I feel like any team playing Iran should be claiming conflict of interest.
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I don’t think that would necessarily matter. While im not privy to the entire process, I would assume that both teams would be given a list of referees that would officiate a match and be allowed to raise issues with any of them. Dual nationality isn’t a new thing and could rule out a lot of people from officiating a lot of matches. They would most likely go with who puts forward the name of a ref and in this case, it’s Australia
I did not know that. I feel slightly bad for shitting on him so much. Only slightly though.
His personal opinions don’t make him any better a referee…
2 points might just be enough to sneak China into a “best of third places” spot but they probably won’t want to be beaten too heavily by Qatar. That said, Qatar have already topped the group so they can put out a weakened team if they want to.
PS: I don’t know if we’re going to make a separate thread for the game tonight but I’m not liking my prospects of staying awake for the whole Socceroos game after sleeping only 2.5 hours last night. I am predicting a real borefest, with Syria sitting behind the ball and trying to get another 0-0, then hoping to beat India in their last group game to finish second.
Do always prefer the match thread for Aussie games. I had just made one here: Asian Cup: Australia vs Syria 18 January
Absolutely hate comp setups that have some third place going through. Makes it so messy
Unfortunately the only realistic way to fix that is to make it 32 teams. To best put it in perspective, using the same Asian Cup qualifying format for this iteration, we may have added the following teams to the final tournament:
Phillippines (world rank 140th)
Kuwait (136th)
Monoglia (190th)
Maldives (161st)
Afghanistan (158th)
Turkmenistan (141st)
Singapore (156th)
Cambodia (179th) were “best” of the bottom-placed teams in the last group stage, so maybe they’d be the eighth and last addition.
Or groups of 3, which is so much better.
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Maths-wise it adds up nicely, and as a purist, I agree it is a better format. There’s probably TV considerations to make, though. The current format allows for 36 group games, while we’d only get 24 for a 3-team format. Money-wise, I don’t see TV rights being worth as much. A hell of a lot more prawn cutlets will need to be sent to the AFC to make up for it.
I was just over there and as I do whenever I go overseas somewhere I google the local league to see if there are any games on.
Unfortunately they’re in their off season but a look at the previous season showed that the league only had 7 teams of which one pulled out halfway through. That team was United City, previously known as Ceres, the club that Brisbane was playing when they had to tape the numbers back onto their shirts.
As for the upcoming season, from the official website, “A total of 17 clubs, of which 9 are amateur clubs, have expressed their interest in competing in the 2024 season”.
If that’s the level of the league in the 140th ranked country then I’d hate to see what we’d be getting from most of the others on that list.
I checked it a few years ago and they had six teams playing each other five or six times a season! And we think we get it bad!
I’m so fucking sick of VAR. If enough time has passed that all of the players from both teams are in place and ready for kick off, enough time has passed for a whole team of fucking officials with control of all of the camera angles to decide if it was an obvious error. Fuck this shit.
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We are well past the point of needing to put in a “shot clock” for VAR decisions. Clear and obvious errors don’t need more than two minutes to find. Maybe a maximum of 60 seconds for the VAR officials to look at it (ideally less because they should already have spotted something suspicious before that 60 seconds starts), and a maximum of 60 seconds for the referee to look at it on the TV.
Iraq leading Japan 2-0 at halftime
My solution is to go out there and poke the ref with a stick.
Fucking Iraq man, Iran’s biggest West Asian nemesis. Well, Saudi, Bahrain…all Arab teams.
I guess it’s good at least that in football it’s not Kurds who suffer the most from the animosity. 
Japan not even looking close to scoring here
Fantastic defensive performance, and they probably could’ve had a third on the counter as much as Japan could have scored even one. Very little egregious time wasting or play acting too (from what I saw, from kick off to 40’, then from 70’ on) has been wonderful. Very easy to cheer on this result.