Cane Toad Cup: An Unfair Continuation

You can hit it with a golf club, run it over with your car or even try to set it on fire but in the end the Cane Toad Cup is just like its namesake. It will not die.

Regular readers will recall that earlier in the season your humble blogger devised a season within a season - a non-official, sub-competition comprising the three Queensland teams in a winner-takes-all quest for bragging rights.

Now, with the season nearing its end, it is time for Queensland-based A-League fans to once again turn their attention to the non-official, sub-competition table. Non-Queensland readers are advised to adjust their table to non-daylight savings time (which, if I recall correctly, is approximately one hour and twenty years behind the southern states).

Clearly Gold Coast United have enjoyed a season of dominance over their banana-bending brothers. It is now mathematically impossible for either North Queensland Fury or Brisbane Roar to break the New South Wales-touchers stranglehold on the title.

At this point it would seem that the fair thing to do is crown Gold Coast United inaugural Cane Toad Cup champions and be done with this whole charade. However, I am not going to be fair to Gold Coast.

Just to be clear, I have no intention of changing the established rules of the competition just because my team is doing poorly. As much as I hate to admit it, Gold Coast United have played the best football of the three teams this season and rightfully deserve to be sitting atop the ladder. Insert your begrudging applause here.

What I intend to do is incorporate some finals football excitement to the Cane Toad Cup to better reflect the nature of football in this wonderfully sunburnt (except for Brisbane moon-tanned me, of course) country. As such, finals matches fought between two Queensland-based teams will now be worth double points - i.e. six points for a win.

Both Brisbane Roar and North Queensland Fury still have a chance of sneaking through to the A-League's version of everybody-gets-a-trophy-day in sixth place despite their unflattering win-loss ratios. And while tonight's match between the two will not necessarily end either's finals series aspirations completely, it will certainly be the termination of Brisbane's Cane Toad Cup dreams if they fail to record a win.

A Roar victory at Dairy Farmers Stadium could be the first step toward finals series qualification and hopefully a final, double-pointed battle against the sun-bronzed lads of Gold Coast United. It may sound implausible but I assure you that it is not impossible - I have done the sums.

So I plead with my fellow Roar faithful to cast aside the disappointments of previous weeks and support their club however they can this weekend in the name of Queensland pride. Even if that does mean getting a horrendous orange spray-tan to complement this week's horrendous, one-off kit.

Which makes me wonder if that ugly concoction could handle being struck with a golf club, flattened by a car and then set on fire? Surely, it couldn't be as resilient as a cane toad...