Question: How can the Socceroos win a game without Tim Cahill on the field? Answer: Take him off the field.
The empty space that was left in my head at the jaw-dropping sight of Brett Holman coming on for Tim Cahill was quickly filled by the sound of beating keyboards and blistering fingers. Australian football forum writers will fill books with this one.
We had been criticising Pim Verbeek's attacking game plan as being overly reliant on the poaching skills of Tim Cahill and now he was about to burned at the goalpost for the sin of removing the Socceroos only scoring option from the field. Up until that point Pim could've been forgiven if 10 of the Socceroos best could only manage a draw against a dominant Oman team but atonement with Socceroos fans is clearly not an objective of Pim's.
Squaring the pressure onto his shoulders was not enough though. Not satisfied with the furore that replacing Australia's golden boy would cause, Pim had to replace him with Brett Holman. I could think of metaphors for Brett Holman, the Jonah of Australian football, the thorn in Australia's side, that guy in your football team that you want to kick because he makes you work harder by giving the ball back to the opposition all the time. However I don't think there is a need for a metaphor because Brett Holman is a metaphor himself.
Perhaps Holman would not be so lambasted were it not for the fact that he keeps Australia's potential favourite son, Nick Carle, off the field. Recently however the bloggers and forum writers have been conceding the facts in Pim Verbeek's case. Nick Carle needs game time and Crystal Palace is not the place for him.
Socceroos fans were finally coming around to Pim's way of thinking and Pim must have known about it. Sometimes I have wondered if Pim is trawling the football forums searching for ideas on team selections that will piss the Socceroos fans off the most. Now I knew it to be a fact, nothing could possibly piss us off more than replacing Cahill with Holman.
Then however, a strange thing occurred.... we won. Holman gave the ball away a few times as we've come to expect and a better team would've used those opportunites to score. Lucas Neill was like Marlon Brando in the Godfather wandering around the vegetable patch and pulling faces trying to scare the little Omani players but only looking likely to have a heart attack. David Carney was offside when he received the ball to deliver the game winning cross and in spite of all that we won.
Mark Schwarzer had a spiderweb of impenetrable tensile strength wound around his goal face, Harry Kewell had the force of the two strikers in his lonely role up front and Brett Holman was lively and energetic and he took the dominance out of the Omani midfield.
Yep, Pim really knows how to piss us off.
