbing Oceania into Asia and making the road to the World Cup just a little bit harder for the Kiwis could well be in the best interests of the AFC.

The draw for South Africa 2010 might not be the one Mohamed bin Hammam had hoped for, but perversely one or two shock results Asia's way could make a bigger impact for the confederation than one team's progression beyond the second round.

With the caliber of opponents on offer, the opportunity of shocking the world all over again is there for the taking.

Apparently China's President Hu Jintao is "very concerned" about his country's football league and underperforming national men's team. He has every right to be.

China, a nation of 1.3 billion people, just scrapes into the FIFA top 100 and this week 16 football officials, players and coaches, including a former vice-president of the Guangzhou FA, were arrested following a six-month match-fixing investigation.

Investigative journalist Declan Hill, author of The Fix, calls China the "ground zero of match fixing" and dismisses the Chinese Super League as "a complete joke". On top of all this, the number of player registrations has dropped from 650,000 over a decade ago to 30,000 today. It's hard to imagine how much worse it can get for Chinese football.

Despite this, you would be hard pressed to find anybody in the world of football who would bet against China being the most likely host of the next World Cup to take place in Asia.

A quintet of AFC nations - Australia, Indonesia, Qatar, South Korea and Japan - are currently vying for the hosting rights of the 2018 or 2022 tournaments, but it's virtually guaranteed 2018 will go to Europe and the United States has a strong claim to 2022, not having had a World Cup since the massively successful USA 94.

Which leaves China almost as the World Cup host by default for 2026, because it meets all the criteria for FIFA's avaricious executive committee: truckloads of sponsors, a TV viewing bonanza, ready-made stadia, a track record in putting on big events (hello, Beijing Olympics) and, most importantly, the opportunity to leave behind a positive legacy in the most populous nation on earth.

What more could FIFA possibly want? Very little, which is why Australia, regarded as the strongest of the Asian bids for 2018 or 2022, should be very, very worried.

The Australian camp has made a big pitch to FIFA in capturing the "legacy" aspect, but when you do the math - Australia, 20 million, versus China, 1.3 billion - it's a no-brainer. They might have been better off just not mentioning it at all.

What is mitigating against China, though, is its own inertia, and that is why China's vice-president Xi Jinping made the strategic ploy last month of mentioning the government's desire to take Chinese football "to the top level".

It was a message to FIFA that it hasn't given up on the game - and that is all the sport's world governing body really needs to hear. There's a lot of cleaning up that can be done in 16 years.

It was said at the time that China's decision to withdraw from the race for 2018/2022 was the best present Australia could have had. In reality, it's probably the worst possible outcome.

If China had gone toe-to-toe for 2018/2022, Australia could have accounted for it easily, being in a far more organised position with its bid and with the state of its own game. But by delaying its pitch, China has made it clear that by 2026 it can be ready for the World Cup, thus obviating the need for FIFA to award the tournament to Asia before then.

Australia won't give up, of course, and it shouldn't - bid leader Frank Lowy's motto is to "push the limits" - but I'm of the view we won't see a World Cup down under for two decades still.

In football, unfortunately, as in life, the mouse rarely roars. But elephants do.

Times are changing in Asian football. On Tuesday afternoon at AFC House in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Asian Football Confederation president Mohamed bin Hammam announced a staggering new deal with sports marketing company World Sport Group that is expected to deliver the Confederation US$1 billion between now and 2020.

As "The President" explained to me in a roundtable conference afterwards, the AFC will be making in a year what used to take a decade.

That same day Bin Hammam hosted the AFC Annual Awards, a lavish affair at the capital's Shangri-La Hotel, with two waiters for each guest in the enormous ballroom.

The President entered the room like royalty, and he sat next to it: the handsome son of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Khalifa Al-Thani, the public face of the Qatar 2022 bid, is a heavy hitter, probably the heaviest on a long table of some 80 VIPs that included Frank Lowy, Peter Kenyon, David Gill and Chung Mong-joon. But this was Bin Hammam's show, the proceedings carefully choreographed to create a halo around the man who has plans to one day lead FIFA.

For all the money that was spent on the production, though, and there was clearly a fair bit of it splashed out, the awards night was a curiously stilted affair.

Perhaps this can't be helped, as Asia is such an enormous continent and at such gatherings the clash of cultures is palpable - Tajiks, Koreans, Sri Lankans, Uzbekis, Saudis, Australians and Japanese have very little in common and good, clear English is a rare commodity in acceptance speeches. But is there really a need to hand out such superfluous gongs such as Men's Match Commissioner of the Year or Women's Assistant Referee of the Year?

More to the point, how can the Iraqi FA, which has just been suspended by FIFA, be nominated for Men's Association of the Year? Or Australia be in the mix for Women's Association of the Year when the Young Matildas made headlines around the world for beating up their Chinese opponents in a match in August?

The abiding impression one gets from some of the awards are that they are politically geared, designed to keep happy various voting blocs of this unwieldy conglomeration of football nations.

But then the AFC can get things right, like selecting Korea Republic for Men's National Team of the Year (a brave but correct decision over Pim Verbeek's Aussies) or handing out its biggest award, Men's Player of the Year, to Gamba Osaka's brilliant playmaker Yasuhito Endo. Endo missed out in 2008, unjustly, I believe, to Uzbekistan's Server Djeparov, but class is enduring and there would have been a riot if he hadn't won it this time around.

One of the recurring themes in the speeches on the night was "improvement" and Asia is very much doing that in leaps and bounds in its administration. There is still much work to on the field, and in areas such as coaching and the professionalisation of domestic leagues, but the mission has started and there is a lot of money and motivation behind it.

Bin Hammam might be quietly spoken and unfailingly polite, but don't discount the man's driving ambition to make Asia a true power in world football. On the evidence of what I've seen this week in Kuala Lumpur, he's going to get his wish sooner than he thinks.

Next week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, there will be an outbreak of vigorous backslapping as the who's who of Asian football gather for the AFC Awards. But amid the revelry there will be pause to consider just how the biggest confederation in the world can continue jockeying for five places at the World Cup when for next year's tournament it could only manage to qualify four: Japan, Australia, Korea Republic and DPR Korea. Bahrain, of course, succumbed to lowly New Zealand in the AFC-OFC playoff series this week in Wellington.

Only three Asian teams currently sit in the FIFA top 50, yet CONMEBOL, the South American confederation, has seven, despite being allocated the same amount of berths (4.5) and looking like qualifying five (Uruguay face Costa Rica in Montevideo on Wednesday in their second-leg playoff, taking a 1-0 lead away.) This on top of a poor continental showing at Germany 2006, when no Asian team progressed beyond the first round. (Australia, for the record, was still part of Oceania, only being admitted to the AFC in 2007.

Asian football might the "future" but it is not throwing its weight around with much effect and on present performances the push for five berths can't be sustained.

The pressure is very much on, then, for the AFC to start recording some impactful results in South Africa, with two teams getting beyond the second round as a minimum. (An Asian side hasn't gone into the Round of 16 since Korea Republic and Japan managed to do it together in 2002, with the Taeguk Warriors reaching the semi-finals.)

We will know how much of a shot they have when the official draw for the World Cup is made in South Africa on December 4. Of the four teams, I believe that on form
Korea Republic has the best chance of progression, followed by Australia, Japan and DPR Korea, though it is all academic when their opponents are still unknown.

A repeat of the collective AFC performance at Germany 2006 would constitute an unmitigated disaster for the confederation.

That's not just in regards World Cup places, but also hosting World Cups.

No less than five members of the Asian confederation - Japan, Korea, Qatar, Indonesia and Australia - are in the midst of lobbying for the hosting rights to the 2018 or 2022 tournaments. If Asia tanks at South Africa 2010, chances are it will also tank when FIFA's executive committee comes around to voting on the bids in December next year.

So AFC president Mohamed bin Hammam will be hoping for much more from Asia in 2010, and so he should.

There's not just a World Cup to play for come June 11, but nothing short of Asia's football future.

Much has been said and written over the past year about the Asian Football Confederation's rather hare-brained if noble idea to have a one-off Asian Champions League final in Tokyo, irrespective of who made it. "Crazy," said one camp. "Ambitious," said the other.

In the final analysis, 25,000 people turned up for the match between Pohang Steelers and Al-Ittihad, which the Koreans ended up winning 2-1, and there were cases to be made for both sides of the argument.

The turnout, let's not mince words, was poor, even by Japanese standards. A stadium that is at less-than-half capacity does not make for a good image on television, which defeats the point of having a stand-alone final in the first place. A final should always be full. It is the exclamation point of a competition. The one day when everything - colour, excitement, action - needs to be turned on full throttle.

The ACL final was anything but.

Yet the AFC singularly took a very brave decision to test the appeal of a one-game final, in accordance with the way things are done in Europe, and it should be commended for making a leap of faith. The concept doesn't work in Asia, we know that much now, but someone had to take the risk in the first place and there is nothing wrong with taking a risk.

The AFC under Mohamed bin Hammam has taken Asian football to places his predecessors could not or would not dare.

While he is not to everyone's taste, as we saw with the bitterly contested elections for the presidency, no one could begrudge him his grand vision.

It's worth noting the AFC Cup, Asia's second-tier club competition, which was won in dramatic fashion a week ago by Kuwait Sports Club 2-1 over Syria's Al Karamah, has enjoyed its most successful instalment ever, with crowds going gangbusters. Nearly 600,000 people filed through the turnstiles in the group and knockout matches, with 38,000 turning up for the South China AA vs Kuwait SC semi in Hong Kong - 13,000 more than turned up for the ACL final in Tokyo.

In the nominations for AFC Player of the Year, too, we are starting to see a refreshing recognition of the breadth and richness of the Asian football diorama - Maldivians, Indonesians, Bahrainis, Qataris - even if the award criteria and the voting process is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed.

This weekend the Asian football year reaches its culmination with the second-leg World Cup playoff between Bahrain and Oceania champions New Zealand in Wellington.

It's taken a long time to get here - the whole shebang kicked off in October 2007, with Bangladesh playing Tajikistan in Dhaka, and swallowed up some big football nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and China among them.

That a tiny nation such as Bahrain is still alive in November 2009 is a mark of how healthy Asian football really is.

So Bin Hammam has cause to be proud. And we have cause to celebrate being part of this wonderful part of the world we call "Asia".

Our football might not match Europe yet, but we're on our way.

Thailand's finance minister Korn Chatikavanij has his heart in the right place with his idea that ASEAN countries unite together and make a bid to host the FIFA World Cup.

He mooted the concept at the recently convened summit of ASEAN leaders in Hua Hin and, if pie in the sky, it would have made a nice break for everyone from droning on incessantly about tariffs. Football has a habit of breaking the ice.

But Korn's idea is fanciful at best, preposterous at worst. I say that as someone, too, who wants to see another World Cup in Asia.

But my memories of the 2007 AFC Asian Cup weren't all good ones, with the sort of inadequate ticketing, policing, transportation and infrastructure a World Cup requires of a host country or countries.

The decision to have matches shared by Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia was an unmitigated disaster, with poor crowds in Thailand and Malaysia especially. I came to Bangkok for Australia's group games, fully intending to go to Vietnam and Indonesia, but found getting around the Thai capital frustrating enough and so ended up pretty much staying in my air-conditioned hotel room and watching a lot of the tournament on TV.

Even when I managed to turn up to a match, via a hair-raising combination of Skytrain, taxi or riverboat, I didn't know which stadium entrance to use and nor did any of the young people manning the ticketing booths or the police. There were no chaperones on hand, like there were at Germany 2006, to point fans in the right direction. Like many fans who had bothered to make the trip to Thailand, I spent most of my time during the Asian Cup laundering sweat-soaked shirts and cursing the tournament as a monumental cock-up.

That was only two years ago. Yes, the Thai Premier League is coming along in leaps and bounds and the crowds are flooding stadiums to watch football again but how much has really changed?

Very little. You can bet, too, the same applies to Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and any of the remaining members of ASEAN (Philippines, Burma, Singapore, Brunei, Laos and Cambodia). Of those, only Singapore strikes me as a ready-made host for World Cup matches, with the kind of extant infrastructure FIFA would require.

But it is not a lost cause. There is plenty of time to put in place the necessary foundations for hosting a World Cup.

If ASEAN really wants a World Cup, however, the biggest obstacle is not going to be money or the weather but politics. Obviously a World Cup cannot be spread among ten countries, and FIFA president Sepp Blatter has already indicated his preference that only stand-alone countries make bids. (Which, of course, could change any minute. Blatter has a habit of changing his mind and, in any case, he'll be long gone by the time ASEAN gets a World Cup).

The only viable course in my view, then, is for a single nation to bid or, at the most, a two-nation bid to be made. In my opinion, the only legitimate contenders are Thailand and Indonesia and I don't see them as joint bidders. Indonesia has already made a quixotic bid for the 2022 World Cup but, as I wrote some weeks back for one of my columns in Australia, I see Australia not Thailand as a possible partner in a new bid.

So it would have to be Thailand going it alone.

The Buddhist country already has a lot of things going for it - its people, shopping, culture, food, beaches - that makes it an attractive candidate for an event of such immense scale but there's a very long way to go till the football infrastructure is anywhere near satisfactory: the Rajamangala Stadium, the biggest in the country, needs to be torn down and built again. There are no other stadiums in Thailand with capacities of over 40,000. FIFA requires at least 12 of 40,000 or more and one of 80,000 or more.

Obviously a bit of a pickle. And that's just for starters.

But kudos to Korn for at least floating the idea. South-East Asia deserves a World Cup and one day it will come here. Words, however, don't win World Cups. Politics, money and hard work do.

If ASEAN is serious, that hard work needs to start now.

In a media interview this week Indonesian Football Association general secretary Nugraha Besoes starkly outlined the massive work Australia still has to do, not just with its faltering World Cup bid but to convince its 45 fellow members of the Asian Football Confederation that it is actually part of Asia.

When asked by a journalist if Indonesia was "the best Asian candidate for 2022", he replied: "If Japan and South Korea drop out, then yes. Japan and Korea already had their chance. I don't think FIFA will give it to them. Then there is only Qatar. I don't think they will make it. So we are very strong in Asia."

No mention of Australia at all.

Yet Australia, as Frank Lowy told a business audience in Melbourne last week, is supposedly "the backyard or frontyard for Asia".

If that's the case, Australians are intruders on Asia's lawn and the owners of the house are armed and calling for reinforcements. If they don't start making the right noises soon, they're going to be blown back to Oceania.

With his rich man's gravitas and not inconsiderable means, Lowy was the man who engineered Australia's entry into Asia back in 2007, gifting his adopted country a whole new football diorama.

But Australia itself is still resistant to the notion of being an Asian nation and Australian football has been slow to embrace the opportunities afforded to it by virtue of being part of the AFC.

True, a couple of Thais now play for Melbourne. There's an Iraqi at Newcastle. There are a handful of Koreans getting about. But they are just six or so out of over 200 professionals calling themselves A-League players. Australia is part of Asia? You wouldn't know it watching an A-League match.

Australia put in a lazy effort for the 2011 Asian Cup, drawing with Indonesia 0-0 and losing to Kuwait 1-0 with domestic-based teams before realising its qualification was in jeopardy and bringing back the Socceroos' European contingent for its most recent qualifier, the 1-0 victory over Oman in Melbourne. Only 20,000 people bothered to show up and the game was most memorable for the spray Australia team manager gave to Oman coach Claude Le Roy at half time, when he accused the visitors of cheating.

Now, along with the 2015 Asian Cup and the 2018 or 2022 World Cups, the FFA wants to bring next year's 2010 Asian Champions League final down under.

Ambitious and admirable, maybe, and heading in the right direction but preposterous when you consider that the final will most likely not feature an Australian side. How many Australians, a people who can be xenophobic about Asians at worst, wary about them at best, would be galvanised to pay to turn up to see, for example, Al-Ittihad play Pohang Steelers?

The FFA would have to give tickets away.

As an Aussie might say, "Fair suck of the sav." It ain't going to happen. At least not for the next ten years.

In the meantime Australia can work on what it has hitherto conspicuously failed to do: convince those 45 other members of the AFC that it is Asian.

But that will only happen when it's managed to convince itself. 

It's a shame there is apparently water-cooler talk of drafting Leandson Dias da Silva, or "Rico" as he is known in the convention of Brazilian footballing nomenclature, into the Bahrain national team for the final playoff between the AFC and OFC for a berth at the 2010 World Cup.

Rico, the leading goalscorer in the Bahraini league for Al-Muharraq, is an ex-teammate of Kaká at Sao Paulo, but unlike his illustrious peer, never made it to the Selecao, La Liga and all those uncountable millions, so plumped, like so many South American also-rans, for the next best thing: the lucre on offer in the Middle East. There he has scored at will over five seasons.

Yes, Bahrain, frustratingly, could not score at home when they met New Zealand in Manama on October 10. Jaycee John is out of sorts. Alaa Hubail is seriously injured and ruled out for the return leg in Wellington on November 14. But Bahrain got to this stage largely on the strength of their homegrown players and is a shining example to all nations in the Middle East that developing your own is ultimately a better strategy than naturalising however many planeloads of Africans or South Americans as you can.

Qatar take note.

Which is not to say Bahrain has completely disavowed naturalisation as a strategy to realising its World Cup dream expeditiously - you'll still find a handful of west and north Africans with Middle Eastern-sounding names suiting up in Wellington - but you would hope that it is slowly dawning on the powers-that-be that long term the strength of the nation's football ultimately has to come from within its own borders.

And Milan Macala's team has shown there is plenty of talent on this tiny island of 700,000 people and (incredibly) just 4000 registered footballers: Salman Issa, Ismail Latif, Mohammed Salmeen, Hussain Ali, and the Hubail brothers, Mohammed and Alaa. What they lack in stature they more than make up in skill, speed and bravery.

If Bahrain can make the World Cup, by rights it should be a Hollywood movie. If John Candy were still alive he'd be perfect for their silver-haired Czech bear of a coach, Macala.

No country as small has ever made it that far: the next smallest, Trinidad & Tobago, Bahrain's conquerors in the playoffs in 2005, is nearly ten times larger with almost twice the population. So while Bahrain itself hardly evokes images of romance in Western minds (duty-free shopping malls have their limitations) the story of its football team is one of the loveliest in memory.

That's why, against my better instincts as a proud Antipodean, I will be supporting Bahrain over New Zealand on November 14.

The World Cup, for all its crude commercialism and cynical money grabbing, is still a place where the unlikeliest football dreams can come true.

Bahrain, the unlikeliest football team, and one from this loose neighbourhood we call Asia, is on the cusp of making its very own happen.

Believe it or not, Australian football fans do care about the Asian Cup, even though it's taken far too long for the Australian players themselves and the Australian coach to cotton on to its importance.

We (I count myself as a fan of the game first, journalist second) were aghast at the Socceroos' poor preparation and woeful performance at the 2007 Asian Cup, which saw Asia's number #1-ranked team knocked out in the quarters in a penalty shootout by Japan.

That tournament was Australia's "coming out" in Asia after being admitted into the Asian Football Confederation and, truth be told, we were ungracious and poorly-behaved guests.

It was hoped the arrival of former South Korea boss Pim Verbeek would correct this attitude of entitlement and inculcate a culture of respect for our opponents in Asia, but disappointingly the Dutchman carried on with pretty much the same behaviour as his predecessor, Graham Arnold: for Australia's first two qualification matches for the 2011 Asian Cup in Qatar he selected squads exclusively made up of domestic-based A-League players, thinking they could do the job.

They could not.

On January 28, in Jakarta, a dreadful sponge-like pitch at the Gelora Bung Karno and a plucky Indonesia held Verbeek's C-side to a 0-0 draw.

Afterwards, Verbeek was moved to call his strikers, Melbourne Victory duo Danny Allsopp and Archie Thompson, "hopeless".

On March 5, in Canberra, Kuwait deservedly defeated the "Diet Socceroos", as I like to call this peculiar and wholly unsatisfactory incarnation of the national football team, 1-0.

That match in Australia's capital city was a low point of Verbeek's short reign as manager, with players getting around with three numbers on their back, as good a sign as any of how the green-and-gold shirt was being devalued and the startling indifference with which Verbeek was treating the Asian Cup campaign.

The ladder doesn't lie.

Going into tomorrow's do-or-die showdown with Oman in Melbourne, the Socceroos are on one point from two matches in Group B, with a negative goal difference. Oman lead the group on four points, with Kuwait on three and Indonesia on two. After Wednesday's match there are three matches left to play: two away in the Middle East, and Indonesia at home. It's a must-win. And hardly a lay-down misery (Oman smashed Australia the last time they played, in Bangkok in 2007, only being saved from defeat, once more, by a late equaliser from Tim Cahill).

An unacceptable position for the so-called "best team in Asia", especially a nation in the midst of trying to bring the 2015 Asian Cup and 2018 or 2022 World Cups to its shores.

Which is why, belatedly, mercifully, Verbeek's tune is starting to change.

The side that will face Oman is the same that drew with the Netherlands in Sydney on Saturday: the "A" team, the one that will likely take the field for Australia's first match at South Africa 2010.

Some of the old arrogance is being shed, too, and Lucas Neill is starting to talk like he's being drilled by Football Federation Australia's PR department.

"We need to get ourselves out of this sticky situation and we want to go to the Asian Cup," he told the Australian media in Sydney last week. "We want to win every game we play in. We can't go to the World Cup and not go to the Asian Cup, which is in our own region, so we have to put that right. We have to dominate our region and the only way we can do that is to go to the Asian Cup and try to win it."

Nice effort, Lucas, but you would still be well advised to drop words like "dominate" from your captain's lexicon. Do Aussies ever learn?

So there's an awful lot riding on the result in Melbourne. It's heartening to see the coach and his players have finally woken up to their responsibilities.

The problem is they might have woken up too late.

Money can't buy you love and, as FC Bunyodkor has now found out, it can't buy you Asian Champions League titles either.

The ambitious Uzbeki club went for the jugular this year, splashing out a staggering US$18 million a season to secure ex-Chelsea, Portugal and Brazil manager Luiz Felipe Scolari on a two-year deal on top of the millions it had already forked out for Rivaldo.

However, it counted for nothing as they couldn't even subdue lowly Pohang Steelers in the quarter-finals last week, despite winning the first leg 3-1. The Koreans won  4-1 at home, putting them through to the semi final 5-4 on aggregate.

A terrible result for Tashkent's self-styled superclub and by rights Scolari should be out on his ear.

What use is a coach if he can't stop a side scoring four goals when his own is already two to the good? Especially one who is the highest paid not just in Asia but the world. Especially when Bunyodkor went into half time in the second leg in Korea at 0-0.

Leaking four goals in 45 minutes. Shameful. A coach on one-hundredth of Scolari's salary could have got Bunyodkor a better result.

But what does Scolari care? Even if he loses his job, which some are suggesting is imminent or inevitable, he's going to walk away a rich man, just like he did at Chelsea.

In the rarefied world of elite international coaches, where contracts get torn up as a matter of course and lawyers feast on fine print like vultures over carrion, failure can be just as lucrative as success.

Bunyodkor, however, should resist that temptation and make "Big Phil" work for his money. Letting him go is letting him off the hook. If Scolari is as good as he thinks he is, and undoubtedly he is no charlatan, he should be given another season to prove it.

Bunyodkor only has eyes for the Asian Champions League title and the FIFA Club World Cup and finding another coach now - which would make it nearly half a dozen in the space of just two years - would only delay those dreams being realised.

All coaches, whatever the sport, work best when they're actually given time to create a team. In football, unfortunately, the infiltration into the sport of crooked owners and dirty money has meant ego gratification takes precedence over stability, and nowhere more so than in Uzbekistan.

Bunyodkor, as is well known, is to all intents and purposes a vanity project for Gulnora Karimova, the photogenic daughter of dictator Islam Karimov and clearly the inspiration for the Sophie Marceau character in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough.

The Uzbeki people have suffered enough by seeing their country's fortunes siphoned away by gangsters and tyrants. If Bunyodkor is really for the Uzbeki people, as it purports, then it's time to start winning things for them. They deserve a whole lot more.

For that reason alone, Big Phil has to be made to stay.

Earlier in the year this column commended Melbourne Victory for signing Thai international Surat Sukha. Not only were they getting a very good player but they were taking a bold initiative among A-League clubs in recruiting in their own backyard, something the other then-eight teams in the competition had hitherto decided was simply "too hard".

Now, after only eight games of the new season, another Thai is joining Surat at the 2008/09 A-League champions. It is a defining moment for the A-League and for South-East Asian football.

Sutee Suksomkit has been signed as a "guest player", a spot usually taken by high-profile aging European or South American players looking for a short-term payday - think Benito Carbone and Kazu Miura at Sydney, Romario at Adelaide. He will arrive in Australia on October 5 from Singapore's Tampines Rovers and his first game is likely to be on October 24 at home against Melbourne's arch-rivals, Adelaide. The contract is for three months at AUD$15,000 a month.

Sutee breaks the "guest player" mould in more ways than one.

First, he's still young at 31; second, he's still playing international football; third, he's relatively inexpensive; and lastly, like Surat, he is promoting Australian football and the Australian league in a part of the world that holds the key to its growth.

When I was in Bangkok in 2007 for the Asian Cup and seeing with my own eyes the passion and fervour Thais had for football, as well as the quality of some of the Elephants players in their match against the Socceroos at the Rajamangala, I couldn't help think a golden opportunity was being missed by the A-League in ignoring Thailand.

For a long time, the marketing bounty of South-East Asia has been effectively harvested by European clubs but not by Australian ones. No longer.

It's clear from the double recruitment of Surat and Sutee that Melbourne has firm plans to brand the club regionally as part of its ambition to become an Antipodean version of Barcelona. And it's something other A-League clubs would do well to replicate, especially since most of them are broke.

Recruiting players from South-East Asia is not only smart but economical. With Football Federation Australia propping up so many clubs - Brisbane Roar is the latest to find itself in some financial trouble - one can only hope some of Melbourne's bravery and foresight rubs off on other teams in the competition. The A-League cannot go on, especially when it is being plundered each week by West Asian clubs taking advantage of the Asian Football Confederation's "3+1" rule, being a slightly rundown retirement village for has-been European and South American footballers with inflated price tags.

Melbourne is not only setting the benchmark as an Australian club in the way it does its business, but it is also so as a South-East Asian one.

With Surat and Sutee now in the A-League mix, perhaps the AFC's motto, "The Future is Asia", isn't so hopeful after all.

There's been an inordinate amount of media attention of late paid to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan's takeover of Manchester City and how seemingly inexhaustible financial investment from the Middle East is starting a new "gold rush" in the Premier League.

What gets little coverage, however, is how the same money is reshaping Asian football, shifting the ballast of power from the traditional crucibles of Japan, Korea and Australia to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Already this year from Japan we've seen Gamba Osaka's Brazilian striker Leandro go to Qatar's Al-Sadd, following the well-worn path of Bare and Davi to the Middle East.

Koreans Lee Chun-soo and Lee Young-pyo made a double switch from the K-League to the Saudi Professional League. And just last night Socceroo Michael Beauchamp, out of favour at Aalborg in Denmark, signed on with Al Jazira in Abu Dhabi, bringing to three the number of big-name Aussies who have chosen to play in the Middle East this season, after Melbourne Victory striker Danny Allsopp defected to Qatar's Al Rayyan and Gold Coast United defender Adam Griffiths jumped ship to Saudi Arabia's Al Shabab.

Australia stars Mark Bresciano and Lucas Neill were also recently linked to moves to the Gulf and the A-League's top scorer, New Zealander Shane Smeltz, is being talked up as the likely first AUD$2 million transfer from Australia to the region.

The attraction for the players is obvious. Minimal or non-existent tax exposure. High wages. Luxury-resort living. An easier level of football.

The attraction for the clubs is also pretty transparent. Top players with a cheaper price tag than they can be possibly be bought for in Europe. Reinforcements for those prestigious Asian Champions League finals.

When oil flows like water, money is a trifle. Success is the true elixir for the Arab moneymen, and in the ACL a Gulf club has not won the title since Saudi Arabia's Al Ittihad won back to back in 2004 and 2005, so there is ample motivation to spend big and think later.

The big problem is the ACL runs the risk of becoming as predictable as the UEFA Champions League in the process. Titles will be able to be simply bought by those clubs with the biggest wells of cash and that likely means a club from Australia, where the football is arguably superior but a strict salary cap is in place, will never be able to keep up with its rivals from West Asia.

What all football lovers in Asia want to see, and what the Asian Football Confederation should want to nurture, is a league featuring the best teams in the region that is not only thrilling and of the highest quality but above all competitive.

Arab money has made the Premier League more exciting, that's for sure.

It might do the same for the ACL. But when winning becomes the preserve of those who can afford it, the soul of football is the big loser.

For a country that very few people could accurately locate on a map, with a population that doesn't even pass a million, Bahrain has more than punched above it weight in Asian Football Confederation qualifiers for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

In the final round there was the brilliant performance against Australia in Manama, where the Socceroos undeservedly snaffled a win in the last minutes, a narrow loss to Japan in Tokyo and wins against Uzbekistan and Qatar.

Then last week the Bahrainis went through to the AFC-OFC playoffs on the away goals rule at the expense of Saudi Arabia, a nation that has a valid sense of entitlement to World Cup final berths.

The "Sons of the Desert" will be missing out on their first World Cup since 1994. Bahrain, meanwhile, stands to go to its first World Cup ever if it can overcome New Zealand over two legs, at home on October 10 and away on November 14, which might sound a doddle given the All Whites' limp showing at the Confederations Cup. But it will be anything but. Shane Smeltz, the team's redoubtable striker, is in a rich vein of form in the Australian A-League with nine goals from six matches and he will be a hard man to stop.

Thankfully the Bahrainis, affectionately known as Al-Ahmar, the Reds, have a quality marksman of their own in Jaycee John, one of the most exciting talents in Asia, even if by way of Africa.

Nigeria-born, John stands 181cm tall, looks a little bit like Emmanuel Adebayor and has the technical ability of someone who should be playing in a much better league. At the moment, he gets around in Belgium's Jupiler Ligue for Excelsior Mouscron but that cannot last forever and won't last long at all if he can book his team a ticket to South Africa.

John was a handful for the Aussies and Japanese and scored a crucial sliding goalmouth leveller against the Saudis just before half-time in Riyadh. His goal celebration - complete with running backflips - was a testament to his strength and athleticism.

The only weakness in John's game is a propensity to go AWOL for long periods when he is not given licence to roam. The Australians completely suffocated his supply on the return leg in Sydney in June by marking him in pairs, even triptychs, and John couldn't so much manage a shot on goal all game.

The Kiwis will undoubtedly attempt to do the same thing in Manama in October but they will have to be also mindful of not paying him too much attention. Mahmoud Abdulrahman, Salman Issa and Ismail Abdullatif are also handy goal scorers in their own right.

History, though, has not been kind to Bahrain. In November 2005, they looked home and hosed for Germany 2006 after drawing 1-1 with lowly Trinidad & Tobago in Port of Spain but couldn't manage to score at home in the home leg and had a player, Hussain Ali Baba, sensationally sent off for protesting the disallowing of a goal to Ahmed Hassan in the 92nd minute after dispossessing T&T goalkeeper Kelvin Jack. What followed was much scuffling between players, a near riot in the stands and four years of collective agonising over a gilt-edged opportunity gone begging.

So New Zealand won't be the beneficiary of any underestimation. This might be Bahrain's time in the sun but they're not about to be burned again.

The way Australia was ambushed by Korea Republic on Saturday night in Seoul you would think the Socceroos were on the receiving end of some elaborate practical joke by FIFA and the Korean Football Association.

Anoint the team from Down Under #14 in the world, invite them over for a little kickaround and some kimchi, and while they're caught unawares, let the home side loose. Show those upstart Anglo swellheads how a real football team plays. And how the Taeguk Warriors brought the "best team in Asia" crashing back down to earth.

This is a team that is ranked #49 in the world, wedged between Tunisia and Colombia. Australia has not defeated Korea Republic since 1998. In 23 meetings since 1967 Australia has only defeated the South Koreans five times. Yet this is a team that is officially gazetted as 35 places poorer?

Korea Republic has gone a quarter century of games without a loss. In its final round of World Cup qualifying in Asia it wouldn't give an inch to the likes of North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Iran - all regional heavyweights - and the lamentable UAE. A real "Group of Death". Australia, meanwhile, also got through the last phase undefeated but only had to square off against one strong team: Japan. The Uzbekis, Qataris and Bahrainis were all hopeless, and it's a mark of how poor Australia was during periods of the campaign that it could only manage a scoreless draw against 83rd-ranked Qatar in Doha and escaped with a 1-0 win against 64th-ranked Bahrain in Manama, right at the death. There was also an Asian Cup qualifying loss to 110th-ranked Kuwait at home and a scoreless draw against 133rd-ranked Indonesia. The last two were not matches that featured a full-strength line-up, made up exclusively of A-League players, but they were representing Australia all the same.

Fourteen in the world? Pull the other one.

Korea Republic has not lost a match since going down to Chile 1-0 in January 2008 in Seoul. In the same period Australia has lost twice, to China and Kuwait, and played three fewer matches. The only thing in the Aussies' favour has been a willingness to play teams outside the AFC. Korea has only played Paraguay, winning 1-0. Australia has played Ghana, South Africa, Netherlands and Republic of Ireland - without loss and for three victories from four matches.

That is the only explanation for the anomaly in the FIFA rankings - and at least on that score Australia can be proud of its achievement. It has shown a willingness to take risks and pit itself against stronger teams while the Koreans have not.

But the serendipitous alchemy of bravery and mathematics does not in itself make Australia the best team in Asia.

In my opinion, that is quantified by skill, technique, tactical precision, quality of goals and ­- last of all - results.

On the evidence of what we witnessed in Seoul over the weekend, Korea Republic has the wood over the Aussies in every way.

Bob Houghton said before the Nehru Cup that he thought India, the 156th best team in the world, was better than the FIFA rankings suggested. Now that the Nehru Cup is over and India have won, he might just be right.

It was a stirring victory by the Bhangra Boys in the final at Ambedkar Stadium in Delhi, overcoming a determined 95th-ranked Syria 5-4 in a penalty shootout after the two sides were deadlocked 1-1 after 120 minutes. And most of the credit, as is usual in these situations, must go to the home side's keeper, Subrata Pal, who stopped three Syrian strikes in the faceoff.

Indian football has a new star - which is a positive development, because it is going to need a handful of them to replace the irrepressible Baichung Bhutia, who will likely call it quits after the 2011 Asian Cup. The man is a colossus of the Indian game, dwarfing everyone else. And as much as everyone would like him to, he can't go on forever.

Not all his good work takes place on the park though.

Recently he launched the website of the Football Players' Association of India, in his words, "for the welfare of the players... to come together, share our issues, let our issues be known and just grow the game". You can find it at www.fpaindia.com and it's a positive development in the promotion of Indian football, along with the excellent www.indianfootball.com which is run by a group of fans and journalists based in Germany.

So it's an indictment of Indian football bureaucracy that Bhutia's old club, Mohun Bagan, is locked in a vicious legal dispute with the player over his appearance last year on Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, the Indian version of the Dancing with the Stars.

He missed some training sessions and an exhibition match and was summarily suspended for six months.

Bhutia says his battle is "not with Mohun Bagan" but rather "one or two egotistic or publicity crazy officials who are handling the club". He says he would rather not play for 12 months than ever play for the Kolkata club again.

Whoever is at fault, and I don't know either way, it's not a good look for Indian football when it is making such great strides in on-field performance and off-field exposure.

Bhutia is nothing short of a living treasure of Indian football and while he may bear some responsibility in not meeting his commitments to Bagan that is surely a subordinate matter to the greater good of not bringing negative publicity to the sport and keeping its most important player happy ahead of the country's most important assignment in years, Qatar 2011.

After nearly two decades playing Indian league football and over 100 international caps, he deserves to be cut some slack.

Will he stay or will he go?

Worawi Makudi, the president of the Thai FA, insists Peter Reid is not about to quit as coach of Thailand to take up the assistant role at Stoke City in the Premiership. Reports emanating from London suggest otherwise.

Whatever transpires, the news of the past 48 hours has been a blow for Asian football. Not so much because Reid can't be replaced - he can and will - but rather as it underlines the challenges football in this region faces in talent retention.

For Asia to ever draw close to European standards in football it needs the best possible coaches working in this part of the world to make it happen and Reid, who may not have the urbane continental sangfroid of Arsene Wenger or Jose Mourinho, was still a cut above many of his Asian contemporaries.

Since arriving in Bangkok in September last year, he'd given Thai football a profile internationally, contributed in no small part to the commercial appeal of the new Thai Premier League and led the men's national team to some success: winning the T&T Cup in Vietnam and finishing second at the AFF Suzuki Cup. The campaign for qualification for the 2011 Asian Cup had just begun and Reid's ultimate objective was to make history and qualify the Elephants for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

It appears that is not going to happen, however, when the prospect of laying out the cones on the training paddock for Tony Pulis is regarded as a better job offer.

This, unfortunately, is the tough reality of Asian football.

The Potters might be a small-fry club but they are part of the biggest football competition in the world. A few poor results, a bit of pressure on Pulis, a kneejerk board and suddenly Reid could find himself back in charge of his fifth English club, his fourth in the Premiership. That is the big carrot and Thailand can't hope to keep him away from it, even with a four-year deal and all the other trappings of life in South-East Asia.

So where to now for the Thai FA?

Steve Darby, Reid's 2IC and erstwhile ESPN STAR Sports commentator, will likely stand in for however long is needed, and there are a couple of important games ahead, the home and away Asian Cup qualifiers against Singapore in November.

But should it turn to Europe again for a permanent replacement?

After all, Reid's predecessor, Charnwit Polcheewin, who coached Thailand for three years from 2005 to 2008, also had some success, winning the King's Cup two years in a row and, like Reid, taking home the T&T Cup. It's not like locals can't do the job.

There is, however, a bigger picture. And that is opening up Thai football to European ideas, European techniques, European application - of making Thai players give 100 per cent every moment of every game.

That has been the problem with Thai football in the past and it was something Reid and Darby were working to change.

Whoever comes in, be it Darby himself, another foreigner or a Thai, the hard work needs to continue. And let's just hope he's in for the long haul.

Football Federation Australia is usually way ahead of the pack in Asian football administration - at least outside of the Japanese, who continue to serve as the standard bearer in this region for all things football.

The A-League is marching on in leaps and bounds, the Socceroos are ranked #16 in the world (an unprecedented position) and of course there is the small business of bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Certainly it is a mark of the confidence it has in the FFA's professionalism that the Australian federal government tipped in $45.6 million of taxpayers' money for that arguably quixotic project without any guarantee of success.

So it beggars belief that an organisation which normally addresses issues and gets things done with a minimum of fuss is dragging its feet on deciding on what punishment to mete out against the Young Matildas, the Australian women's youth side, for its part in a disgraceful melee with China two weeks ago at the Asian Football Confederation Under-19 Women's Championship in Wuhan.

The AFC's Disciplinary Committee didn't waste any time determining that both parties had behaved poorly, issuing fines immediately. Yet importantly the Australians copped the blame, the AFC stating in its press release that the Young Matildas had been "found guilty of initiating" the fracas and "also of throwing bottles at the spectators. The team's head coach was also found guilty of misbehaviour during the post-match press conference."

The FFA nobly accepted the penalty and said it wouldn't be making any comment on the matter until such time as the incident had been reviewed and the perpetrators and witnesses interviewed and only then would it make its own decision on what was an appropriate sanction.

That was on August 6. Ten days on, nothing has happened.

Why the delay?

When I rang the FFA the media department in Sydney this Tuesday morning they didn’t know what was going on. I was informed that only Bonita Mersiades, the FFA’s head of corporate affairs, was permitted to comment on the matter.  I left a message on her mobile phone and, at time of writing, she has yet to get back to me. (Addendum: Mersiades later contacted me Tuesday evening and could only say that the "national teams unit" was undertaking its normal review of the Young Matildas' performance in China and had no statement to make regarding whether there was a breach of the FFA's code of conduct.)

The lack of resolve and transparency is perhaps understandable being that the FFA is caught is something of a catch-22. If it comes down hard on the Young Matildas, it will just compound the bad international publicity Australia got in the wake of the melee. But equally if it doesn't do anything and hopes the issue will just be forgotten, it is shirking its duty as a policeman of FIFA's much-vaunted principle of "fair play".

Either way, Australia is not going to come out of this looking squeaky clean - and that is presently the FFA's invidious position and great torment.

Just when it is trying to put its best face for FIFA's executive committee, a bunch of hotheaded sheilas have compromised the World Cup bid and caused no end of embarrassment to Australia's image in Asia and around the world.

The FFA, of course, didn't screw up. The girls and their coach did - and they warrant the sternest rebuke. But if the FFA's stalling goes on any longer, it is they that will emerge out of this sorry saga the most guilty party of all.

The Asian Football Confederation's "3+1" rule, which allows all competing clubs in the Asian Champions League to sign a player from within any of the AFC's 46 member nations above and beyond normal quota restrictions for foreign players, is one of the smartest things the AFC has ever implemented.

Already we've seen a significant amount of human traffic to and from football clubs, especially in Japan and South Korea - making the top Asian football leagues, and Asian football in general, stronger for their cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.

Unfortunately, though, it's a rule that is beginning to reward the rich and punish the poor. And that's precisely what is happening in the transfer of Gold Coast United defender Adam Griffiths to Saudi Arabia's Al Shabab.

It's a funny world we live in when the likes of Gold Coast owner Clive Palmer, among the richest half-dozen men in Australia, can be described as poor but against the financial muscle of a cabal of sheikhs his fortune certainly looks small fry.

As we have seen in the English Premier League with Manchester City, money is no object for men of the desert and the outlay on Griffiths is probably less than Prince Khalid bin Sultan, the Riyadh club's benefactor and son of the Saudi Crown Prince, spends in a year keeping his moustache clipped.

But it's still a fortune in Australia and it instantly makes Griffiths, a middling talent at best, the highest-paid Australian footballer in Asia and multiplies his United salary sixfold.

Palmer might have more money than he'll ever need but billionaires never lose their nose for a good deal and so he is not going to stand in the player's way.

Griffiths, just one game played for Gold Coast after signing a three-year deal from Newcastle Jets last A-league season, gratefully accepted the invitation without a moment's hesitation. Hours after making his A-League debut for his new club, he'd decamped to Bahrain to nut out the fine details with Al Shabab before Tuesday's deadline for player registrations in the Asian Champions League quarter-finals.

That's how it easy it is to poach an Australian player from the A-League under the "3+1" dispensation. Wave some riyals, won or yen in their face and their bags are packed even before they say yes. And there will be more to follow.

Griffiths is just the latest in a growing number of Aussies to have left the country for the bounty on offer in Asia - his brothers Ryan and Joel among them - but is a pioneer of sorts in going to the Middle East.

All of which makes it hard to mount a case that Asian football has been made fairer by "3+1", the adverse effects of which are only compounded by salary-cap restrictions presently in place in smaller, poorer leagues such as Australia. Which means that even if Gold Coast wanted to spend all that new money in its bank account on an expensive overseas signing, it would be effectively prevented from doing so. It can only spend what the Australian football federation permits it to spend. In Saudi Arabia, no such restrictions apply.

So far from "3+1" fostering competition across Asia it could be argued it actually hinders it when the playing field is already far from level.

I'm still a fan of "3+1" - I think it's a great idea in principle - but it's starting to become a rich man's plaything.

And I'm not sure that's what the AFC intended it to be.

I've been banging on about the importance of Indonesia and Australia fostering greater ties in football for some time now, including the establishment of an annual Indonesia-Australia Cup, which to date has not seen the light of day. (Not everything that comes out of this formidable mouth is taken seriously by the suits at Football Federation Australia.)

Some years ago, in a wistful moment, I even advocated the entry of an Indonesian side into the Australian A-League and was laughed down by the parochial mob back home as having had too many Bintangs the night before.

So imagine my pride and vindication this week when an Australian friend, Gerard Clark, sent me a news item reporting that Indonesia Super League megaclub and current champion Persipura Jayapura was considering defecting to the A-League.

There has been trouble brewing in West Papua ever since Persipura made the decision to walk off the ground during the final of the Copa Indonesia against Sriwijaya FC on June 28.

Trailing 1-0, Persipura was incensed when a Sriwijaya player handballed in his own penalty area and the resulting pleas for a penalty fell on deaf ears from the referee, who got a headbutt from Persipura's Nigerian striker Ernest Jeremiah for his trouble.

The PSSI, the Indonesian FA, summarily banned the club from next year's Copa. Jeremiah and his non-playing Brazilian teammate Alberto Goncalves, who egged on the team to quit, were also banned from all football in the country for three years - three years! - and the club chairman, Manase Robert Kambu, who ordered the walkoff and happens to be the mayor of Jayapura, was sidelined for two. Jeremiah has since buggered off to China to play for Huangzhou Greentown.

In my view the PSSI was right to ban Persipura from the Copa Indonesia. A walkoff by any team in any situation that does not involve direct endangerment to their players (such as a riot, a fire, a terrace collapsing) should not be tolerated under any circumstances.

Headbutting a referee, meanwhile, is a disgrace. Jeremiah can't run from his shame. But the bans on Goncalves and Kambu appear disproportionate and that is partly why 100 Persipura fans picketed outside Papua Provincial Legislative Council in Jayapura this week.

There has been talk of the regional governor withdrawing tobacco sponsorship of football in the region and even of taking the club's case straight to the top - Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - unless the penalties are overturned. Then, breathtakingly, there is the threat to defect to Australia.

But it's all pie in the sky.

As my ESPN Star Sports colleague Antony Sutton wrote in his "Jakarta Casual" blog last weekend: "Of course the Aussies would welcome a team who get the sulks when things don't go their way with open arms. But they would draw the line at headbutting officials and walking off mid-game."

An Indonesian club might one day take its place in an expanded, regional A-League, and I think some point it is going to be inevitable, along with the inclusion of a Singaporean team, but it's not going to be an outfit like Persipura that takes such diabolical liberties with the definition of the word "professional".

West Papua might still be a wild frontier in all sorts of ways, but Persipura's behaviour has no place in football in Indonesia, Australia or anywhere it's played.

It's a lesson that needs to be learned - the hard way.

While Manchester United were shellacking Hangzhou Greentown and Liverpool were putting Singapore to the sword in two grossly mismatched encounters this week in Asia, a far more interesting assignment involving an Asian team was taking place in Catalonia, Spain: Spanish third-division club Unió Esportiva Castelldefels versus India at the Estadi La Bóbila de Gava.

India? In Spain?

It's rare enough to even hear of any Indian football match, let alone one taking place in Europe, but this is a football nation that is aggressively trying to shed the weight of its oppressive history on and off the park.

Oppressive because this country of 1.1 billion people, one of the fastest growing economies on earth, hasn't qualified for a World Cup since 1950. And it didn't even turn up for that event because at the time some of the national-team players preferred, believe it or not, playing without boots. FIFA wouldn't have it and so India withdrew from the tournament in Brazil.

IndianFootball.com, the premier Indian football site on the web, gives a good account of the Catalonia match, admitting India "were having difficulty" coping with the "polished Spanish football" from the "taller and stronger" Castelldefels players but they surprisingly opened the scoring in the 24th minute through a long-range strike from Surkumar Singh and only conceded in the second half through a penalty to the home side.

Not a bad effort for a team playing its first practice match of the year, even if the opposition wasn't the best team in Barcelona. Much more than the result, however, the game speaks volumes for India's ambition to get better at football, a sport that has a long and illustrious history on the subcontinent (as far back as the 1850s) but appears to have not seized the imagination of the public in the way cricket has.

The truth is, though, football is wildly popular in India. It's just that Indian football isn't. Starry-eyed kids and the upwardly mobile middle class, as elsewhere in Asia, favour watching and supporting teams such as Arsenal, Barcelona and Manchester United over the likes of Dempo, Mohun Bagan and Pune.

European football is not only of a high standard, it is aspirational. Indian football is neither - and it has the added misfortune of being compared to Indian cricket, which boasts arguably the most exciting players in the world who are paid sums of money even staggering by the standards of professional sportsmen in the West.

If you were a kid in Mumbai or Kolkata with some athletic talent and a desire to own a fast car and marry a Bollywood actress, what would you choose? It's a no-brainer. That is just part of the problem.

The other is an unwieldy football bureaucracy that you would expect of a nation made up of 35 states or territories covering over three million square kilometres. But that is slowly being dismantled and the All India Football Federation (AIFF) is currently in the process of overhaul, calling for new blood in the key positions of AIFF secretary-general and I-League (the Indian domestic competition) chief executive.

One of the secretary-general candidates, Goa Football Association secretary Savio Messias, says a World Cup is unrealistic.

"Let us accept the ground realities. We can't dream of playing in the World Cup. We have to go step by step, think of Asia first and then the world."

He may have a point.

Until it qualified for Qatar 2011, India hadn't qualified for an Asian Cup since 1984 and it does seem a logical place to start.

But, even still, a World Cup is not an impossible dream.

Qualifying for the biggest sporting event on earth might be decades away, but who thought India would be the power in cricket it is today when for two decades between 1932 and 1952 it couldn't win a Test against England? Now, 50 years on, India virtually runs the sport. 

If the 21st century is India's to own, which on all the evidence at hand it appears to be, football has to be part of that story.

It's time to write a new chapter.

Well nothing much happened in Kuala Lumpur overnight that we didn't expect - save for the fact that the Malaysian XI who trotted out against Manchester United for a second time in three days didn't retrieve the ball inside its own net more than twice and Michael Owen, the Red Devils' much-maligned signing from Newcastle in the EPL off-season, managed to score one of them. Two goals, though, from the Malaysians in the first game against a sluggish Man U gave the game some pep and faint hope, albeit deluded, to any Asian football romantic watching on.

The two sides were playing again because of the cancellation of United's Indonesian leg in the wake of the bombing of the Marriott Jakarta by terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah. As one of those aforementioned Asian football romantics, the scheduled July 20 game against an Indonesian Super League XI was one I was really looking forward to seeing, chiefly because I think the Gelora Bung Karno Stadium is one of those incredible arenas where the combination of the noise and colour from the crowd and the atrocious playing surface can level things between even the most mismatched opposition, and the Indonesian Super League XI was just that. It was also Man U's first trip to the old East Indies since 1975.

But it will never be.

There is talk already that the Indonesian 2022 World Cup bid is doomed because of the bombings.

That is balderdash. Spain and England are also bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups and both have been victim of some wretched atrocities perpetrated by terrorists in recent years. Russia, another bidder, has been fighting a war against elements within its own realm (terrorists to some, freedom fighters to others) for over a decade.

How is Indonesia's situation any different?

It's all lies in perception. As someone who has travelled overland in Java a couple of times, I have never felt in grave danger for my safety at any time - except on public transport. Get around the east of the island on a bus at night and you'll know what I am talking about. It's heart-in-your-mouth stuff.

But for mine the locals were friendly, tolerant and open to engaging with foreigners - nothing like the image that now has some currency in the "West" of your average Indonesian being a red-eyed, foreigner-hating religious nutjob. There are some of them around, no doubt, but there are bad elements in any society - and England, Spain and Russia are no different.

Yes, Jemaah Islamiyah might want to use the World Cup for publicising their cause, but the same surely applies to ETA in Spain, Chechen militants in Russia and terrorist cells within England, as well as fellow World Cup bidders in the United States, Qatar, Japan and Australia, among others.

There is still 18 months before FIFA makes its decision on the 2018 and 2022 World Cups and a lot can happen in that time. Terrorism reaches every part of the world.

The bombing in Jakarta is not going to cruel Indonesia's World Cup bid. It never stood a chance anyway, even before the bombing at the Marriott.
But it can turn this tragedy into opportunity by renewing the fight against these criminals and bringing them to justice and doing it before the eyes of the world.

That would be a far better result than trying to win a game that's unwinnable.

It’s one of those ironies of Japanese culture that a country so steeped in not losing face, of (post 1945 at least) non-confrontation and avoiding drama, can produce a football chief in the mould of Motoaki Inukai. The Japanese Football Association president and former Urawa Reds boss this week called his own league “boring”, which is something his Australian counterparts would never countenance – and Aussies are known worldwide for their candour and lack of fear in calling “a spade a spade”.

In an interview with Nikkansports, Inukai complained that the J-League “doesn't have enough shots” and said shooting at goal “is not practised enough among children and they don't do enough of it in games”. He then trundled out some dubious statistic that the average Brazilian footballer takes 300,000 shots on goal before he becomes a professional, while a Japanese player will take 5000.

Which would explain J-League clubs’ enduring love affair with foreign strikers and the Japanese national team’s remarkable inability to score goals. All this, while Japanese midfielders can produce some of the prettiest passing football in the world then fall apart with a goalmouth beckoning. So Inukai has a valid point and he should be commended for making it. It’s refreshing to hear.

But I think it’s a harsh assessment.

As a viewer and follower of Asian football, Japanese teams have long set the standard for their regional competition, on and off the park, and that includes scoring goals. In the final of last year’s Asian Champions League, for example, Gamba Osaka crushed Adelaide United 5-0 over two legs. In this year’s group stages, two Japanese clubs, Kashima Antlers and Gamba Osaka, scored over 16 goals in just six matches. Gamba, who missed out on the ACL quarter-finals this September, also lost narrowly to eventual world champions Manchester United in the FIFA Club World Cup in a thrilling match that produced eight goals, three of quality from Gamba.

Last season in the J-League Kawasaki Frontale scored 65 times from 34 games with a goal differential of +23. The next highest scorer, champions Kashima Antlers, put the ball in the onion bag 56 times with a GD of +26. Compare to the A-League, with champions Melbourne Victory finishing the regular 21-game season with 39 goals with a GD of +12. Runners-up Adelaide finished with the same GD, but scored just 31 times. Even against the K-League, the J-League stacks up favourably, 2008 champions and top league scorers Suwon Samsung Bluewings scoring 46 times from 26 games with a GD of +22.

So Inukai should cut his clubs some slack.

The real issue, of course, is that the J-League is so far ahead of other Asian leagues that Inukai is really comparing his baby with Europe  – where EPL champions Man U finished their 38-game season with 68 goals with a GD of +44 and La Liga and Champions League winners Barcelona finished their domestic season breaking the ton in goals scored, an incredible 105, from 38 games and a GD of +70.

But that is an exercise in vanity and foolishness. Europe is another level entirely.

For what it is and what has achieved in its very short history, the J-League can be proud. One day it will compete with Europe but that day is not now.

Rather than get down on his own league, Inukai should be celebrating the beautiful football his countrymen can produce and which has given so much pleasure to fans around the world.

Because just like making love, football isn't all about the climax.

There was a cheeky editorial by Wanchai Rujawongsanti in the Bangkok Post last week titled "Thailand should join Oceania", which posed the question: "Australia switched to Asia so why can't Thailand go the other way round?"

Wanchai has a right old whinge, clearly annoyed by the qualification of Asian new boys Australia to the 2010 World Cup at a canter and riled by the fact his own country, Thailand, recently accounted 2-1 for a team that is still in with a shot at South Africa 2010, New Zealand.

The All Whites are due to play either Bahrain or Saudi Arabia in October in a two-leg playoff between the fifth-placed team in the Asian Football Confederation and the champions of Oceania. The AFC has 4.5 spots in World Cup qualifying, the OFC half a spot.

"The Thais comfortably defeated a second-string All Whites in a friendly in Bangkok recently," Wanchai wrote. "[We] should switch to Oceania as this might improve the chance of advancing to the finals.

"After being crowned Oceania champions, Thailand would face an Asian side in a play-off for a finals spot. This could be easier for the Kingdom than playing in long qualifying stages in Asia."

Easier is debatable.

Wanchai's thinking is the same thinking that bedevilled successive administrations of football in Australia and he would do well to pay heed to the lessons learned from that long period of stagnation when Australian football effectively kept its head in the sand.

It wasn't easy for Australia to qualify for the World Cup between 1974 and 2006 when it was a member of Oceania. In fact, that period is a great black mark on the nation's football record, its nadir in 1997 when the Socceroos let slip a two-goal lead in Melbourne to draw with Iran after a 1-1 scoresheet in the first leg in Tehran.

And in 1981, of course, Australia managed to lose to New Zealand, the All Whites going on to make their first and only World Cup appearance in Spain the following year.

So being a part of Oceania is not a red carpet to the World Cup as Wanchai seems to think. It means dropping down in the rankings, not having too many teams that want to play you, not having that many games to play - all of which goes on to affect the quality of the football being played.

That's why Australia desperately wanted to be a part of Asia. It didn't want its task made easier. It wanted to make it harder. And since joining the AFC, our football has benefited at club and international level, more games are being played, we're on the radar for hosting a World Cup and have qualified for a second World Cup in succession - the first time in our history. Australia is also at a historic high of #16 in the FIFA world rankings.

Asia has delivered everything it promised - and more. So what is Thailand's problem?

Having seen the Thais play first-hand myself, I believe they are a football nation with great promise. What they lack in physical stature they compensate with skill, speed and technique. When Australia met Thailand at the Asian Cup in 2007, they got a real fright.

They are positioned in one of the fastest-growing zones in the football world, South-East Asia. They are blessed with a population that is football mad.

But I'll be frank: they aren't prepared to put in the hard work. More players need to head overseas and test themselves outside of the Thai league without waiting for Thaksin Shinawatra to hand them a start in a club he's bought.

To my knowledge Teeratep Winothai and Surat Sukha are the only current internationals playing outside the Asian continent and a handful of players are picking up their wages in Vietnam.

This has to change.

Talent isn't lacking. Belief is. Both among the players themselves, the national federation, the Thai media and fans. Getting to a World Cup is not as easy as simply joining the OFC. That's a cop-out. It's going to take application, competition, effort and money - and if the Thais really want to get there they can't be in a better federation than the AFC.

The AFC's motto is "The Future is Asia" and it's completely right. Thai football needs to wake up and realise the gift it has been given - not sulk about what it doesn't have.

So Luiz Felipe Scolari, the legendary Brazilian coach who was most recently putting out the cones for Chelsea FC in a little park competition called the Barclays Premier League, has chosen Bunyodkor of Uzbekistan as his next coaching assignment. Bunyodkor? Uzbekistan?

If that wasn't enough to make you blow your corn flakes across the breakfast table, Andriy Shevchenko is wanting out of Europe, too, and has been linked with a shock move to the Qatari league's Al-Gharafa Sports Club, a place where outrageous wage demands are shrugged off as camel feed.

The U-League and the Q-League, or whatever the hell they're called (the names seem to change every year), haven't had too much success yet in the Asian version of the UEFA Champions League, the AFC Champions League, but at the pace all this oil money is being thrown around it's only a matter of time before they claim proprietorial rights over every bit of silverware going, just like Manchester United of England and Barcelona of Spain. Money doesn't always buy championships but it sure goes a long way in getting you near them.

As Japan and Australia have shown on the world stage and Gamba Osaka at the Club World Cup, the gulf between European and Asian football is narrowing and on a good day a top team in Asia can seriously give one of Europe's best a fright. In terms of professionalism, the gap is admittedly still wide, but in terms of performance it is not.

There are some wonderfully talented footballers in Asia and the only thing they've been lacking, unlike most of their European peers, is exposure to fans and decent exposure in the press. Thankfully, the arrival of big names such as Scolari and Shevchenko in Asia can only aid the cause of promoting football in the region.

But what is really needed, in my view, is a drastic rethink on continental club competitions.

Asian Football Confederation president Mohamed bin Hammam's long-term goal is to have Asia compete on an equal footing to Europe, so what faster way to accelerate that process by combining Asian and European club football with a new dispensation that would reward the best clubs in Asia with an opportunity to compete in Europe?

It would give all clubs in Asia an extra incentive to buy better-quality footballers and coaches, serve the purpose of bettering Asian football in general and, above all, expose European clubs, big and small, to that all-important marketing mother lode: the Asian continent.

How it could conceivably work is the hard part, but for example, the finalists of the previous year's Asian Champions League could automatically qualify for a pre-qualifying round of the Uefa Champions League, where they would be pitted in knockout home-and-away legs against some of the lesser clubs of Europe.

In effect, Asian clubs would be jokers in the pack: an entertaining novelty for fans and a lucrative commodity for TV rights holders. Given their quality, they would also stand a very good chance of progressing to the rounds featuring the European heavyweights, where things would really start to get interesting and the money would really start to flow.

It's pie-in-the-sky, of course, and how Asian teams could be accommodated in the present Uefa format without taking away the privileges of existing teams and national federations is a problem for which I don't propose to have any ready solution, but it's an idea worth throwing around.

We live in a small world and it's getting smaller. The dividing line between Asia and Europe is an imaginary one. Let's stop pretending it's intractable.

It's anything but.

If there's one thing the final at the Confederations Cup has proved conclusively - lest there were any doubts - it's that football is a game of two halves. USA went into the change-rooms at half-time in Johannesburg 2-0 up against the most storied, dangerous team in the world: Brazil. They were 45 minutes away from one of the great upsets of all time. A triumph for the ages.

Once they had got back on the field, however, it took less than a minute for one of those goals to be pegged back, a shade over 20 for the scores to be deadlocked and, with six minutes to go until extra time, it was all over, the unlikely figure of Lucio the saviour for a Selecao that had been pushed to the limit and proved it had stores of mental strength to match its virtually inexhaustible talent.

Football romantics, and I am one, were aghast. There's nothing more satisfying than seeing the Brazilian national football team put to the sword. It happens occasionally. What is rare, though, is to see anyone match the masters of joga bonito at their own game, and that is what USA did for that first 45 minutes, like Egypt against the same opposition earlier in the tournament.

Landon Donovan's goal, the Americans' second, was a masterpiece of counterattacking, one of the most beautifully executed pieces of football art I've seen in a long time. It's a shame it had to be overshadowed in the final analysis because it was a goal that deserved to deliver victory.

It was hard to believe the same Americans that danced across Ellis Park with such élan in the first half could be reduced to running at shadows in the second. But whatever Dunga had said to his players inside the dressing sheds must have been Pattonesque, judging by the wild reactions that accompanied each goal.

For the first time in a long time Brazil had needed to come from two goals down and do it in a final of a big tournament. That they scored three with such conviction and alacrity - none of them were lucky - is a tribute to their willpower. Clearly they needed to be shaken up a bit to find their mojo. This was more like the side that had crushed USA 3-0 in the group round, with Káka producing an imperious display after the break befitting a player with a GDP-like bank balance.

And so there is order in the house of football again. Even Spain, playing with the enthusiasm of a bunch of blokes who would prefer to be lying on beach towels, managed to survive another scare, this time in the third-place curtain-raiser against South Africa in Rustenburg.

Wedged between them in second place, though, is USA, and to get that far when no one gave them a hope in hell is an achievement worth praising. More than Egypt, USA has emerged from the Confederations Cup as a new world power in a sport whose name it can't even get right.

The ranking no longer looks like a typo. There is substance behind it.

For a guy whose head was on the chopping block after just two group games, Bob Bradley's position going into next year's World Cup now looks unassailable. USA can go a long way.

The only disadvantage his team will have when they return to South Africa is the surprise is gone. But great performers never look back.

USA has got its break on the world stage. Now it's up to them to take it the next level.

That it took a sublime piece of dead-ball magic from Barcelona defender Daniel Alves to separate the teams with just two minutes of regulation time left, is a tribute to Bafana Bafana and their under-fire coach Joel Santana.

For a team that is way down the pecking order of African football nations - it can't even qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations - South Africa have served notice that they won't be a pushover for anyone next year when the World Cup circus hits town.

I was scathing of Santana's team earlier in the tournament, especially for its insipid performance against Iraq, but they've had the last laugh. I am eating my words.

And I'm happy to. No one wants to see a host nation of a World Cup be embarrassed, and on the evidence of what we saw against Brazil South Africa won't be in 2010.

Siboniso Gaxa's thunderous strike across the face of goal from the right flank was an early sign that Bafana Bafana weren't going to be overawed, and they followed it up with probably their best chance a short period later. Aaron Mokoena skipped his marker by the left post, he got his head to the ball only for Julio Cesar to parry the effort over the crossbar. There were other good chances, notably another cross-goal ripper from Steven Pienaar, but Mokoena's was the best of them.

It was a composed, assured and intrepid showing from the South Africans, which actually reminded me a lot of when Australia played the Selecao in Munich in 2006. Again, it was a game that was won by the Brazilians, 2-0 in the final analysis, but the moral victory had been the Socceroos', who, in defeat, played their best game of the World Cup but showed a resolve to win complemented by an exhibition of technical football that I'm sure surprised even them.

That's one of the great things about Brazil: even when they're playing below their own lofty standards: they bring out the best in their opposition. Everyone wants to beat them. To beat Brazil, even if they aren't on top of the FIFA rankings at any given time, is to effectively become, for however briefly it lasts and however self-deceptive it might be, the best team in the world. Which is a tribute to Brazil's place in football. They remain, despite the claims of pretenders such as Spain, Holland and Argentina, the apotheosis of beauty in the beautiful game.

But to play below their best, while bringing out the best in others, beat them and still go on to win big tournaments - like they did at USA '94 and Korea-Japan 2002 and may well do again here in South Africa - is their greatest quality. For fleeting moments they give the world hope they can beaten. But when the gears kick in, when the drums start beating, when they find their Jobim rhythm, they cannot be stopped by anyone.

USA might be feeling on top of the world right now but come the final on June 28 put your money on them crashing back down to earth.

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the President of the United States this morning? Has Paris Hilton won the Nobel Peace Prize? Is the world being invaded by vast armadas of spaceships carrying indestructible alien bugs?

Don't snicker. You'd better check, because the USA have beaten Spain 2-0 in the semi-final of the Confederations Cup, a game no one in their wildest dreams ever thought La Roja would lose.

Worse, it came just as the Spaniards were about to overhaul Brazil's longstanding world record for being undefeated.
You couldn't make it up.

The Americans, no match for Italy and Brazil in their first two matches, have now shocked form teams Egypt and Spain in succession and must have a good chance of upsetting Brazil in the final - if indeed the Selecao can overcome South Africa to get there.

What a confounding tournament this has been. It started so predictably, but now nothing can be taken for granted. If this is a sign of things to come at the World Cup next year, then football fans are in for four weeks of something truly special. A World Cup where no team is safe.

And, on this showing, the USA, so long the butt of jokes in football circles, should find themselves back in the top ten of the FIFA world rankings when they are released next month. It couldn't have come at a better time for the American World Cup bid. If Europe's movers and shakers thinks they have 2018 in the bag, they should think again.

So were Spain the victims of the disease otherwise known as complacency, something that has riddled this year's Confederations Cup?

It must have been a factor, but to make too much of it would be unfair. The USA's teenage striker Jozy Altidore turned his marker, Joan Capdevila, with ridiculous ease for the first goal and the second, scored by veteran midfielder Clint Dempsey, was a result of the Americans pressing and dispossessing Spain in their own half and making the European champions pay dearly for failing to clear the ball out of their own danger zone.

What was Sergio Ramos thinking? Why on earth did he just tap the ball with the inside of his right foot when it landed at his feet following a Landon Donovan cross? Dempsey didn't need an invitation to dip, swerve and fire around Ramos' legs.

This guy plays for Réal Madrid? After last night's match he should be cleaning toilets at McDonalds on Calle Gran Via.

All great teams are allowed an off day, and for Spain this clearly was one of them, their vaunted attack only managing a handful of retaliatory strikes on target in reply. But they also had an off day against Iraq, don't forget.

Two poor performances in four matches against some less-than-stellar opposition is worrying.

Spain thought they had consigned their infamous big-tournament yips to history by winning Euro 2008. On the evidence of their hitout in South Africa, that might not be the case at all. The yips are back.

As for the USA, they can hold their heads high. To be virtually down and out in the group stage, only to eventually make the final is an escape act worthy of Harry Houdini. Their only glaring problem is a propensity for collecting red cards, three in four games - three times more than all the other teams combined. They also lead the way with fouls conceded.

Afshin Ghotbi's Iran couldn't quite complete the fairytale but there was a welcome change in the passenger list on the Asian World Cup bus when the Democratic People's Republic of Korea qualified for South Africa 2010 on the back of a 0-0 draw with Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, the first time North Korea has qualified for a World Cup since its two-leg defeat of Australia in Cambodia in 1965.

The story of that encounter in Phnom Penh forms a whole chapter of a book I wrote back in 2007, the knockabout Australians (they weren't yet known as the Socceroos) being caught completely unawares by their well-drilled opposition, who smashed them nine goals to two. After shocking the Aussies, the same team went to England 1966 and "shocked the world", defeating Italy and giving Eusebio's Portugal the fright of its life in the quarter-finals.

So it's a 44-year break between drinks for the Chollima and it's greatto see them back on the biggest stage of all. FIFA president Sepp Blatter concurs, saying this week from the Confederations Cup: "I think to have the Democratic Republic of Korea at the World Cup is a confirmation that the development of football will not stop."

Perhaps, Sepp, but how much has North Korea developed itself as a football nation since 1966? In some respects it has gone backwards. The North Korean side of 1966 and the one of today might as well be from different planets. Where the 1966 side was celebrated for its attacking instincts, the team of 2009 is celebrated for its stinginess.

In its eight Group B games in the final round of Asian qualifying, it conceded only five, second only to South Korea (four) but scored just seven, bettering only bottom side UAE. It hasn't scored a goal since its home qualifier against UAE in March, when it won 2-0.

It doesn't augur well for a Chollima goalfest come June 2010, but, to be fair to the North Koreans, poverty of offence is becoming a characteristic of all four Asian teams to have directly qualified for the World Cup. South Korea scored 12 in eight games, Australia 12, Japan 11 and North Korea just over half a dozen. That's an average of less than two a game.

And poverty of offence, of course, didn't stop Greece winning Euro 2004 and Italy winning Germany 2006. But North Korea will go to South Africa 2010, too, under pressure not just to win games but also win the propaganda war. Tensions between the United States and the DPR are at an all-time high over the issue of nuclear-arms proliferation and there is every chance the football teams of the two states could meet at some point, even be grouped together.

The Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-il, has form on the board for using football to score propaganda points, so if the players of 1965 and 1966 thought they were under pressure not to lose - a bad result could mean being sent off to a prison camp - it's going to be nothing compared to the demands that'll be placed on their 2010 counterparts by Kim Jong-il and his Politburo.

Spare a thought for coach Kim Jong-hun and his team. They're already finding it hard enough to put the ball in the back of the net. So having to turn that record around at a World Cup and embarrass Barack Obama while they're doing it might just be an expectation too far.

Complacency. It's a word hard to escape at this Confederations Cup, with Egypt, the team I've been giving big raps to all week, being bundled out 3-0 by a hitherto underwhelming USA and Italy, the world champions, being sent home in disgrace by Brazil with a tournament record - three games, no wins, two losses - that should be casting some doubt on whether Marcello Lippi is the right man to lead his country to the World Cup next year in South Africa.

Then there was Iraq, which I flayed in yesterday's column, having a priceless opportunity against New Zealand to progress through to the semis at the expense of South Africa and, like their goals-for tally, coming to naught.

Complacency. Brazil had it against Egypt. Spain against Iraq. Italy against Egypt. Egypt against USA. Iraq against New Zealand.

By contrast, South Africa and USA, two of the least impressive teams, have benefited from their steadiness and a distinct lack of the spectacular to progress to the final four.

The other semi finalists, Spain and Brazil, of course, are so good they can afford the occasional stumble and have the necessary wherewithal to pull themselves out of a hole when required.

Egypt and Italy, brilliant in flashes, evidently cannot.

You've undoubtedly read the reports that some of the Pharaohs players were robbed by prostitutes back at their team hotel. The suggestion of hanky-panky would explain some of their sluggishness against USA. But were they also drugged en masse by some dodgy loukoum? How else to explain their collective brain explosion?

Egypt's coaching staff is complaining about tiredness and lack of preparation but that is a scoundrel's excuse. The fact is they thought the USA would be pushovers, chose a less than full-strength team and adopted a commensurately casual mindset when they should have been at their most alert. There are no free passes in big tournaments like this.

Instead of playing their normally open, free-passing, hard-running, out-from-the-back game and making offence their best defence, their response to going a goal down in shambolic circumstances to Charlie Davies was to camp in their own box, try not to concede anymore and counterattack with long-balls.

Always a dangerous strategy, even for the best teams in the world.

Playing to their strengths, which is to attack, Egypt could be one of them. So why they chose to play against their better instincts is a question I'm hoping coach Hassan Shehata will enlighten us and especially Egypt's supporters with in the days to come. We all deserve an explanation. The Confederations Cup has lost its fairytale team.

For their part Italy just didn't have their heads screwed on right from the very start. To be in a position where they had to win against Brazil in the final group game - what before the tournament should have seen as 90 minutes to experiment and rest key players for the semis - is an indictment of Lippi's preparations. The Selecao certainly weren't about to do them any favours, smashing them to smithereens all in the space of just eight minutes.

That vaunted blue defence, so long the calling card of the world champions, looks like a relic of history, the Azzurri scoring three in three games but conceding five.

Italy will rebuild, they cannot afford not to, but on the evidence of their performance at this Confederations Cup they run the very real risk of being the first defending champions to go out in a World Cup since France in 2002.

They might be flying home in ignominy and to a savage reception, but, like Egypt, they've also been gifted a precious warning.

Complacency has no place at this level.

Oh, Iraq. A team that could be so easy to love if it weren't so diabolically inconsistent. Asian champions one minute, World Cup roadkill the next. Frustrators of Spain, pushovers for New Zealand.

So much goodwill has been invested in this side, including my own, but, truth be told, they have not deserved it. Bora Milutinovic has again failed when so much was expected of him. Three games for two draws and one defeat.

But the statistic that matters is goals scored, and for Iraq it is an unflattering one: none.

Its disappointing record at the Confederations Cup is not an isolated one. Since their 2-1 World Cup qualifier defeat of China in Tianjin in June 2008, the Lions of Mesopotamia have not won a match. They have not scored twice in a match since December last year, a 2-2 draw against UAE in Al Ain.

If ever there was a time when they could turn both those records on their head, erase them as lingering embarrassments, it was against New Zealand, the whipping boys of the Confederations Cup, the great pretenders of Oceania who have been so out of their depth here in South Africa.

They hardly needed extra incentive, with the prospect of qualifying through to the semis at the expense of Bafana Bafana laid up on a plate.

Beating New Zealand? How hard could it be?

But save for some early predations at Ellis Park from Emad Mohammed and Younis Mahmoud and a late rally from Karrar Jasim, they were outplayed by the All Whites, who have reason to be proud of the way they have responded from being thumped by Spain and South Africa.

Coach Ricki Herbert was exultant after the game: "We've never come to an international tournament and gotten a point. This was another milestone for the country. I think we proved a few doubters wrong."

Perhaps they did. Perhaps, too, the all-black strips worked. There's a lot to be said for a change of paint. New Zealand certainly looked like a different team that had been thumped seven goals to zip in their previous two group matches.

Perhaps it's time to ditch the All Whites moniker and ape their more feared, more successful rugby counterparts. Perhaps even introduce a scaled-down haka?

From a position of looking like write-offs in their upcoming World Cup playoff against Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, the Shaky Isles might just have found a little of the self-belief hitherto they have been so conspicuously lacking.

Good luck to them.

As for Iraq, the question needs to be asked: Was their Asian Cup victory a fluke?

I was at the Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok in 2007 when they defeated Australia and saw a team that looked and played like a real Asian power.

Now they can't even get past New Zealand.

Granted, they've had to endure more problems and overcome more obstacles than any team should rightfully bear but too many times that has been used to explain away substandard performances like we have seen at this Confederations Cup.

No more.

It's going to be a long time before we see them back on the world stage.

Confederations Cup Day 6 Gallery

ESPN STAR, do I get a cigar?

Sorry while I attempt to slap myself on the back but I did say just a couple of days ago that this Egypt team was something special and threatened to upset the divine progression of either Italy or Brazil in Group B of the Confederations Cup. And so it has come to pass, the Pharoahs making good on their incredible display against Brazil in their opening match by defeating world champions Italy in their second. What a day for the Confederations Cup. What a day for world football. What a day for Africa.

Not such a great day for the Azzurri, of course, whose much-vaunted defence might as well have been asleep when Mohamed Homos headed past Gianluigi Buffon in the 40th minute, such was their resistance to the corner from Mohamed Aboutreika. What were they doing exactly? Playing cards? Picking nits out of each other's hair? I have no idea. But how Homos could get to the ball, unmarked, with four defenders standing around him is a subject worthy of an inquest by the Italian parliament.

Oh to have been a fly on the wall in the Italian dressing-room at half-time. Marcello Lippi must have, as the Australian saying goes, torn them all new a**holes, because they came out after the break like bats out of hell, desperate to atone for their failure. But Vincenzo Iaquinta and Riccardo Montolivo just couldn't get any joy despite numerous clear chances and the impassable Egyptian goalkeeper Essam El-Hadary wasn't about to give them a sniff anyway. This was Egyptian football's arrival on the world stage. The party wasn't going to be spoiled with an equaliser - and it wasn't. Despite the crossbar saving El-Hadary late in the game after what was clearly a mishit cross from Iaquinta, the fact of the matter was the Italians simply weren't good enough.

But that hasn't stopped them being predictably ungracious since. This from Gianluca Zambrotta: "We could have easily scored three of four times tonight, if only we had a little more luck on our side." And this from Simone Pepe: "The pitch... wasn't perfect. In fact yesterday we were unable to train because of its problems, and tonight proved that."

Oh dear. Luck. The pitch. How about just outhustled, outmuscled and ultimately outdone by a better team?

Now the Azzurri have the unenviable task of having to beat Brazil to make the semis and might just have half a chance with the Selecao likely to rest some of their key players after clinically dispatching a feeble USA 3-0 in the other match played overnight.

But if there is any justice in this world Egypt will prevail, hammer the USA in the process and take their place among the final four.

Apart from being the most exciting team to watch at the Confederations Cup they've given some real weight to the cause of African football as a whole and shown the world there is real depth of talent outside the usual bread basket of west Africa. If a case is to be made for increasing the Confederation of African Football's World Cup allotment of five places (not including the hosts, South Africa), it is right now.

Europe's 13 is starting to look a little generous.

Now that's more like it. Two days ago for ESPN STAR I wrote: "Don't be surprised to see one of the big two from Group A, Brazil or Italy, come unstuck, with African Nations Cup champions Egypt into the semi-finals.

"The Egyptians are desperate to get their World Cup qualification dreams back on track after a 3-1 defeat to Algeria a week ago in the final round of African WCQs. There is nothing more dangerous in football than a chastened team out to prove a point to themselves."

Well, Egypt proved more than a point to themselves; they proved it to the rest of the world. The only thing they didn't come away with after succumbing 4-3 at the death to a vastly undeserving Brazil in Bloemfontein was, ironically, a point. They deserved that at the very least.

Much is made by FIFA of South Africa 2010 being the vital cog in an "African renaissance". The reality is if the football part of this renaissance is going to last any length of time it will have to start in the north of the continent, not the south.

The massive gulf in class between Egypt, the African champions, and South Africa, who haven't even qualified for the African Nations Cup next year, is obvious.

The Pharoahs were utterly captivating to watch and for long periods of the game out-joga-bonitoed the masters of joga bonito. Crisp passing, great technique, wonderful invention in one-on-one situations, a massively improved defensive effort in the second half and that most important ingredient: passion.

Brazil, meanwhile, especially their defence, seemed lulled into complacency by their own astonishing self-regard. Egypt was happy to prey upon that weakness and time and time again filched the Selecao defenders playing out of their own half.

If Mohamed Zidan is not snapped up by an English Premier League or La Liga club after this tournament and lured away from relative anonymity at Borussia Dortmund then there is something very wrong with the world. The same goes for Al-Ahly's Mohamed Aboutreika.

If they dropped their first names, shaved their heads and put on a yellow shirt, you would think they'd learned their art on the streets of Rio or Sao Paulo, not Cairo or Alexandria. And they'd be attracting commensurate price tags.

Let's hope Egypt can carry this performance over into their next World Cup assignment against Rwanda because they would be an ornament to the 2010 tournament. On form, they are clearly a match for anybody, as Brazil found to their great horror. The rest of us, meanwhile, have found a new team to love.

So it was all a bit of a letdown to have Italy vs USA follow in Pretoria. The Italians prevailed 3-1, as the Azzurri always do even when they're half asleep, and got a nice leg up in having Ricardo Clark controversially sent off in the first half for chopping down Gennaro Gattuso, which meant an already onerous assignment for the Americans was made that much harder. But it was nowhere near the nailbiter of Bloemfontein.

Credit to USA - they gave it a good shot, even going ahead 1-0 with a penalty to Landon Donovan in the 41st minute - but as is the way with teams that are world champions Italy never look a gift horse in the mouth and so exploited the width provided by the absence of Clark to give Bob Bradley's men a lesson in target practice: their first, a Giuseppe Rossi on-the-run left-foot 20-metre screamer in the 57th minute, was one for the highlights reels. Marvellous stuff.

But the day, if not the result, belonged to Egypt. For a tournament that seemed destined to offer up the same old faces in the semi-finals, Italy must now be sizing up their next match against the Pharaohs on Thursday in Johannesburg with some real alarm. The way Egypt is playing, a loss for the winners of Germany 2006 is a genuine possibility and then they have the prospect of facing Brazil.

Who said the Confederations Cup was a stroll in the park? It's going to be a cracker.

For long periods of the game between Spain and Iraq in Bloemfontein, while waiting for La Roja to put the ball in the back of the net, which seemed an eternity, I was preoccupied with the thought of how Sergio Ramos will feel when he's old and fat with all those weird tattoos of numbers and other talismans that adorn his body. You can get away with a bit of showboating when you're young, good-looking and talented, not so much when you're geriatric, infirm and need a Zimmer frame to get around.

But they're obviously working a charm for Ramos, because he's played over 50 internationals already and just all of 23.

And little wonder. His combination of flair, energy, creativity, speed, positional acumen and peerless skills, as with all his teammates, makes watching Spain a very satisfying exercise in patience: you know that sooner or later they're going to cut through and score. It might have taken 55 minutes, with an exasperated David Villa finally connecting his head to a sublime cross down the left byline from Joan Capdevila, but to a lover of the beautiful game, those 55 minutes were wonderfully instructive. Even with nine men behind the ball, with no thought to getting up the other end, could the Asian champions hold out this rampant Spanish team, which has now stretched its unbeaten run to 34, including 14 straight victories, just one match shy of the all-time record held by Brazil in the early 1990s.

The score might not have flattered the European champions but the bare truth is had Iraq opted to play a more expansive game it undoubtedly would have been a goalfest.

Spain is so good that the only viable strategy left to opposition coaches is to park the proverbial bus in front of goal and hold them at bay for as long as they can. To their immense credit, Iraq's players did a mighty good job of it for Bora Milutinovic but the ploy was always going to come unstuck once Spain scored.

The mark of a great team is one that manages to score even when it's having an off day, and for Spain this was most assuredly one of those.

But it's now into the semi-finals and I can't see them not winning this tournament, which, after a curiously insipid opening day, is finally starting to hit its straps.

Bernard Parker must have read my column from yesterday, calling for Joel Santana to swallow his pride and draft Benni McCarthy and Richard Henyekane to the national cause, because he rejoindered in the best way possible and put away a double against an All Whites rabble in Rustenburg.

Yes, it was New Zealand, so it might as well have been the Bad News Bears, but Bafana Bafana looked a different team with Steven Pienaar reinstated to midfield and will go into their next match, against Spain, with at least some conviction they're not going to be smashed to kingdom come.

Even if they lose, and Iraq thumps New Zealand (a most likely scenario) they can still scrape through to the next stage on goal difference.

Iraq showed the hosts Spain can be contained, so, with goal difference the key (South Africa has two goals, none against, while Iraq has no goals, with one against) there are no prizes for guessing what approach Joel Santana will be taking into the match on 20 June in Bloemfontein.

Bafana Bafana might be not quite the real deal yet, but if there's one thing South Africa has going for it, it's zealousness in defence.

Ramos and the rest of those Spanish pretty boys better buy extra pairs of shinguards. They're going to need them.

A break in transmission. A day's furlough. No matches to report on from overnight in the Confederations Cup in South Africa, and that's a blessed relief for this Australian, anyway, given the matches are televised at 12am and 4am AEST. A nice bottle of Marlborough pinot noir put me nicely to sleep before midnight and I awoke to the new day relatively refreshed and ready to once again staple my eyelids to my forehead and stay up for another night of international football.

Well, that is, if you can call South Africa vs New Zealand international standard. On the evidence so far, the hosts of South Africa 2010 are going to go out in the first round next year unless something drastic happens, most likely a new coach to replace the Brazilian Joel Santana. What's struck me most about Bafana Bafana so far is that they are overcompensating with their lack of incisiveness in attack with brutality in defence, and this is, naturally, a dangerous tactic with referees at big tournaments who are instructed to brook no nonsense. Against good teams, too, it's not going to get them too far.

For a nation that is already copping criticism from FIFA for half-filled stadia and wishes to put on its best face for the world when June 2010 rolls around, there is going to have to be a quantum shift in the make-up of the team. Benni McCarthy, stood down by Santana for supposedly faking an injury to excuse himself for internationals against Norway and Portugal and then fronting up for Blackburn Rover days later, has to come in from the cold. Bafana Bafana without McCarthy is like Sweden without Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Spain without Fernando Torres.

Santana was morally right to assert his authority in the matter of McCarthy's commitment (or lack of) to his country but this is not a team that can afford the luxury of leaving out its only genuine European-based star outside of midfielder and fellow English Premier League player Steven Pienaar.

Some compromise from both sides - player and coach - needs to be reached.

It cannot afford, either, to leave out Golden Arrows striker Richard Henyekane, the leading goalscorer in South Africa's domestic league, the Premier Soccer League. Last season Henyekane put away 19 goals for the Durban club, well ahead of fellow PSL strikers who were ultimately picked by Santana for his 23-man Confederations Cup squad: Katlego Mshego (9) and Katlego Mphela (3).

In response to his star player's exclusion from the national squad in early May, Arrows coach Manqoba Mngqithi called it "truly astonishing" and "nonsense". For his part, Santana refused to explain why. Perhaps he knew even then there was no real justification. There certainly doesn't seem to be any now with South Africa looking so singularly incapable of scoring in this tournament, that combined comedy-tragedy in the Iraq match from midfielder Kagiso Dikgacoi and Red Star Belgrade striker Bernard Parker aside. (Parker, for the record, scored all half a dozen goals last season for the Serbian club after moving from Durban's Thanda Royal Zulu and is now suing them for unpaid wages. Hardly a player at the top of his game.) South Africa should beat a hapless New Zealand in Rustenburg and keep themselves in the hunt for a semi-finals spot, providing Santana, for the moment at least, some vindication. A loss or draw would be unforgivable. Whatever the result, though, there's no hiding the fact Bafana Bafana is the weakest World Cup host nation in memory and is playing accordingly.

That can change. There is still time to fix the team's myriad problems. But when a case can be made that the biggest problem of all is the coach, how much hope can there really be?

It might not have registered as news in Asia, but on Sunday afternoon Australia officially launched its FIFA World Cup bid for 2018-2022 with a VIP lollapalooza at Parliament House in Canberra, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was there, along with a swag of politicians, businessmen, journalists, ex-players and other assorted faces from the long-lunch set.

"Come Play" is the slogan and exhortation to FIFA's executive committee, whose votes count for the decision to anoint World Cup hosts, and it was backed up by an elaborate, expensive ad campaign that went to air on Australian TV the same night and is now all over YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

The next day Football Federation Australia chairman Frank Lowy addressed the National Press Club, the first time in his illustrious business career, and presented his case for why the World Cup should come Down Under.

The curious thing about it, and what I want to talk about here, is that for a large part of his speech Lowy spoke about Asia and why it was important for the World Cup to return there for only the second time in the tournament's history.

Curious because although Australia is nominally a member of the Asian Football Confederation, it is not seen as "Asian" by much of the rest of the world, including some of its fellow member nations of the AFC.

Curious, too, because there are four other Asian countries - Japan, South Korea, Qatar and Indonesia - also bidding for either 2018 or 2022, or both.

"The weight of the world is with Asia," Lowy said. "The wealth of Asia continues to grow. It is where the customers are - for goods and services; and for football. In fact, the biggest television audience, by far, lies in Asia, not Europe and America. And in 2014... there will be more people flying in Asia than in Europe or America."

All impressive, all wonderfully convincing, but who is this data helping? Australia or its competitors in Asia?

Japan, South Korea and Indonesia all have bigger populations than Australia. Japan, Qatar, South Korea and even Indonesia have more favourable time zones than Australia for those all important TV schedules and the huge amounts of money that flow from them. South Korea, Japan and Indonesia have far bigger football audiences and far more established football leagues.

According to the International Monetary Fund, Japan has the second-highest GDP in the world, after the United States, and even tiny Qatar has a much higher GDP per capita than Australia, meaning Qataris have much more discretionary income to spend than Aussies. Being a transport hub between Asia and Europe, too, it is of course also far easier to get to for the bulk of fans who will planning to attend.

As I have stated in my column for SBS's The World Game in Australia this week, I believe playing up Australia's unique reputation as the only continent not to have hosted the World Cup is its true trump card. That and its fantastic weather, harbours, beaches, food, wine, nightlife, wilderness and other features that can offer international visitors the time of their lives. That's what so much of going to a World Cup is all about. The time you spend away from the football. For that reason alone, "Come Play" is well pitched.

But drawing attention to the economic clout of Asia? It's hardly doing the Australian bid any great benefit. In fact it might even be ultimately counterproductive and come back to haunt it.

So ditch the business suit, Frank, and, as Paul Hogan famously did in the 1980s, sit back, relax and put another proverbial shrimp on the barbie. The less that is made of the business case and more of the lifestyle one, the better the chances of Australia pulling off its World Cup miracle will be.

Well, if we all learned one thing from the first day of action of the FIFA Confederations Cup, it's that there is no moment to lose wrapping up the farce that is the Oceania Football Confederation. The OFC's representatives, New Zealand, were toyed with by Spain with the sinister intent of those killer whales you see throwing around seals in nature documentaries. It's all fun until someone decides to strike.

And strike Fernando Torres did. It was all over by the sixth minute.

If Torres can score in six minutes with such effortless sangfroid, as he did for his first, treating the All Whites defenders with the contempt they deserved, you just know there's going to be a bloodbath.

And that's precisely what La Roja served up like those orcas in a Vancouver sound: a lunch of blood. 5-0. Goodbye New Zealand. Let's hope they don't make it back to South Africa. They're out of their league.

Watching Iraq vs South Africa, meanwhile, was also no fun - an exercise in being tortured with vuvuzelas. I don't think my middle ear has been assailed with so much noise much since I walked out of a Sex Pistols concert at Sydney's Hordern Pavilion in 1996. It was ceaseless. Unremitting. I got a headache from just half an hour of it, let alone the full 90 minutes.

The headache was compounded by one of the most tedious, error-riddled games of football I've seen for some time. It was all very disappointing stuff from Iraq, whom I wrote about in my last column for ESPN STAR. For a team that is supposed to be so united, they spend an awful amount of time arguing amongst themselves. Nashat Akram, the star of the Lions of Mesopotamia, their floppy-maned il fantasista, had a particularly horrible match and won't have given his new club, FC Twente, much succour that they'd spent their money wisely. Let's hope he comes good for Iraq's next match, against Spain. They have the ability, the Iraqis, they're just not showing it. And they're going to need all their counterattacking wiles against La Roja.

As for the home side, on the evidence of their hitout against the Asian champions they're not going to progress through to the semi-finals with any great exposition of joga bonito, Brazilian coach or not. There's nothing fancy about the South Africans. They have a lethal rugby-like defence, marshalled by Matthew Booth, their sole white player who looks like the villain in the horror movie The Hills Have Eyes and has a bedside manner to match. Every time he flies in for a tackle you're expecting the stretchers to come out. If he can get through this tournament without killing anyone it will be a miracle.

To their credit Bafana Bafana appear adept at pushing the ball around quickly and clinically in midfield but when it rolls into the zone that matters, the final third, they are a rabble, typified by Kagisho Dikgacoi's header that was comically stopped from breaching the Iraqi net by his own team-mate, Bernard Parker.

Still, there is some consolation for the home side in that their next opponent is New Zealand. What an opportunity to sort out their scoring problems. Having just cleaned up the mess from their shirts, the All Whites are surely destined to get splattered with their own blood all over again.

It’s a mark of how big the FIFA World Cup is that it has its own dry-run tournament every four years, the Confederations Cup. Not even the Olympics has that.

I went to my first Confederations Cup in 2005 to watch Australia play Germany in Frankfurt, a game the home side ran away with 4-3. There was requisite colour on the field and in the stands at the space-age Waldstadion, and back in town all the heavy hitters of FIFA were doing their business behind closed doors in hotel conference rooms.

Make no mistake: this is a big football tournament on all sorts of levels, not least for the hosts, who have the opportunity to iron out sundry organisational kinks and get a gauge on how their own football team might really fare when South Africa 2010 kicks off.

Its rivals in this carnival of the boot, the so-called “Festival of Champions”, won’t be treating their time here lightly either.

Historians of the game will remember how the plan to get Guus Hiddink for the Socceroos was hatched at the last Confederations Cup when Frank Farina’s side crashed to Tunisia 2-0. Every coach, every player, is on notice. The only team not in the running for a World Cup spot is Iraq, but they’re playing for honour and so won’t be in South Africa to just make up the numbers.

In fact, a colleague of mine, the British football writer James Montague, the author of a splendid tome about football in the Middle East called When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone, told me during the week that “Iraq is going to kick a**.”

You can read his report about the team, “How the Lions of Mesopotamia brought a sense of unity to Iraq”, on the Guardian website.

As James writes of the 2007 Asian Cup winners, “The Confederations Cup campaign, now under the aegis of the Serbian coach Bora Milutinovic, may seem like an irrelevance to most fans. Just don't tell the Iraqis that.

This is their one chance to remind the world that this generation of talented players was no flash in the pan, a quaint sporting aberration dreamed up in a Hollywood script.”

So pity Bafana Bafana, as the South African team is affectionately known, for being lumped in Group A with them.

The organisers probably thought they were giving the home team a leg up in putting them in a group featuring New Zealand, Iraq and Spain – while Group B has a meatier complexion in Brazil, Egypt, Italy and USA – but this is the funny thing about Confederations Cups: they always spring plenty of surprises.

Of the heavyweights, Spain will progress in a canter from Group A but don’t be surprised to see one of the big two from Group A, Brazil or Italy, come unstuck, with African Nations Cup champions Egypt into the semi-finals. The Egyptians are desperate to get their World Cup qualification dreams back on track after a 3-1 defeat to Algeria a week ago in the final round of African WCQs. There is nothing more dangerous in football than a chastened team out to prove a point to themselves.

A Spain–Brazil final is undoubtedly the pick of the local organising committee, FIFA, and just about every football fan around the world, myself included. I can’t see Spain or Brazil not getting there with players of the calibre of Puyol, Kaká, Torres and Pato among their ranks.

But no one gave Iraq a chance at the Asian Cup, either, and look what happened there.

There are still fairytales in football. The question is can they come around twice? At the Confederations Cup, they just might.

The usual suspects, the two leading football nations in Asia, Japan and Australia, qualified from Group A in Asian Football Confederation qualifying this week for South Africa 2010. There was little fuss made about either's achievement and reasonably so: given the amount of money at their disposal and the talent within their ranks they should be expected to be there.

In Group B, the third-best nation in the 46-member AFC, South Korea or "Korea Republic" also qualified, making it to the World Cup finals for the seventh consecutive time. The second automatic qualifying spot in that group, however, is still up for grabs - with Saudi Arabia, another World Cup regular, the favourite, and North Korea (the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea") and Iran outside chances at best.

On Wednesday the Afshin Ghotbi-led Iran has a must-win assignment at home in Tehran against United Arab Emirates followed by another must-win trip away to Seoul on June 17. North Korea, with just one match left to play, has a similarly daunting must-win task on the same day, away to the Saudis in Riyadh. The Arabian side, meanwhile, is away to South Korea on June 10 and only has to collect four points from its remaining two matches.

Having just thumped China 4-1 away, the same side that defeated Iran 1-0 a couple of weeks ago, I am favouring the "Sons of the Desert" to clinch the fourth automatic qualifying spot. Which, if my hunch proves to be right, would mean the Grand Trunk Road that is Asian qualifying has once again brought us to the same lookout point: and it's a view that is so familiar to seasoned Asia watchers we might as well have not bothered making the trip at all.

The real interest, then, is and has been for some time the tussle for the playoff spot in each group - the third-placed team in Groups A and B meeting for the right to take on Oceania champion New Zealand over two legs.

In Group A, Bahrain, which plays Australia in Sydney on Wednesday night, is on seven points from six matches and is favourite to take the coveted playoff spot. Even a point from their remaining two matches should be enough. Qatar, which gave the Socceroos a fright in Doha on the weekend before finishing in a 0-0 stalemate, is on five points but have played one more match than the Bahrainis and have an unflattering goals against tally that will count against them if they and Bahrain finish on eight points each. They also have to play Japan away. Last-placed Uzbekistan, on four points from seven, are as good as gone.

In Group B, North Korea, on 11 points from seven matches, seems to be a shoo-in for the playoffs, with chief rival Saudi Arabia, currently in third place, only having to collect those four points to directly qualify, but Iran can overtake the Chollima with wins in Tehran and Seoul. UAE, anchoring the group with one point from seven, is playing for pride.

It really is too hard to call but I'm going to stick my head out and pick Iran to sneak through the back door. Their backs to the wall, Ghotbi's Team Melli knows what it has to do without the distraction of complex mathematics and there is nothing in football like a team riding on adrenalin. 

Whatever happens, whether it's Bahrain or Qatar or Iran or North Korea that take those two playoff spots, it'll be refreshing to see a new Asian face at the World Cup finals outside the "Big Four". A strong federation is one that produces new contenders with each World Cup qualifying cycle. Asia, as we have seen, a federation with pretensions to greatness, hasn't quite broken the habit of coughing up the same old gallery of nations.

And lastly, speaking with my Aussie cork hat on, so long as New Zealand gets beaten, I'll be happy with whoever gets through.

It's one of those ironies of football that Iraq, the only west Asian team to have any consistent measure on the Socceroos, is going to the Confederations Cup in South Africa in two weeks around about the same time Australia should have qualified for the World Cup, to be played there a year later.

As Asian champions, Iraq should have found a place at South Africa 2010. But their qualification path through Asia was beset with the sorts of difficulties being a national team of Iraq can only throw up: not being able to play at home, federation intrigue, FIFA interference, talk of a conspiracy by Iraqi Qatar-based players to deliberately lose matches so as to protect their domestic contracts, and a turnover of coaches that even Chelsea could not match (there have been five since Brazilian Jorvan Vieira led them to Asian Cup glory in 2007: Egil Olsen, Adnan Hamad, Vieira again, Radhi Shenaishil, and now the Ken Kesey of international football, Bora Milutinovic).

So, unsurprisingly, they succumbed ultimately to finishing in third place in Group 1 of the penultimate Asian qualifying round, behind Australia and Qatar, on just seven points from six matches. It's a wonder they even got through them at all. All this, however, is not a reflection of their quality. Anyone who saw Iraq run rings around Australia in Bangkok in 2007 or over two legs in Brisbane and Dubai in 2008, can vouch for that.

Admittedly their Gulf Cup effort in Oman in January this year was poor (finishing bottom of their group and failing to win a match) and their recent form in friendlies has been underwhelming to say the least (defeats to Qatar and South Korea, a draw against Saudi Arabia). But then had very little to play for. When they have something to play for - and so follows commensurate will, ambition, spirit and unity - they are a hard-running, silky, technically adept side that are as good as any team in Asia. We saw that at the Asian Cup. The way Iraq play football is sort of like the way Pakistan plays cricket.  They pack it in when they know they can't possibly win. When they feel they have a chance of victory, they are a match for anyone.

So Milutinovic knows, just as his counterpart Afshin Ghotbi does with Iran, that concentrating on the psychology of his charges is the key to his hopes of success at the Confederations Cup. Given the short time he has to prepare for his side's three group matches with European champions Spain, hosts South Africa and Oceania whipping boys New Zealand, he can hardly be faulted for trying to keep it simple.

But Shenaishil, the man who vacated his caretaker post for the peripatetic Serb-Mexican, takes a markedly different view. He walked out of an Iraq training session at the Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence in Qatar a fortnight ago, resigned his assistant position and immediately excoriated Milutinovic, who took the reins in April, as a man "not qualified to lead our national team", claimed he did "not even have a method in training" and said he "knows nothing about the players". "The training sessions were theatrical and there is no way that I would accept being a part of something so fundamentally wrong," he railed. "I couldn't remain quiet because that would be equivalent to betraying Iraq."

A good coach knows that most of his work is psychological and motivational, about instilling pride and spirit. It is a bit rich for the 39-year-old Shenaishil, a coaching neophyte who has never taken a country to a World Cup, to question the methods of a 64-year-old master of the football craft who has taken five. It would be like me calling William Shakespeare a hack.

Iraq's players, the Lions of Mesopotamia, the Lions of the Two Rivers, know how to play football. They know how to find the back of the net. It's instinctive. What they've forgotten, and what remains hitherto untapped in the Iraq national football team of 2008 and 2009, is their will to win.

Being as experienced as he is, Milutinovic knows playing with ambition, flair and, most importantly, joy is one of the quickest ways to find success. An unhappy team is no good to anyone. A happy team can do anything.

Some years ago, when I was writing my book about the Socceroos’ 2006 World Cup campaign in Germany, I couldn’t avoid the subject of diving and simulation in football. That’s because to many Australian minds the Socceroos fell victim to one of the greatest con jobs of the tournament; when in the dying seconds of regulation time in their Round of 16 clash in Kaiserslautern, Italy’s Fabio Grosso went down after being obstructed by Lucas Neill.

There was outrage and not an insignificant amount of anguish Down Under when Italy was granted the penalty and Francesco Totti put it away with clinical ease. But in my mind the Italians had deserved what came to them and they deserved to go on to win the tournament.

Firstly, the Socceroos gave Totti too much space in midfield seconds before the fateful sequence of play, allowing him to set up Grosso for his jinking run into the box with an exquisite long pass.

Secondly, Grosso used every ounce of his street smarts to fool the referee and make what was a fairly innocuous, if foolish, challenge by Neill look a hell of a lot worse than it was.

It was no coincidence then, that in the months and years after Germany 2006 the Socceroos themselves, the one-time innocents of international football, began adding the occasional dive to their repertoire of skills. They had learned a valuable lesson from the world champions.

Diving and simulation is a part of the game that is almost impossible to eradicate because, frankly, most footballers are awfully good at it. Also, the line between legitimate and illegitimate is frustratingly difficult to glean, even with the luxury of slow-motion replays.

Referees, of course, don’t have slow-mo instant playback devices buried in their top pockets, so they are forced to make decisions on the run and many times they get it horribly wrong.

It makes a tough and thankless job all the more tough and thankless.

So without the benefit of video refereeing, and FIFA’s troublesome decree that incidents dealt with by the referee on the field cannot be retrospectively punished, diving and its attendant scourge, simulation, is able to flourish. Both are a blight on the beautiful game, but they are here to stay until drastic reforms are implemented at the top in Zurich.

That said, the silence from the Asian Football Confederation this week in the wake of the disgraceful behaviour of Tianjin Teda players in their Asian Champions League group match against Central Coast Mariners is simply not acceptable. (If you haven’t seen footage of the May 19 dead rubber in Gosford, it’s easily found on the internet). No press release deploring the actions of the Chinese team. No public rebuke from any AFC official against Tianjin Teda for dragging the hard-won reputation of the ACL back to joke status.

In fact, if you go to the AFC website and read the match report, there is no mention whatsoever of any diving or simulation, despite the fact that the Mariners’ Scotland-born coach Lawrie McKinna and several Mariners players gave their Tianjin counterparts a verbal rocket after the match.

McKinna, for the record, said: “It’s just a farce, they make a mockery of [our game]… they were bumping into their own players and diving.

That’s Asian football for you. It’s just terrible.”

For his part Mariners midfielder Matthew Osman called the Tianjin divers “a disgrace” and “an embarrassment to football”.

No wonder the AFC have kept mum.

Now there is diving, as we see every week in Europe, and then there is vaudeville, as we saw with that clutch of Tianjin Teda buffoons. The match actually became so farcical that at one point, late in the match, two Chinese players were rolling on the turf in their own penalty box, writhing in supposed agony while stalling for time to protect their 1-0 lead.

Osman, who had enough, joined them, flopping to the ground like he’d been shot by a sniper to clearly make his and his teammates’ disgust known to the Syrian referee, Mohsen Basma.

Osman succeeded in making a good point, but until the AFC comes out and publicly excoriates the players involved and the clubs they play for that encourage such pathetic tactics, nothing is going to change and Asia will go on carrying the stigma of being a complicit host to some of the worst, if not the worst, unsporting behaviour in the world of football.

Speaking as Asian, and on behalf of all Asian football fans, it’s time for the AFC to show some leadership.

In July 2007, while my personal life was rupturing catastrophically in the wake of my ten-year marriage falling apart, I flew to Bangkok for the Asian Cup. I took along my dad, Fred, just because I needed some company and together we watched a lot of football, drank a lot of margaritas and wore out the soles in our sandals as we tried to cover as much of inner Bangkok on foot as we possibly could.

The highlight of those ten days was a stormy night at the Rajamangala Stadium, where the crunch Australia vs Thailand group qualifier was to be played. We got there by klong but arrived early, so to pass the time went to one of those nondescript concrete and glass shopping malls that are everywhere in the Thai capital and whiled away an hour in a food court.

While sitting there, poking half-heartedly at my plate of som tum, I got into a conversation with a Thai man from an adjoining table who was thrilled to find out I wrote about football.

Surachai Nira was trying to help his young teenage son Suphanut, or "Pepé", land a professional contract and, at great expense, had paid for his tuition at a number of football schools in Europe. Now he wanted his son to go to Australia.

What did I suggest?

I didn't know what to say, not so much because I didn't want to give Surachai and Pepé encouragement but more because I didn't think Australia was the right destination for an Asian kid with stars in his eyes.

There were no South-East Asian footballers in the A-League. No Indonesians. No Thais. No Malays. No Vietnamese. Just a handful of Chinese and Koreans who hadn't quite achieved what was expected of them.

To all intents and purposes Australia was still very much terra nullius for Asian footballers and the pervading view down under, albeit an erroneous one, was that players from Asia were too small, too frail, couldn't handle the physical stuff and would get smashed the moment they took the field.

All the same, I took Surachai's number and promised to pass it on to some people when I got back home - but didn't hold out much hope for him despite my own confidence in and admiration for the ability of Asian players. (For the record I did, and don't know what ever happened to Pepé. If he's reading this, please get in touch with me via Facebook.)

Later that night, at a sodden Rajamangala, I was happy, then, to see the Elephants run the Socceroos ragged before being overcome late in the piece, Australia winning the match in a barely deserved scoreline of 4-0.

While the team in red lacked what was required in front of goal, doing just about everything but score, the Thais gave 2006 World Cup second-round heroes a bloody good shake and served notice in the region about the potential of South-East Asian football.

In a column called "Bangkok Redemption" for the Australian cable network Fox Sports, I wrote at the time: "In players such as Teeratep Winothai, Pipat Thonkanya and Suree Sukha there is real quality... Football Federation Australia and the [then] eight A-League clubs should be looking to this part of the world in their big-picture plans for the future of Australian football. Getting ‘into Asia' is not just about playing Asian Cups; it's about ensuring the long-term prosperity of the game."

The message was listened to, but, as often the way in "she'll be right" Australia, not acted upon.

Until now.

Finally, two years on from that game at the Rajamangala, a Thai player has landed a professional contract in the A-League.

Surat, the 1.76m-tall twin brother of Suree, has signed a two-year deal with champions Melbourne Victory, facilitated by the new "3+1" rule in place for the Asian Champions League.

A Thai player in the A-League? "So what?" you say.

It's no insignificant achievement. Surat is overturning decades of deeply ingrained myopia, small-mindedness, xenophobia and ignorance in Australian football by coming to Melbourne.

Thanks to performances like the Elephants' in Bangkok in 2007 and a few nasty surprises sprung on Australian teams in three editions of the ACL, the mentality of Australian football officialdom is beginning to change. The FFA and the now-ten A-League clubs are starting to appreciate that smaller, more technical, more nimble Asian players have what it takes to compete against the height and brawn of homemade footballers.

At a junior level, too, the focus on physicality is being superseded by a new emphasis on skill and technique. An Australian under-13 side is about to head to Malaysia for the Asian Football Confederation Under-13 Boys Festival of Football tournament and they include some kids who in previous times would never have a got a look-in because of their physical attributes.

The reasoning according to FFA technical director Han Berger? "The players in the squad have been selected based on their technical ability and potential and not necessarily their physical development as that will happen in due course."

As for Surat Sukha, he hopes his move to Australia "will be the first step for other Thai players to follow".

I do, too. Sincerely.

Surat's is a minor story in the big world of football but it's a watershed one in our region.

Because of his trailblazing, the dreams of kids like young Pepé who I met in that food court in Bangkok in 2007 won't be cruelled by prejudice and closed minds and they will finally get the opportunities they deserve.

And that's the best result of all.

Is there a more confounding place on earth than the United Arab Emirates?

It likes to promote itself as a liberal-thinking 21^st-century destination, yet a member of the UAE ruling family gets involved in torture that can only be described as medieval. For years it has been embarking on a scale of development not seen since the rebuilding of western Europe in World War II yet the engineers who are employed to build buildings are defaulting on their mortgages because of layoffs due to the global economic crisis and fleeing the country rather than risk the prospect of jail.

Then there are the vast reserves of cash that allow things like the world's biggest shopping mall - all 12-million-square-feet of it - to be built on what used to be just a pile of sand and dirt in an unprepossessing desert. Yet those same reserves of cash don't extend to keeping one of its own football teams in the Asian Champions League, the premier football competition in Asia.

That is precisely what happened last week when Sharjah FC, which qualified for the tournament through a 3-0 win in a playoff against Dempo SC of Goa, officially withdrew from the ACL after deciding it was pointless to continue in the group rounds after losing its first four matches. Sharjah played in Group B alongside Persepolis of Iran, Al-Shabab of Saudi Arabia and Al-Gharafa of Qatar.

The three other UAE teams in the ACL haven't fared that well either. Al-Ahli has one point in Group A, Al-Jazira four points in Group C and Al-Shabab Al-Arabi six points in Group D. Only the latter is still in contention with one round of matches left to play in the pool stage. But credit to all three that they have at least stayed on in the competition and gone down fighting.

Sharjah, like scoundrels, have not. In so doing they have failed their fans, failed their players, failed their country and failed Asian football in general.

The reasoning, apparently, is Sharjah's predicament in the country's shiny new 12-team UFL Pro League, where, with three rounds left to play, they are in danger of relegation, just three points above the drop zone. Coach Abdul Wahab Abdul Qader believes it would have "further demoralised" his team to stay in the ACL while involved in a relegation dogfight.

The club itself released a statement explaining its "difficult" decision: "Continuing in the Champions League would have added to the players' fatigue and suffering... we have been... conscious of the need to lift the burden on the players, which would have resulted from the stress and pressure of these [two remaining ACL] games."

Romy Gai, the Italian chief executive of the UFL, is crestfallen at the decision.
"[The ACL] is the closest you can get to the Champions League in Europe," he said. "So [Sharjah's] decision is going to hurt the image of the tournament itself. It is very sad... they have under-evaluated the effects of their decision on the entire football movement here and in Asia."

The UAE Football Association's general secretary Yousef Mohd Abdullah wrote to the AFC in Kuala Lumpur to explain it had been put to him by Sharjah that it was in the club's interests to divert all its energies and efforts at home and abandon the ACL. The UAE FA's and UFL's own hands were tied in the matter because they had no by-laws in place to prevent a team making that unilateral decision to withdraw. That has since been ameliorated.

The AFC, for its part, is singularly not impressed at seeing the ACL, its pride and joy, reduced to an international laughing stock and is threatening severe sanctions against Sharjah, including big fines and automatic expulsion from the next season of the ACL.

In my opinion it should do that - but more.

The UAE's allotment of three places in the ACL needs to come under serious scrutiny. How the UAE can have three automatic and one playoff entry and produce no outstanding contenders while the A-League, Australia's professional competition, can produce a finalist last ACL season in Adelaide United yet still only have two places in 2009 is beyond me.

The maths just doesn't add up.

Yet don't expect too much to happen. AFC president Bin Hammam is fresh from having scraped through last week's AFC Congress in Kuala Lumpur, where he narrowly survived a concerted challenge for his place on FIFA's executive committee by Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain.

The Qatari, a civilian, is not about to rock any boats with any sheikhs on board. Having their confidence and ongoing support is crucial to his own political future. And there are plenty of sheikhs in the UAE who can make Bin Hammam's job very difficult.

A stand, however, has to be made for the sake of the reputation of Asian football and to ensure Sharjah's disgraceful abandoning act is not repeated.

Bin Hammam's one-word mantra ever since he became the AFC's heaviest hitter is "professionalism". Professionalism is not only about doing your job well - it's seeing your job through. In this case, Sharjah have done neither. They deserve what's coming to them.

Forget Mohamed bin Hammam being reelected to FIFA's executive committee. As far as missions go, you would be hard pressed to find one more impossible - and improbable - in Asian football at the moment than the one new Islamic Republic of Iran manager Afshin Ghotbi faces in the next six weeks.

The affable Iranian-American, who was only announced in the job on April 22 when the incumbent Mohammed Mayelikohan sensationally stepped down a short time after being appointed himself in place of the sacked Ali Daei, has three matches to turn around Iran's near-moribund World Cup qualifying campaign and so gain automatic qualification to South Africa 2010 - or the more likely consolation prize of a playoff place. (The third-place-getters in the two Asian Football Confederation pool groups in this final round of World Cup qualifying play off for the right to take on Oceania Football Confederation champions New Zealand.)

It's all the more extraordinary because only a fortnight ago the 45-year-old was at his own sort of personal crossroads, living in Dubai, fielding enquiries everywhere from Iraq to Sweden to Japan, and even contemplating taking time out from football altogether to write his autobiography. Returning to Tehran, where he led Persepolis to the Iranian league championship in 2007 before leaving his post midway through a second season for personal reasons, was a wistful pipedream. When I met Ghotbi in Sydney in March, it seemed Iran was firmly in his past. Not his future.

It's a shame the book didn't see the light of day, because it would have been a cracking read. But it's probably best it was held off. The most exciting chapters have yet to be written.

Like the plot in some bizarre B-movie, this unlikeliest of Californian beach boys (he left Tehran for the United States in 1978) has now been asked to wrangle one of the spitting vipers on the three-headed "Axis of Evil" to the biggest sporting event on earth.

When he arrived on April 24 at Imam Khomeini Airport in the middle of the Tehran night, he got a hero's welcome reminiscent of Beatlemania in the 1960s - without, of course, the screaming girls. (Unless those girls were wearing fake beards.)

He has a nation of 70 million people behind him. He can count the immensely powerful Iranian football media in his corner. He even has, for now at least, the full support of the notoriously meddlesome Iranian Football Federation and their overlords, the religious clerics who run the state.

And it's all credit to Ghotbi's perseverance and character - for someone who previously couldn't get a visa to visit his homeland because of his American passport and for someone who has been derided in some quarters for being a glorified computer geek, he's making all the right noises.

One of the first things he did on returning to Tehran was declare his willingness to be a "soldier for Iran". And on the news that Team Melli's opponents on June 6, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, had chosen to play on artificial turf, he was typically unperturbed.

"It does not matter where we play," he said. "We will have to beat them even if we were playing on the moon. We will be supported by 70 million Iranians."

All the right noises. All the right notes.

And that is what Iran need to hear right now more than anything. Technically this is a team that is not deficient in any respect. Iran possess some of the finest players in Asia. But the national team has been lacking inspiration, lacking continuity, lacking confidence, and there are few men capable of turning that around as quickly as Ghotbi, who worked with Guus Hiddink at Korea-Japan 2002 and was a crucial cog in the "Be the Reds!" express that took South Korea all the way to the semi-finals.

Ghotbi told an Iranian news network this week: "What we need right now is to transfer positive energy to both players and fans. It is more a matter of heart and willingness, and the next matches must therefore be won first outside and then inside the field."

So what then of the artificial turf his team will have to play on in Pyongyang?

If there is a place as alien and spooky as the North Korean capital on this fair planet, I don't know it. Ghotbi's Team Melli might as well be playing on the moon for the unfamiliarity and hostility of their surroundings. And artificial turf isn't going to make his do-or-die assignment any easier.

Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have both gone there this year and lost, not even able to score. The well-drilled North Koreans have arguably the stingiest defence in Asia, typically playing 5-4-1. But conversely Iran have the wood on DPR. When they faced off in their opening World Cup contest last year in Tehran, Iran accounted for the Chollima 2-1. They also beat North Korea 2-0 in Pyongyang in 2005.

Though Ghotbi has never been to North Korea, despite living on the Korean peninsula for near on a decade, he believes he has enough inside knowledge to make an immediate impact in his three-match campaign.

The South Korean national-team training ground at the National Football Centre in Paju, which Ghotbi is well acquainted with, is a stone's throw from the North Korean border.

Accordingly, Ghotbi has organised three training blocks, the last of those in China, and four friendly matches prior to the game at Kim Il-sung Stadium. Two of those friendlies will be played on surfaces similar to the one his team expects to play on in Pyongyang.

It's worth pointing out, however, this match is just as crucial to DPR. The North Koreans are still holding to their accusations they were poisoned by their South Korean hosts on April 17. The same day Iran meet South Korea in Seoul but crucially Team Melli have an extra game in hand against UAE at home on June 10.

As with North Korean teams of World Cup campaigns past, their preparations for the June 6 match have been conducted under a veil of secrecy. Much of what they're doing can only be guessed at.

Yet Ghotbi is undeterred and nonplussed. He knows what he has to do and what he can control and so his immediate priority is to instil team harmony.

Speaking to him this week, he told 'Asian Rules' much of his time had been taken up flying around Europe, meeting players and "instantly developing a relationship. Listening to their views about their experiences in the national team has been valuable."

His 41-man preliminary squad, announced on April 30, was also notable for the return of Persepolis midfielder Ali Karimi, a player who had been frozen out of national-team reckoning under Ali Daei. Another new face from Ghotbi's old club Persepolis is gifted and towering striker Mohsen Khalili, who has played only eight times for the national team and spent much of 2008 out injured.

Yes, Ghotbi's mission is a difficult and onerous one. But it is hardly thankless.

Like his mentor Hiddink at Chelsea, if he fails, he arrived too late. If he succeeds, he's a national hero.

Knowing the man personally, though, he won't be countenancing failure. Nor will those 70 million people behind him.