Oz Blog: Hug And Hi-5 A Kiwi After Wellington Phoenix's Win Over Gold Coast United

Despite the FFA’s best efforts to talk it up, Round 12 of the A-League was looking like a weekend football wasteland.  

Lawrie McKinna’s steady Scottish hand would lead the Central Coast Mariners to another consistent victory, this time over local rivals and last season’s wooden spooners Newcastle, whose turnaround under Branko Culina is yet to materialise.

Melbourne would again out-psyche and out-play Adelaide, who were all-too-aware of just how many matches against Melbourne haven’t gone their way and just how large the punishing margin can be.

Robbie Fowler would remind us of his cut-above brilliance by scoring but wouldn’t be able to carry the rest of North Queensland, while Perth would organise themselves sufficiently to secure the win.

The depleted and demoralised Roar would be like lambs to Sydney’s ladder-leading slaughter and the Wellington ‘draw specialists’ Phoenix would score one goal in the first half and then struggle to find another while the Gold Coast United juggernaut ran roughshod over them.

Hardly worth tuning in for stuff, really, and unlikely to help get bums through gates and on seats to watch the games live.

Sure, everyone was out to win and the top spot shuffle between Sydney, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast was set to continue, but for the most part the outcomes were - yawn - predictable.

Which is why it’s brilliant that the outcomes of one of the most predictable A-League rounds turned out to be completely unpredictable altogether.

Sure, Adelaide need to do some serious pre-match psychological preparation to break their Melbourne match hoodoo, and the Roar didn’t quite give Ange Postecoglou the new-coach win tradition calls for, but neither team went down as dismally as we’d expected (or even bet).

Better yet, North Queensland proved that someone other than Fowler can score and Wellington, well, Wellington actually gave Aussies a reason to love Kiwis.

Because let’s be honest, who, apart from the Gold Coast and their mere handful of fans, didn’t want to hug and high-five a Kiwi after Sunday’s result?

It’s rare for Australians to exhibit any kind of affection for New Zealanders, particularly when it comes to sport, and I’ll readily admit that until Sunday I regarded the Phoenix somewhere in the vicinity of ‘meh’.

Indeed, with the team having eked out just five goals in six consecutive draws, even Phoenix fans were starting to drop off with boredom.

Which is precisely why the weekend’s result is the best thing the A-League and non-Gold Coast-fan Australians could have hoped for.

Not only did the Phoenix break the self-made draw specialists mould, they proved that Shane Smeltz’s defection was a blessing.

They made rugby-obsessed New Zealanders sit up and take notice of their other footballing team and made Australian football fans sit up too.

It’s no secret that we’re all sick of the Gold Coast’s counterproductive and unsporting bluster, whether it’s due to:  

- Pre-season claims that they’d go through their inaugural season undefeated before they’d even kicked an in-season ball;
- Cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face encouragement to boycott games;
- Ridiculous efforts to cap crowd numbers to save money when they’re owned by a billionaire who claims he spends more on tyres than he did buying the team;
 - Actions which provide competing and more established codes or journalists such as Rebecca Wilson with easy ammunition to bag football;
- Pre-match trash talk about focusing on World Cup Qualifiers instead of the A-League match at hand;
- Flouting the FFA’s authority and Australian football’s interests in a manner that must have the unsuccessful Canberra A-League bid team and supporters shaking their heads in disbelief;
- Or the apparent absence of even one iota of humility or concern for the A-League as a whole.

Nor is it any secret that no one expected the Roar, much less the Phoenix, to be the ones to issue them a comprehensive pantsing.

Which is what makes the match outcome, with its indisputable six-goal margin all the more enjoyable.

The Gold Coast can’t—and, to their credit, haven’t—complained that they wuz robbed by poor umpiring or injuries. They were absolutely, comprehensively, resoundingly played off the park.

They know it and we’re celebrating it, bandying around such clichés as ‘success is the best revenge’ and ‘actions speak louder than words’.

The Phoenix’s actions, including Ricki Herbert’s frank STFU to Miron Bleiberg half way through the match, have injected some excitement into the A-League.

They’ve given fans and teams hope that they too can topple trash-talking championship contenders, and returned the focus, which in recent weeks has been firmly off the pitch and on turfed out coaches, owners’ actions, and crowd number woes, to the pitch and players’ footballing prowess.  

It’s unlikely that we’ll see a repeat of the six-nil drubbing in coming weeks, with the Gold Coast’s embarrassed defence sure to be working double time, albeit it in front of a vastly reduced crowd should Palmer’s latest plans play out.

Regardless, the Phoenix’s actions have done the job for now.

And, while Culina is undoubtedly scouring his contract for an escape clause with Pim Verbeek’s words of warning ringing in his ears, I’m off to hug and high-five some Kiwis.

Fiona Crawford, Goal.com

Get all the Australian football coverage you need on the Goal.com Australia homepage!