Dukes Up Front Will Find It's Personal
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday July 21, 2007
THE battle between veteran Japanese defender Yuji Nakazawa and in-form Australian striker Mark Viduka could well decide the outcome of tonight's Asian Cup quarter-final, and the good news is the Socceroos skipper feels the goals will keep coming.
After struggling for so long to score for his country, Viduka has hit a purple patch [five goals in six games] at just the right time, and admits the scoring spree has left him in a confident frame of mind."Obviously, any striker likes to score goals, and I'm enjoying them going in," he said. "Sometimes you can have a blinder, and you don't get a sniff. Other times you have a shocker, and the ball goes in off your backside. Football's a funny game, and sometimes things just happen for a reason."Could that reason be coach Graham Arnold's decision to switch to a twin-striker formation after Viduka was left up front on his own for the first two matches of the tournament?"It might be, it might be," Viduka said. "To be honest, I don't think I played particularly well in the last game [against Thailand], but I still got two goals ... in my club sides, I always play with two strikers, and personally I think it's a lot easier to have someone up there with me. But is that the reason? Who knows."Heartening news for Viduka is that Arnold seems set to keep faith with a second striker, John Aloisi, with the only change to a winning team likely to be in defence, where Lucas Neill returns to the side at the expense of the suspended Luke Wilkshire.But while Viduka has plundered goals against smaller Asian defenders in recent weeks, he knows his bulk won't count for so much against Nakazawa, one of five survivors from last year's World Cup epic in Kaiserslautern. The Yokohama F-Marinos defender said this week he couldn't "stand" to lose to Australia a second time, and Viduka accepts he'll be in for a torrid time."The last time we met [in the World Cup] I found him very difficult to play against," Viduka said. "He's very big, very strong, and very mobile ... obviously it will be a big battle, but there'll be other battles as well. Both teams have plenty of good players."A match so evenly poised could well be decided by set pieces, and after conceding more than 30 free kicks against Thailand, Arnold accepts the Socceroos cannot afford such ill discipline against a team containing Celtic playmaker Shunsuke Nakamura, one of the most potent dead-ball specialists in world football."The boys are aware of that, we've had a good talk about it, and it's important we don't give away stupid free kicks in dangerous areas," Arnold said. "... We have to defend well."Arnold insists Japan will start the match as favourites because "they're in better form than us, and their J-League players are in season". But the Socceroos coach, who declined to respond to questions about Dick Advocaat replacing him after the tournament, senses a positive result, saying: "We love to be underdogs, and our mentality is very strong."
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
