In pics: Qatar nine years out

Well before the historic announcement that Qatar had won the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup the peddlers of doom were in full meltdown mode.

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of the criticism came from ‘western’ nations and much of that from people who’d never set foot on the sands that ring the Qatari capital.

The other way of looking at it is that this is an historic opportunity to take football’s most important event to one of the world’s most important regions, in a nation which, by many measures, is already better-placed than Brazil is next year, to deliver a successful World Cup.

As anyone who has travelled frequently to the country over the past decade will note, development is moving at breakneck speed – new buildings arise weekly and what were once quiet roads are now, in sections, gridlocked.

The pace of change is blindingly rapid and as those who have been there in the window between November and March will also note the weather is close to perfect.

Neither FIFA nor the Qatar 2022 Organising Committee will say it publicly but this is the time when the event will be held.

But questions remain concerning the bidding process and even more about the timing and delivery of the event.

I travelled recently to Qatar and spoke with Nasser Al-Khater, a member of the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee where we discussed progress, infrastructure, legacy and the fortunes of the national team.

Mr Al-Khater, thanks for speaking with The World Game. It’s now more than two years since the announcement; is the gravity, the enormity of the task sinking in?

I think you could ask anyone who’s working here and they’ll tell you that the amount of work even ten years out is enormous. I don’t think we expected that this much work would be thrown at us this early but as much work as there is I know that everyone who has organised the World Cup or a major event like The Olympics tells us it just keeps getting worse so we’re bracing ourselves for that.

But look, it’s a great project and a great event for the country and just the amount of pride you feel working on a project like this keeps you going.

How far out from the event, including the Confederations Cup in 2021, would you like to have the bulk of things in place?

We want to be ready at least a year in advance of 2021. We realised quite early that there’s a trap that you could fall into when you’re so far out that you might feel like you have enough time and then all of a sudden you realise that there’s so much work you actually need to do before you go into the delivery of the sports infrastructure that you might get yourself caught in traps so we started early.

We started day one after the announcement was made. We got cracking with setting up the organisation, looking at the legal structure of the organisation and put it in place.

We’ve just completed and announced our three-year strategy and we’re going to be breaking ground on the first stadium in 2013.

There’s also a huge mass of infrastructure works taking place here; the metro network is underway and huge road infrastructure works are already in place and I think that people realise this population boom we’re undergoing is going to create a huge bottleneck in terms of traffic and they’re taking it into consideration.

How do you go about selling the concept of Qatar?

It’s on a range of different levels; on an overarching level I think it’s a celebration of different cultures. South Africa was a great example of exhibiting African culture to the world. Similarly, at a time like this I think there’s no better time to start creating a dialogue of understanding between the Arab culture, the Middle Eastern culture and the rest of the world.

For a lot of people all the knowledge they have of Qatar or of the region is what they see in the news. For a lot of people I understand that they can’t differentiate between what’s happening right now in Iraq or in Syria. The Middle East sometimes is just thrown into one pot and it looks like it’s the same across the board when in reality it isn’t.

The Middle East, and the Arab culture of the Middle East is quite diverse, from west in the Levant to east in the GCC region - it’s a huge variety so I think there’s a uniqueness in what we can do in terms of a bridge and cultural understanding.

There’s also the uniqueness of a compact World Cup. I think people will appreciate that they can come in, settle down in a hotel in one room that then becomes their home for the duration of the tournament.

We don’t anticipate more than one hour travel time between any venue so I think the nature of a compact World Cup is going to be very appealing – the fact that you’re going to have all the fans in a small area relative to other World Cups I think will add to the feeling of festivity.

Would you consider sharing facilities and infrastructure with some of the surrounding naions?

No, all our plans are for Qatar to be the host, for all the games to be played in Qatar and all the team base and training camps to be based here.

However, what we do encourage and what we do want people to do is get a flavour of the Middle East. It’s quite fortunate that you can hop on a plane for 50 minutes and visit Dubai or Abu Dhabi in the UAE, you can hop on a plane for 35 minutes and visit Bahrain, you can visit Oman which has a very rich culture and very interesting landscape. If you have a little bit more time on your hands you get on a flight and you visit places like Lebanon and it’s an opportunity to come enjoy football and try a bit of sightseeing in the region.

How do you respond to criticism from the west about alcohol, dress code and so on?

First of all we have to recognise that all the world doesn’t share a common culture. We have a lot of similarities – we’re human beings and we share a lot of common values and a lot of common behaviours. Each culture also has its unique attributes and people need to recognise that people of Qatar are conservative by nature. Alcohol is not part of our culture, it’s not part of what we do here. But we are also a very hospitable nation, a hospitable people and we understand and recognise that people have their preferences, they have their lifestyle and alcohol is available in Qatar.

We’ve never said that alcohol is not available, so if we’re talking about alcohol then the fans that come here will be able to enjoy alcohol; it might not be as readily available but it will be available and I guarantee you alcohol will be a non-issue.

The other point you mentioned about dress code; all we ask people is just to have some respect to other people’s cultures.

The bid was run with the proposal being a summer World Cup but if everybody was in agreed, can you see the benefits of holding it in winter?

If everybody was agreed to shift it to the winter then that means that the international football community, who is better positioned to take that decision, sees the logic and sense in that. We, as host of this tournament will be happy to oblige but I have to reiterate that our plans in our bid were to host a summer World Cup and we are planning and building towards a summer World Cup in 2022.

Even, with our cooling technology, when people come back to us and say that you’ll be able to save on that, people forgot that for us cooling technology is a legacy as well. We have 12 teams right now in the top division and they will be using these stadiums so that is important.

Can you see though the argument from a fan perspective that people don’t want to come here in the middle of the year when temperatures are suffocating?

When I feel it’s too hot and I don’t want to go outside, I’ll see a lot of Europeans in their convertibles or sitting on the beach so to be honest with you I think you should ask them.

How is the development of the cooling technology progressing?

I know that Qatar has received a lot of heat on the subject of heat. We’re putting a lot of effort into researching the cooling technology because this kind of technology is going to have applications beyond the realms of sport. It’s going to have applications in terms of outdoor cooling so if you’re a country that has a plaza or a place where you hold concerts or huge sort of festivals happening in the summer and you look at heatwaves. Well, you know what, there is a solution for that.

How do you react to rumours about the hway the 2022 World Cup was awarded?

These things have been surfacing even before the decision was made. So, we’re confident of ourselves and that we’ve conducted ourselves in the highest ethical standards and we’re just busy delivering our project right now. We’re busy delivering the structure and plans for hosting the World Cup.

How important is it for Qatar to have a successful team, on the pitch, ahead of 2022?

It’s important for Qatar to have a successful team, period.

Even longer since one was a regular entry, not just on the football pages but also the social ones; where every taxi driver in town knows where you eat and with whom.

This isn’t Tim Cahill in New York, any number of young and old Australians in the Premier League or even the returning national captain. It’s the unlikely and, for many, unknown duo of Tolgay Ozbey and Andrew Barasic.

Last weekend the pair lined up opposite each other in front of 75,000 supporters for one of the marquee matches of the season. In India.

GALLERY: Two Aussie footballers making a name in India

Yet this wasn’t a national I-League match, rather a local state-based competition in Kolkata, the hotbed of Indian football where the two sides - Mohun Bagan and East Bengal - are viewed more like a religious undertaking than football clubs.

For Ozbey it’s been a remarkable journey – from playing in front of several hundred fans barely three years ago in the NSW Premier League to eastern India, where he’s earned wrath by turning out for both sides in the city divide, won a host of trophies and accolades and achieved the Samba-esque status of being referred to by a single name.

“You’re going to meet the Australian…Tolgay? This man is a hero to us.”

That was a taxi driver last month when I spent time in Kolkata, the guy at the front desk of my hotel was an East Bengal fan and spent the whole week and a bit pestering me to get something, anything, autographed by Barasic.

Football and not much else:

Having spent time in the equally rabid surrounds of Indonesia, the ex-Gold Coast United forward knows just how passionate the love for football is in what is still viewed by many as a footballing outpost.

“A lot of people don’t really know about these countries and they don’t give them a chance or just write it off and I was close to being one of them,” Barasic explains. “You know, ‘what am I going to do there’ and stuff like that.”

“But having played in Indonesia and now also India you get a sense of just how much people love football and how important it is.

“It probably distracts them a little bit from their everyday lives because a lot of people don’t have much. In Indonesia I know a lot of the supporters don’t even have TVs so to get to the games was their main thing.”

Challenging expectations:

After winning both the Golden Boot and Player of the Year awards with Blacktown City in 2010 an offer arose for Ozbey to play in India almost out of the blue with the ex-Sydney FC and Newcastle Jets forward admitting he didn’t know what to expect.

“I didn’t even know India played football at that time, I thought it was just cricket and that’s it. But as soon as I got here I saw, of course, that I was completely wrong,” Obey said.

“The day I got here the team had a match and it was a local league match, the first one of the season and I think there was 15 or 20,000 people at the match; reporters everywhere and photographers. Just nothing I’ve seen back at home and ever since then.

“When I was at East Bengal we played a derby in front of 110,000 people and that was amazing. The stadium was choc-a-block and the atmosphere was out of this world.”

“No A-League match will ever compare to it. I think the most they get is around 55,000 and that’s only for the Melbourne Victory. Maybe an AFL match is close but spectator-wise I think the atmosphere is much better than the A-League.”

“When these two teams play and the supporters really get behind them, you can’t describe it.”

At home with company:

Kolkata is not an easy city to live in. Sat on the banks of the Hooghly River it’s a pollution-choked region with a confronting poverty that means few foreign visitors venture this far.

To that end, it’s natural that the small antipodean-related community spends a lot of time together.

Arthur Pappas, coach at Palian Arrows, his assistant Aaron Symons, Prayag’s Carlos Hernandez and his New Zealand teammate Kayne Vincent are all regular companions.

Ozbey and Barasic have also developed an unlikely bond over the chessboard, all of which makes life that little bit easier in a city neither ever imagined they’d find themselves in.

With the success they’ve already had, the likes of Ozbey and Barasic are also opening up doors for other Australians in a country that FIFA boss Sepp Blatter recently described as being a ‘sleeping giant’ of world football.

The Potential:

When most people think of football in Asia the northeastern prism of Japan, Korea and China are viewed as the leagues that matter but for those that have seen things up close, India remains a land of almost unlimited potential.

As Ozbey explained, “I can see in 20 to 30 years time the Indian league definitely being one of the best in Asia. If you look at the Japanese league 20 years back no-one even knew about it and now it’s a top league and I think the same is going to happen to the Indian league, definitely.”

“The top four or five teams would definitely not come last in the A-League. Sometimes the speed of the game looks slower but you have to take into consideration that we play in 40 degree heat, we don’t play at ANZ Stadium on that beautiful grass, 15 degrees and so on. Things are not so easy here.”

Nothing much is particularly ‘easy’ in India, yet for Australia’s two unlikely footballing missionaries things have been going spectacularly well.

Ozbey has scored at better than a goal every two matches in his three years in India and Barasic found his way into the hearts of the East Bengal faithful, scoring a late equaliser as his club won the weekend’s derby on penalties.

As one supporter noted after, “it was not only a goal, it was much more than that for us.”

Sure, it may not have the global audience of those matches and the players are certainly not at the same level as Messi, Ronaldo and co. but in terms of fervour, atmosphere and passion the Kolkata derby ranks as one of football’s greatest spectacles.

What’s astonishing though, in these days of global peepholes, is that hardly anyone outside of India has heard of the contest or the two ancient clubs that contest it.

Mohun Bagan, founded in 1889, is one of the planet’s oldest sporting teams – older than Barcelona, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Chelsea, Newcastle United and every single German and Italian side.

It is widely referred to as India’s national club – partly as a reflection of the role it played in overthrowing British colonial rule; a heady mix of sport and politics if ever there was one.

City rivals East Bengal was founded in 1920 and are traditionally the club of a region that is part of modern-day Bangladesh.

A confluence of Hinduism and Islam, India and Bangladesh streamed through a turbulent river of colonisation and partition – this is a footballing rivalry as potent as any in the world.

It’s a contest that regularly attracts 120,000 people to the cavernous Salt Lake Stadium and which down the years has seen death, tragedy and violence sit uncomfortably alongside the goals scored and titles won or lost.

I remember talking several years ago to Bob Houghton, India’s former long-serving national coach, and he told me he’d never seen anything like it anywhere in the world.

“Every derby the stadium is full, I mean more than 100,000 screaming people, and quite often what will happen is that people get so carried away with the emotion that they will... they’ll kill themselves. This is how much it means.”

The most infamous case was in 1975 when 25-year-old Umakanto Palodhi took his life the night of a 5-0 Mohun Bagan loss in a cup final.

His suicide note read, "By becoming a better Mohun Bagan footballer, I wish to take revenge of this defeat in my next birth."

The club's coach Karim Bencherifa told me last month not much has changed.

“The passion is unimaginable; I’ve seen supporters get so excited at a goal or a victory they’ve run and fell off the top part of the stadium,” he said.

“At one recent derby there was an East Bengal supporter who even had a stroke when they scored... I made sure, although I’m the opposition coach, that I visited them in hospital.”

Perhaps the most controversial of all incidents happened last year when late in the first half of the season’s opening derby a red card, to Mohun Bagan’s Odafa Okolie, sparked a chain of events that led to the club being banned from the I-League for two years.

With East Bengal taking a 43rd minute lead and the send off shortly after, it was all a bit too much to bear for a section of the crowd, which started pelting the field with any missiles available.

A piece of concrete struck Bagan captain Syed Rahim Nabi, fracturing his face in two places and knocking him unconscious. As he was being led to hospital the club decided the security situation was too volatile and refused to return for the second half.

I-League chiefs argued only the match officials can abandon a fixture and banned the club from taking part in the league until 2014 – by far the harshest penalty ever handed to an Indian club.

After weeks of wrangling the ban was eventually overturned and the club allowed to fulfill its obligations for the remainder of the season although it was stripped of any points earned prior to that match and also forced to pay a substantial fine.

Thus it was that when I arrived in Kolkata for the next derby after the ban was overturned that the atmosphere was somewhat subdued.

Ticket prices were jacked up almost 400 percent in order to ‘keep things orderly’ and the police presence was the heaviest I’ve seen outside of Beijing and Jakarta.

The reaction to both was keenly felt on the terraces (yes, they still exist) in one of India’s grittiest cities, where football is woven into the fabric of everyday life.

“We are poor people and football is the sport for poor people, so why do they do this to us? Most of us can’t even afford tickets but we can’t miss this match, it is so important... for us, this is our life,” one supporter told me.

With the match grinding towards a scoreless draw that left East Bengal at the top of the standings and the heavily penalized Mohun Bagan at the bottom the fans never stopped singing.

“The sun is green and the sun is also maroon; wherever, forever, we’ll always be with you,” was the Mohun Bagan refrain.

That wherever may well be the second division next season; a crushing blow for the club that is omnipresent throughout India’s seventh largest city.

At the club's clubhouse, directly opposite the Eden Gardens cricket ground, hundreds of supporters gather daily just to breathe in a sense of the 120-odd years of history.

Huge framed pictures of famous visitors (Messi and Maradona among them) adorn the walls along with those of coaches and players past, including the famed 1911 side that beat a British selection, playing barefoot, in what many view as a catalyst for latter political events in the city.

Out in the garden area sits the original bench from that match amid a raucous selection of wandering poultry, ticket sellers and long-serving fans.

When Bencherifa arrived for his daily media duties there were more than 30 reporters waiting – as there is every single day of the season.

Cricket may be big business in India but in Kolkata football has a high perch, especially when the derby comes to town.

Yet to start its domestic campaign, with 12 new players arriving and a new man at the helm, you could be excused for thinking it will ease its way into the new season.

Not so, says new coach Seo Jung-won.

“We are one of the giants in Korea and Asia also and this brings certain expectations.”

“Last year we couldn’t show our full potential but now we are coming here to show what our true Suwon style is, with a new team and a new approach.”

That’s an attack-minded approach that won’t vary from tournament to tournament nor will it away from home.

“I was an attacker as a player and I would like the fans to see this kind of style; a winning, offensive game full of attacking intent. Whether it’s home or away it doesn’t bother me; I will come with an attacking philosophy.”

The newly renamed K-League Classic commences this weekend, meaning Suwon has yet to play a competitive fixture this season, but unlike the Mariners, it has an extensive squad of players at its disposal.

While Graham Arnold prepares to rest and rotate his threadbare outfit, the Korean powerhouse has a full compliment of 36 available players including several eye-catching off-season recruits.

Chief among those are highly-rated former Seongnam left-back Hong Chul, on-loan Brazilian forward Rodrigo Pimpao as well as one of Asia’s most recognizable names in North Korean international Chong Tese.

The Japanese-born and raised forward has spent the past three years playing in Germany and has already impressed in pre-season.

There was though a minor hiccup this week when the 28 year-old had to leave the team’s training camp on the Central Coast to travel to Sydney to apply for a new passport.

The other player who most neutral eyes will be focused on is Australian Eddy Bosnar.

The defender has become renowned for a series of spectacular free-kicks over the past few seasons, including one that won the goal of the season last year, and his coach singled him out as a key player.

“It’s not just on set-pieces but he is a very good defender who is key for the organisation of my team,” Seo said

With Pohang, Seongnam and Ulsan all having won the ACL over the past four seasons, Korean clubs are used to dominating on the continental stage and this year Suwon could be set to extend that impressive run.

“I know it’s difficult to compete on two fronts but I’m confident we can do it. We have enough players to rotate and almost run two teams so we are looking to do very well in Asia,” Seo said.

“Players in Korea are getting better and better and this is why you see so much success.”

“There are more and more younger players coming with a positive attitude and compared to before there are more young players moving to Europe and that further inspires the players still in Korea.”

“Also some of those players return after their time in Europe and add experience to the Korean teams in the Asian Champions League and we will be well served in this regard.”

This evening in Gosford marks Seo’s first ever competitive match in charge of a senior side, and after bagging his first A international goal as a player against the Socceroos, he’ll be looking to repeat the dose against arguably Australia’s best club side.

“I have great memories of that match and I respected your former coach Eddie Thompson very much,” he said.

“Now I am here as a coach and I want to show our style of play. There is no pressure because we are well prepared.”

To put the potential into some sort of context, the state where I’ve spent the past few days, Maharashtra, has more people than Spain, France and the Netherlands combined.

A sizable number of those can been found on any number of dusty pitches kicking about a football on most evenings, shirts slung across slender shoulders bearing the familiar logos of Chelsea, Manchester United and Barcelona.

Not many though with the local sides, Pune FC or ONGC on display. That’s part of the challenge.

India is, as Sepp Blatter famously said, a sleeping giant.

It’s a nation with a football culture that would surprise those who associate the sprawling land merely with cricket.

Mohun Bagan, founded in 1889, is one of the planet’s oldest clubs and the derby it, quite literally, fights with East Bengal regularly attracts more than 100,000 spectators.

In the 1956 Olympic Games India finished fourth (eight years after it lost narrowly to France, playing barefoot) and in the 1962 edition it was runner-up to Israel.

Those golden days though are long past. The men’s national team languishes at 167 in FIFA’s Rankings, behind the likes of Myanmar, the Maldives and Hong Kong.

There is hope that change will be not far away and there are several Australians involved in the process.

Scott O’Donell is in charge of the academy system nationwide, Arthur Pappas is the Under-23 coach and ex-Football Federation Australia Technical Director Rob Baan is at the helm the same post in India.

The man at the top of the pile is Wim Koevermans. I sat down this week with the Netherlands international to get a deeper insight into the current state of Indian football.

Why did you decide to undertake this project with India?

After four years working in Ireland as High Performance Director, I felt the time was right for a new challenge . I was speaking with Rob Baan who mentioned they were looking for a coach for the national team.

I thought wow, India is something totally different but Asia always had my attention so I thought I’d have a look. I traveled to India to have a look at both the country and the football.

I went to Goa and saw some matches, spoke to a lot of people and watched some videos of the national team. I realised then that I wanted to do this, to take on this great challenge and experience football in India and in Asia.

What’s the state of football in India?

When FIFA President Sepp Blatter came to India he called the country a sleeping giant and I think you can say that is so. If we look back to that successful period in the 1950s and 1960s I think a lot of other countries in Asia have developed well and maybe not so in India.

People say, ‘look the country has 1.2 billion people. That’s a lot of good potential footballers’. Yes, but it’s also very difficult to organise things in a country of this size. There’s a lot of energy and talent in India and there are a lot of good football players in India but the problem is do they get the right training and is everything in place to make sure that kids can play football and develop themselves?

That’s the reality at the moment. It’s not well-organised and the infrastructure is not good. Rob Baan wrote this big football master plan but we need people to implement this.

In a few states they have started with the big pillars of youth development, grassroots coach education, referees and marketing.

Even if you organise it in just a few states you’re talking about millions of people and you should get players who can go into the I-League. That’s a league that also needs to be developed. The money is available but you have to channel it in the right direction and have a good philosophy to build football and give the kids the opportunity to play.

What were the aims and goals you set out with the Federation when you started?

Given the style of play of India and the type of players - quick, with good technique and a great mentality - I told them we should analyse international football and Asian teams, which are capable of playing out from the back and with combination play, that’s what is suitable for our players.

That is where we started and I think that because of that we’re going to have better results over the years to come. We’re now 167 in the rankings and we’ve already improved a little bit but we want to go higher and closer to the 100 mark.

How are preparations for next month’s qualification phase for the AFC Challenge Cup coming along?

Well, unfortunately the AFC decided to play both this tournament and the AFC Cup – a club tournament - at the same time. Initially those club dates were in the middle of the qualification tournament but when the AFC realised this mistake they brought the matches forward, so now I have this problem.

Two Indian sides are competing in the AFC Cup which means I will lose eight players in this crucial stage of developing the team. I understand the position of the clubs but the AFC has created this problem for Indian football and it should not happen.

The AFC should be supporting development not harming it. Now we also have the risk of injury to players. I will complain to the AFC but for now we have to deal with it.

Many people still have the notion that India is just a nation of cricket, is that the case?

Cricket is definitely very visible, I mean if you look at the TV there are four channels of cricket and not much football, but it [football] is popular, especially among the younger kids. Everybody watches the Premier League and the Champions League so football is really in the hearts of the people.

You look then at the derby in Kolkata. Before I came to India I wasn’t aware of it and I’ve mentioned it many times to people in Europe. I say ‘look, there’s this derby game when East Bengal plays Mohun Bagan and there are more than 100,000 people inside the stadium’ and they can’t believe it. It’s huge, with people very energetic and very lively during the game.

Recently the U17 Netherlands women’s team came to India and there were 25,000 people inside the stadium when they played India – with another 10,000 outside who couldn’t get in.

We need to improve things further and even more people will come.

Prior to the arrival of Rob Baan there was no technical director in India…

WK: There never had been, can you imagine that? Important decisions in the game were made by people who did their best but who didn’t have exact knowledge of what was going on and what needed to be done.

There’s now a technical director and a technical plan but it will take time because you don’t do it in one or two years. If I think back to when that master plan was written in the Netherlands - you’re talking about the late 70s - it took ten to 15 years to get a really high level.

How far can India progress in the future?

Look at how Japan developed itself. They only started their professional league in the early 90s and within 10 to 15 years they are at a very high level so if you manage to get a good organisational structure in India you can have a huge effect.

Hopefully we’ll have the U17 World Cup here in 2017 and if that comes off then immediately we’ll have a team and we can work for four years with those boys.

If you have enough good coaches and enough facilities to allow people to play football, you can scout the best players and in a couple of years you will have success and a high level of football in India. You have to be persistent and follow a technical plan.

GALLERY: Scott McIntyre's portrait of football in Sri Lanka

The former Sri Lankan international probably has one of the toughest coaching gigs in world football; trying to haul his native land from the lower reaches of Asian competition in a country where cricket takes, if not the hearts of the people, then certainly their money.

Yet this wasn’t always the case.

Football was once the main game on the island, regularly drawing crowds of about 30,000 to local league matches, with the best players travelling abroad to forge professional careers.

Then came not only the rise of cricket, but also the double hammer blow of a 15-year civil war and the devastating tsunami which washed away so much of the southern coast.

Sri Lanka is not a small nation - at 21 million inhabitants the population is almost identical to Australia’s - and a great many of those have a genuine love for the sport, but the gulf between football development in the countries is as wide as the Indian Ocean that separates them.

It was almost by accident (after being deported from Iran) that I’d found myself in Sri Lanka and it was an eye-opening experience spending the past two weeks in the country to see up close just how tough things are at the "other end" of the footballing spectrum.

While the Socceroos were flying off to Europe to play an international friendly and the bulk of nations across the continent were beginning qualification for the AFC Asian Cup, Sri Lanka was preparing for a more modest tournament and in far more humble surrounds.

No money, no facilities

The "third-tier" AFC Challenge Cup offers its winner a ticket to the quadrennial showpiece and it is here – against the likes of Mongolia, Laos and Myanmar - that Sri Lankan football is pinning its hopes.

The challenges, though, are not to be taken lightly.

For the past year there has been no elite level competition anywhere in the nation after the previous sponsors withdrew their support, in the past 16 months the national team played exactly two matches and the facilities available would be deemed a health hazard in many nations.

The day I visited the National Training Centre on the outskirts of the capital, Colombo, there were two old guys welding a broken goalpost together on one end of the pitch, a collection of chickens just outside one sideline and several cows grazing behind the far goal.

The pitch itself was severely pockmarked, making any sort of passing impossible and by the end of the session the rock-hard surface was causing so many problems that the players begged the coach to abandon training in fear of major injury.

The living quarters were also sparse – the entire 25-man squad housed in a quasi youth hostel set-up with row upon row of bunk beds, while the coaching staff each had a concrete block no larger than 3x3 metres with a desk, a cabinet and a bed - and in some cases - the island’s finest whiskey.

War and its aftermath

The decade and a half of civil war that raged across the central and northern regions of the country, killing almost 100,000 people, stunted development in all walks of life, but the troubles for football are still being heard.

With Sri Lanka back on its feet and eager to welcome foreign guests there has been a mini-boom in luxury hotels, the problem being that in the majority of cases land previously used for football is being turned over to developers.

The new Shangri-La used to house the Army Stadium, while the former home of the Police side is now a Hilton – and in the shadow of that opulence stands the local footballer.

The only grounds of any standard available cost almost US$2,000 a day to rent, while well-cared-for facilities were turned over to rugby after the President’s sons picked up a love for that game while overseas.

When I asked Sampath what the main challenges he faced were, he looked at me as if I asked the most illogical of questions.

“Everyday and everything.”

“I do these coaching courses the AFC runs, but how can I apply anything here?”

“We have no ground, no facilities, no matches and almost half of my team have no job ... this is the challenge.”

The Federation

Sri Lankan football has long been run by one of the country’s wealthiest businessmen, the (literally) larger than life Manilal Fernando.

A member of FIFA’s Executive Committee, he has drawn much comment for being one of former AFC leader Mohamed Bin Hammam’s most trusted lieutenants, and within local football circles he’s viewed with a mixture of trust and suspicion.

As one player told me, “when we go to meetings we all arrive on foot or bicycles while all these guys turn up in their luxury cars.”

Others, though, praised the work he does behind the scenes, paying those without a job a modest monthly salary from his own pocket.

The Federation has made positive steps in recent times though, last year appointing a three-man technical committee to try and raise the standard of grass-roots coaching across the country and working in conjunction with several European-based clubs to try and identify young talent that it can stream into an organised development pathway.

Sampath is also trying to virtually re-build the national team – last week’s camp contained only two players over the age of 23 – while there are advanced plans to launch a new-look league competition later this year.

The plan is to make it a truly nation-wide contest, including the southern city of Galle, where I also spent several days.

Tsunami devastation and rebuilding

This region was at the heart of the devastation caused by the 2004 tsunami and in terms of football, the rebuilding says much about the relative place of the sport.

Down by the bay, where the fishing boats rest after their morning runs, is the impressive Galle Cricket Stadium, grandstand, manicured lawns and all – no more than 25 metres across the road is the football ground.

It’s a familiar story; largely uncared for, brown grass and full of holes.

Not that it stopped the local football fraternity for gathering for their daily kickabout, which I was invited to join.

When night fell I had the chance to speak to the player who was clearly a touch above everyone else that evening and it turns out he was the national captain for 14 years until recently retiring.

Now, as his friends put it, he has no job and no money and so spends his evenings here.

Later that evening another of the players, a fireman, invited me to visit his station – newly built with foreign money after the tsunami poured through the centre of town at a height of almost five metres.

He pulled out some photos he’d taken in the days after the waves came; body upon body upon body that he’d collected with his bare hands.

Friends, family and football players.

“We are still trying to rebuild and for us football is hope but it’s a small hope.”

“The only places to play are given to cricket and with my monthly salary of $300 how am I supposed to buy boots that cost more than $100?”

In much of southern Asia, indeed in much of the world, these are the challenges facing people who just want to play the game they love.

It’s hardly representative of the standard on offer.

High School football rarely comes across as a ‘sexy offering’ in a world saturated by glossy professional leagues but the annual winter tournament in Japan has risen to such a standard that it now attracts interest from scouts across the region and beyond and is widely recognised as one of the premier breeding grounds for not just J.League clubs but also the Japanese national team.

The roll call of recent graduates is an impressive one: national team regulars Yasuhito Endo and Shinji Okazaki, as well as several European-based players like Bundesliga pair Genki Omae and Takashi Inui and Arsenal’s Ryo Miyaichi have all graced the tournament in recent years.

Yet, more than just a football competition the winter classic is an institution in its own right.

Both the opening and closing matches – at Tokyo’s National Stadium – attracted crowds of almost 40,000 and many of the other fixtures were completely sold out.

This includes each school bringing thousands of students who act as large-scale support squads often replete with marching bands and cheerleaders.

The tournament is broadcast live on national television, there’s a range of merchandise – featuring keyrings and pennants of each of the 48 schools – that had all but sold out by the day of the final and there have been numerous books, films and even video games spun off from the event over the 91 years it’s been running.

Yet at the centre of all the pomp is a serious tournament and a fascinating mix of styles that showcases some serious talent.

With the regional qualifiers played throughout the summer, the top side from each of the nation’s 47 prefectures, plus a pair of Tokyo entrants, gather in the capital for a three-week knockout finals tournament that makes front-page news throughout the country.

While baseball may still have claims to the hearts of the older generation of Japanese there’s no doubt that football has won the youth battle – walk through any park on most days of the year and the chances are you’ll see high-school students kicking a football rather than swinging a bat.

Although the J.League clubs have been playing an increasingly influential role in youth development, much of the talent now emanating from Asia’s top-ranked nation has come through the school system; indeed 19 of the 23 players from the 2010 World Cup squad were all products of the system.

Along with the sport’s rising popularity has emerged countless specialist football high schools throughout the country – and it’s here that much of the nation’s talent is nurtured.

Unlike the situation in Australia – and many other nations – youth coaching is viewed and respected as a specialist field in Japan and there are high schools coaches who are more widely known to the general public than several J.League bosses.

As with most layers of Japanese school life once football is undertaken seriously, nothing is shirked.

Just ask Socceroos defender Jason Davidson how tough it is.

Players must adhere to a strict training – and personal – routine that often crosses certain boundaries.

Ten years ago, when I first attended the high school football tournament in Tokyo, I met a German guy who was an assistant coach at one of the most renowned schools in the country – Kunimi – in the south of the country.

Two weeks later he called me to say he’d quit because he couldn’t endure any longer what was happening to the players – the coaching staff would deny the students access to mobile phones, any form of junk food and from having girlfriends.

They also had to cut their hair exactly the same, in a short-crop military style.

If any player broke rank the entire squad was punished and this often took the form of players being forced to remove their boots and then being struck across the face with them.

Such behaviour still occurs at many football schools throughout Japan.

There’s rigidity and there’s discipline but there’s also a single-minded belief from many of the students I’ve spoken to of knowing exactly what they want and being prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to reach those goals.

This year, for the first time, the final was halted by snow and the two teams – both from the far reaches of the country – had to remain in the capital for an extra week as the match was rescheduled.

Far from complaining both took to snow-covered fields for the next several days under the watch of a platoon of Japanese media, not once complaining about the situation.

Technically, things have also changed immensely over the past decade or so with a flourishing view – almost across the board – of trying to play ‘attractive’ football.

The standard on display in recent years has often been mixed but a hallmark of all the matches I saw this year was a supreme level of technical and tactical capability – sides able to maintain possession at length, patience to wait for the right moment to drive forward and an inherent ability to dictate the tempo of a match.

It was, in several instances, better than the standard on display at A-League level.

Football fans, and no longer just those in Asia, are asking just why Japan has risen so far, so fast.

Anyone who has the chance to come to Tokyo in the first few weeks of the New Year knows exactly why.

While hundreds of fans queued overnight in the island state to ensure their place at the tiny Jalan Besar Stadium, officials in Bangkok announced that ticket sales had been postponed over fears of widespread scalping as Thailand finally looks set to draw a bumper crowd at the tournament.

The minimal turnout at matches in the Kingdom has been one of several sore spots that have blighted the event.

The standard of some of the pitches – particularly that at Bukit Jalil for last week’s semi-final – have simply not been up to international requirements, while much of the match officiating has also been below par.

Despite the problems there have also been some memorable moments – the emergence of some of the minnows has been greatly encouraging and has shown that the gap is gradually narrowing in Southeast Asia.

Myanmar and Laos both finished bottom of their respective groups with just a single point apiece but they played very impressive football at times.

Both have foreign coaches from elsewhere in Asia (Korea and Japan) which is another nod to growing standards within the broader region and both were well organised and committed to playing positively.

Vietnam may have been regarded as a major disappointment and while the side was shaky at the back, there were none better in the tournament in terms of being able to dominate sides through possession and rapid movements in the final third.

Fallen semi-finalists Malaysia and the Philippines were, for differing reasons, major disappointments.

The former played some of the worst football I’ve seen in a long while and it’s clearly time to realise that having a nice guy doing your media commitments and substitutions doesn’t help enhance and progress your nation’s development.

All of which means the two most consistent nations have reached the final.

They’re also the two most successful in the history of the tournament (each have won three of the eight finals thus far) and it will be a fitting conclusion – although the Thais enter as strong favourites.

Winfried Schafer’s side has fairly steamrolled its way through the competition, winning four of its five matches and racking up 12 goals along the way.

As much as the surfaces have allowed, Thailand has played eye-catching football with lots of positional movement, steady possession and fast transitions.

Schafer has also got a handful of players who’ve really stood out: both fullbacks, Theerathon Butmathan and Piyaphon Buntao have been impressive; goalkeeper Kawin Thamsatchanan these days looks more like a bodybuilder than a gloveman and he’s been a steady presence at the back, but it’s up front where Teerasil Dangda has probably already done enough to claim tournament Most Valuable Player honours.

A hat-trick against Myanmar was followed up by a fantastic equaliser in the semi-final first leg and the opening strike in the reverse leg. Several Spanish clubs are reported to be tracking his progress and, at just 24, he could be set to push Thai football to new heights for years to come.

Singapore has surprised many by reaching the final, yet despite a surprise loss to Indonesia in the second group match, they have been steady without being flashy.

A large part of the success is clearly a result of the FAS’s (Football Association of Singapore) decision to have a de facto national team, the Lions XII, playing in the Malaysian Super League this year.

While it may hurt domestic football, the fact that eight of the likely starting side were with the Lions XII last season means that the national team has been a major beneficiary.

While the most highly rated youngster for both the Lions and the national team, Hariss Harun, is still out after breaking his fibula earlier in the tournament, his club teammate Isa Halim has ably stepped into his spot at the base of midfield and has been a controlling presence.

Captain Shahril Ishak has impressed on the right and has contributed four goals, while the backline led by Baihakki Khaizan has, with the exception of the first half against Laos, kept things tight.

It’s up front, though, where Singapore has also impressed, with Khairul Amri in fine form, and the evergreen Aleksandar Duric, at 42, also turning in several solid cameos.

With the Jalan Besar having artificial turf, at least we know it will allow both sides to play the kind of football they prefer and although I fancied Singapore at the start of the tournament, Thailand has grown throughout the competition and deserves the tag of “favourite” ahead of the leading event on the Southeast Asian football calendar.

‘F*** Malaysia’ is one of the milder reminders of the final of the last AFF Suzuki Cup at the grand old dame of Asian football stadia.

That night 102,000 fans packed the GBK in the improbable hope that Indonesia could overturn a 3-0 first-leg loss from a week earlier in Malaysia and claim its first sub-continental title.

The host won 2-1 but both legs were played in acrimonious circumstances. Laser lights boring into the eyes of the visiting Indonesians forced the first-leg to be halted for almost ten minutes to which the locals reciprocated with a similar stunt in the return fixture.

There aren't many sports that drew that kind of crowd last year.

A European Championship final has never matched that sheer mass of humanity and no World Cup Final outside of Mexico or Brazil has either.

This is a region that has a passion for football like few others and the AFF Suzuki Cup is THE Holy Grail.

For most of these nations Asian Cup qualification is a long-shot, let alone reaching the big table of the World Cup,. But it’s here in Southeast Asia where regional supremacy can be arranged.

This weekend the ninth edition of the tournament formerly known as the Tiger Cup gets underway in Malaysia and Thailand. While the rest of the world quibbles over La Liga or the English Premiership, for the vast majority in one of the planet’s most populous regions this is all that matters.

A qualification tournament held earlier this year whittled the number of nations down to eight. Six of those having genuine title claims.

GROUP A

Group A looks to be a race in three as Myanmar will struggle against host Thailand, Vietnam and the fast-improving Philippines.

Thailand showed in the previous stage of FIFA World Cup qualification just how much it has improved under the astute stewardship of Winfred Schafer – it pushed Australia both home and away.

Since then the usual squabbles and dramas that seem to perpetually afflict Thai football have returned to hamper preparations.

Narrow victories over Laos and Malaysia offered promise but the decision to use Bhutan and Bangladesh as the two final pre-tournament opponents was odd to say the least – and the pair of 5-0 wins allows little room for analysis.

The entirely domestic-based squad is dominated, as expected, by TPL heavyweight Muangthong.

The champion contributed nine players to the initial 35-strong squad.

Of that group Teerasil Dangda, Datsakorn Thonglao and Pichitphong Choeichiu all shone in the win over Bangladesh and should form the creative nucleus of the side.

Knocked out in first round last time without a win the Thais will be much stronger here.

Vietnam has reached the semi-finals of the past three editions, winning the title in 2008 but is another nation with a chequered pre-tournament build-up.

After German Falko Gotz was sacked earlier this year the VFF turned to former national striker Phan Thanh Hung, who assumed control in August.

In nine internationals since his appointment the side has only lost once but the new man’s time is somewhat stretched given that he’s only signed on a temporary basis and is still on club duties at Hanoi T+T.

Vietnam is the highest-ranked of the eight nations and Philippines is somewhat surprisingly the second highest.

After never having previously progressed from the group stages – and failing to even qualify for 2008 - the Azkals stunned everyone with their run to the semis two years ago.

That was the launching pad for what’s been termed the ‘renaissance of Filipino football.’

The work that 33 year-old English coach Simon McMenemy started has been picked up by well-travelled German Michael Weiss.

Weiss continued the policy of looking for foreign players with Filipino ancestry and the side now has a mix of exciting local players and overseas ‘stars.’

With the domestic competition not fully professional the impact of the foreign players has been crucial although arguably the two biggest names in Fulham

keeper Neil Etheridge and Hoffenheim midfielder Stephan Schrock will be missing after their clubs refused to release them.

Most of the others though, including Karlsruher defender Dennis Cagara, Paul Mulders from Ado Den Haag and Danish-based midfielder Jerry Lucena, will be present.

As will some impressive, local-based youngsters who’ve really caught the eye in Italian-born midfielder Marwin Angeles and winger Jeffrey Christiaens - a product of the Club Brugge youth academy.

Myanmar is the outsider in the section and will be unlikely to cause too much trouble for the ‘big three.’

Korean coach Park Sung-hwa can call on veteran Yan Paing and teenage striker Kyaw Ko Ko (who bagged five goals as Myanmar won bronze in last year’s Sea Games) as well as midfield starlet Kyi Lin but it’s hard to see the side progressing from the group.

GROUP B

Group B consists of three-time champion Singapore, four-time runner-up Indonesia and defending champion Malaysia, joined by a long-shot in Laos.

Malaysia is favoured to be one of the two sides to progress but its recent form has been a worry. Draws with Bangladesh and Hong Kong following on from losses against Vietnam and Thailand.

Coach K. Rajagobal has come under pressure from his federation and has started attributing blame squarely at the feet of his own players.

As anyone who saw Malaysia crumble to a less than full-strength Australia in Canberra last year can attest, the former international is perhaps not the sharpest tactical mind in SEA football.

That was the worst performance from an international side I’ve seen on Australian soil.

On paper his three-year reign has been a success; the 2010 title in the tournament as well as a SEA Games triumph in 2009 match the expectations of Malaysia and with the coach claiming he has a better squad than the title-winning one from two years ago, it’s up to him to have it playing at its best.

Singapore has had a mixed buildup with losses to J.League club Shimizu S-Pulse and the Philippines preceding a confidence-boosting 4-0 win over Pakistan.

Coach Raddy Avramovic usually deploys a 4-2-31 where midfield creators Shahril Ishak and Shahdan Sulieman will look to provide the service that evergreen frontmen Alex Duric thrives upon.

The bulk of the squad is comprised of players from the quasi-national club team Lions XII which finished second in the Malaysian Super League this year.

This is a huge advantage and with a vastly experienced squad at his disposal for the last time in charge of the national team, Avramovic has a final chance to ensure his legacy will be a positive one.

Under normal circumstances it would be one of the favourites but life in Indonesian football is anything but normal.

The ugly spat between sanctioned and unsanctioned governing bodies and their respective domestic leagues continues to fester and those disputes have severely hampered preparations.

No players from the ‘rebel’ ISL were released for pre-tournament camps and only two warm-up matches were played – a lackluster 1-0 win over Timor-Leste and a scoreless draw with a Cameroon ‘C’ team last week.

While veterans Elie Aboy and Bambang Pamungkas are in the squad there is a new-look about this group of Indonesian talent. Espanyol’s Arthur Irawan is a highly-rated prospect, while Dutch-born pair Irfan Bachdim and Jhon van Beukering add an element of unpredictability to the group.

Bambang defied KPSI orders not to participate and will once again be the key for the Merah Putih, but one of the country’s ‘pin-up’ boys Diego Michiels won’t be with the squad as he’s facing a three-year jail term over an alleged assault at nightclub earlier this month.

Raphael Maitimo’s last-ditch passport application looks to have been successful and he will be one of several foreign-born players in the squad.

The key for coach Nil Maizar is how, after limited preparation, he can get this new-look group to gel.

Laos is undoubtedly the outsider and will be expected to struggle.

OUTLOOK

With a couple of heavyweight clashes the tournament should get off to a lively start.

As much as Vietnam can never be discounted I fancy Thailand and the Philippines to progress from Group A and I think Singapore plus one of either Malaysia or Indonesia will join them in the semifinals.

In my view it will be Singapore and the Philippines in the final.

Either way, it will be a thrilling month of football in Southeast Asia.

It was 5am on the eve of a man in which he would make his Socceroos debut and the young Australian was sending texts as his body struggled to work out whether it was in Belgrade, Istanbul or Korea.

Many others were in a similar shape. Mat Ryan and Tom Rogic arrived barely 40 hours before kickoff and Robert Cornthwaite was on his couch in the middle of a video game session at 4 o’clock on Monday afternoon.

I’d arrived that morning before almost half the squad and the first ‘training session’ – the only one with the full group - had more support staff in attendance than players.

The temperature - recorded near zero – was punctuated by an icy wind that made it feel a lot worse. This was a far cry from the 50 degree heat which engulfed the side the morning of the Oman qualifier in June and another reminder of the headaches that dominate life in Asia.

No other region in the world has to face the logistical problems present in Asia. It is a credit to the Australian backroom staff that such matters are barely discussed these days, but it is a significant point worth repeating. It can often be easy to watch on television and pass judgment on performance without realising just how hard these matches are.

With that as the background what we got was a glimpse into the future on Wednesday evening and things look a lot better than they had. It's another example of how quickly things can change.

Just over an hour into the match against Iraq last month, Australia was bottom of the group and qualification for Brazil had never seemed further away. A dozen or so minutes later the campaign was back on track.

This week the Young Socceroos, deep in stoppage time of their final group match at the AFC Under-19 Championships, were heading home with the post-mortems about failed development already being drafted.

An eleventh-hour Corey Gameiro goal put paid to the obituaries and now everyone is talking about how wonderful things are.

The biggest question may be who of generation-next that impressed in Korea is ready to become a fully-fledged squad regular?

The answer to that may lay with the success of the group that heads to Hong Kong in a fortnight for the East Asian Championship (EAFF) qualifiers.

With those fixtures falling outside official FIFA match-dates the bulk of the squad will come from the leagues of Australia and North Asia.

Of the few available European options, Babalj (whose Red Star Belgrade is on a winter break) has put up his hand and will be a certain selection, while Kerem Bulut is another who may be in line to get a call-up.

Thereafter there are several issues. The likes of Mathew Leckie, afforded token minutes in Korea, will have one more international early next year to press his claim for a permanent spot in the squad.

The EAFF gives the likes of Aaron Mooy, Craig Goodwin, Trent Sainsbury, Aziz Behich, Ryan and Rogic a major platform to show Holger Osieck what they can do.

Those who made their debut did their chance no harm and several players staked major claims for a more permanent role.

None of the young brigade made a greater impact than Rogic.

Much like the Beatles tour of Australia in 1964 or the 2005 qualification match, many will want to claim they were there at the time of a history-making moment and I feel certain I’ll be talking about the time I saw Tom Rogic’s first Socceroos match for many years.

With a player such as the Mariners number ten, it really is all about seeing him play live.

The touches and the control you can see on television perfectly well but what you can’t is arguably the defining feature of a player in his role – the constant movement and probing for space.

The poise too.

I spoke with Rogic at length both pre and post match and at no time did you get the impression that he was especially anxious about making his debut.

It doesn’t come across as arrogance, just a belief that he knows he already has the tools to belong at this level.

The last words Osieck said to him as he headed on in the 67th minute were to keep it simple and the first thing he said to me when asked how he felt was: “I just kept it simple.”

Simple but very effective.

It said much of how highly Rogic is regarded that, upon his arrival, the 4-4-2 Australia had been using up to that point became a 4-2-3-1 to accommodate Rogic’s presence in the number 10 role.

If his development continues, he will be a very good footballer for a very long time.

Of the others Babalj looked sharp, particularly given his lack of playing time in Serbia. Nikita Rukavytsya’s presence gave a more balanced feel to the front two. Aziz Behich fitted seamlessly into the left-back role, with the entire defence taking on a more assured look upon his arrival.

James Holland has, by all accounts, been hugely impressive in Austria playing in what was described to me as a ‘Paartalu role’ and that showed.

He offers a different approach to Carl Valeri and Mile Jedinak and the Austria Vienna man looked completely at home as midfield pivot.

Matthew Spiranovic’s late withdrawal opened the door for Robert Cornthwaite and all of a sudden, a scheduled night watching on TV became a match-winning contribution topped off by a ‘man-of-the-match’ gong.

Ryan McGowan was solid at right-back and for his sake hopefully things can get sorted at club level.

Of the others, Tom Oar was again impressive but on the evidence last night, it appears that Rogic is perhaps ahead of him as a long-term option in the central playmaker role. Oar seems more effective cutting in from his station on the left.

There were moments when he popped up on the right side of the advanced midfield three on Wednesday and such versatility is a strong feature of his game.

Some have questioned why both Mark Schwarzer and Lucas Neill were included given that both have been regulars for well over a decade and the latter will be suspended for Oman qualifier in March, but surely nobody was expecting a team of inexperienced starters against a Korean side that had a similar mix of senior and less capped players.

With Iraq picking up maximum points and Oman, despite its loss to Japan, looking impressive, the scenario is very tight in the qualification race.

Four nations are effectively fighting for one remaining automatic place and although Australia has a match in hand, one loss and the pressure will be right back on.

We now await the EAFF squad announcement next week to see who may force his way into Osieck’s squad for those crucial matches next year.

Two weeks ago I visited a market near the city of Erbil in northern Iraq looking for a replica shirt of the local club side that I’d spent the previous days covering for SBS.

Nestled in amongst the yellow strip – yellow of different hues, to be fair – of Erbil and the ever-present Real Madrid and Barcelona fakes I stumbled across, of all things, an Adelaide United shirt.

It was an AFC Champions League strip complete with a giant Coopers advert (a product that may struggle to crack the tricky Iraq market) and the No. 10 on the front.

Looking at the reverse side, expecting to see Vidosic, there was another surprise as "Podolski" was emblazoned below the collar, but despite the "No. 10 identity crisis" the very fact there was a shirt from Adelaide in Iraq at all was a demonstration of the power of football throughout the continent.

I’ve travelled extensively throughout Asia during the past decade and since the switch to the AFC in 2006 there are two, perhaps three, clubs that are familiar to a broad Asian audience.

Adelaide and Melbourne Victory. In some cases also Central Coast.

The reason, of course, is simple – they are the clubs which have been mainstays in the Asian Champions League.

If Sydney FC, for example, suddenly think "Asia" is going to embrace it just because it signed an ageing Italian star, it is seriously misjudging the region.

Qualification for – and success in – the ACL will do far more for your “brand” than a hotchpotch series of circus matches the likes of which David Beckham and his merry men have even managed to exhaust.

If you need any proof that the ACL is one of the great bridges between Asia and Australia just ask any Australian football supporter to name two or three Japanese or Korean clubs. Chances are those recalled will be that country’s Champions League sides.

The ACL and the Socceroos involvement in Asia – not to mention the impact of the 2015 Asian Cup – have been genuine facilitators of a deeper understanding between Australia and its Asian neighbours.

Players are, as one Olyroos player famously said a couple of years ago, going to places that “normal people” don’t … and fans are following.

Amman, Kunming, Doha and Kuwait City wouldn’t have been on the hit-lists of many young Australians prior to 2006 but they are just some of the cities that have been taken over by an ever-increasing number of travelling Australian football fans.

I’ve met supporters and players alike during this time who have been motivated to study an Asian language as a result of their travels, to move to the region to work, who have started websites devoted to Asian football and even those who have fallen in love and married along the journey.

Not to mention those from other nations who have been inspired to visit and learn about Australia as a result of those same encounters.

Football is a powerful tool for cross-cultural understanding and the various national teams, FFA and Australian diplomatic missions abroad are all doing their part in helping to build these “bridges of understanding”.

In short, football represents one of the most direct and lasting relationships that Australians can build with their Asian brethren – a region in which literally tens of millions of people play, watch and live the sport.

Which makes this week’s release of the long-awaited white paper Australia in the Asian Century all the more confusing.

Becoming an “Asia-literate nation”, developing “collaborative relationships” and forging greater “economic links” all feature prominently as ambitions for Australia over the coming decades, yet the role of sport in enhancing these links is virtually overlooked.

Of the 25 “national objectives” listed, only one mentioned the role that sport can play.

Adding to the disappointment was the fact that football was one of only a handful of sporting organisations (hello netball and racing!) amongst the 273 submissions the authors received.

FFA’s submission was one of the most comprehensive, running to 30 pages and stacked with detail of the important work football has already done in integrating Australia into the broader Asian continent and suggestions for how the sport can be used to further these links.

Amongst the key points were:

*Australia’s involvement in football and development work throughout Asia, specifically in Goa, Timor-Leste and Indonesia

*The role of Australian players – including the unlikely ambassadorial role played by Joel Griffiths – in working to improve Australia’s image in Asia

*The opportunities presented by the 2015 AFC Asian Cup

*The proposed establishment of a “Football Asia Council” to “coordinate commercial, cultural and public diplomacy programs”.

*A push for greater development funding for football throughout Asia

*The opportunities presented by targeting tourism campaigns around the Asian Cup

Yet from this comprehensive submission, what was featured in the report?

Of the 320 pages just three paragraphs – and one break-out box – mentioned football in the “Asian Century”.

Yet other “cultural and educational institutions” (valuable as they are) received page after page of positive reviews around the role they can play.

In a broad sense perhaps football was a victim of its own inclusiveness.

The White Paper used a very narrow definition of Asia – and with scant explanation as to why those boundaries were drawn – as being from India across through Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia and pointedly excluded Australia from this grouping.

Football in Australia belongs to a broad region of 47 permanent members stretching from Lebanon to Launceston meaning, as it noted in its submission, that FFA is “one of the few Australian organisations to enjoy full membership of an Asian supranational body”.

It is important to highlight again some of the positive work Australia is doing in Asia, and not just at an administrative level.

There are now almost 50 Australians playing in Asia and many of them are wonderful ambassadors, including the likes of Aleks Vrteski and particularly Robbie Gaspar, who are working with the Players Association in Indonesia to fight for the rights of their fellow professionals and for structural change in one of the most important football regions in Asia.

However while Australia has, in many cases quietly, been doing development and diplomatic work in Asia for many years and a vast number of Australian players enjoy the rewards of playing in Asian competitions, there remain some glaring problems within the relationship.

As I’ve argued for many years, the exchange of players has been stacked predominantly in favour of Australia exporting to Asia.

Almost 100 Australians have played in an Asian league since the move to the AFC in 2006, yet barely a dozen have featured in the A-League over the same time.

This current season alone there are, at latest count, 49 Australians playing in an AFC competition with a grand total of five (only one of whom is regularly playing) in the A-League.

The sheer imbalance of these numbers is something FFA should be working to remedy, yet the national body continues to ignore the obvious solution.

It’s quite simple – the time for Australia to adopt the AFC’s 3+1 rule (or variants thereof) has well and truly arrived.

When that happens then FFA can truly say it is part of the Asian football family.

The next step is to educate certain agents, promoters and club officials that Asia is a vast region home to myriad languages, cultures and social customs that present opportunities for exchange rather than the “cashed-up market” they prefer to see.

Maybe then even the government will start to see the power of football in bringing people and groups together for mutual benefit across this broad continent in which Australia sits in the south-eastern corner.

As the White Paper notes, this century will see the “tyranny of distance replaced by prospects of proximity”.

These were the first words that Dr. Abdulla Agha said to me.

The month before I arrived was the deadliest in two years; 683 people injured and 365 killed in a wave of car bombs, kidnappings and targeted assassinations.

GALLERY: Scott McIntyre in Iraq

Much of Iraq is still a dangerous no-go zone yet in the north things are much calmer. Sure, the streets are full of soldiers and security personnel with guns slung over their shoulders, but there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack for several years.

Politics is deeply wound up in football as it is throughout much of the Middle East. For the club at which Dr. Agha is the President, Erbil FC, this more so than any other in the country. This is the reason why I’ve come to one of the most dangerous nations on earth.

Kurdistan and the fight for independence

Erbil is the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, an area first settled in 9000BC and home to a fiercely independent people who were at the heart of the struggle to bring down Saddam Hussein.

The former Iraqi President was still on trial for genocide committed in the region when he was executed in 2006. In the years since the downfall of his regime, Iraqi Kurdistan has undergone a rapid transformation.

Containing almost 15 per cent of the nation’s oil reserves, it has its own regional government and security force. A property boom has seen much of the cities of Erbil, Duhok and Sulaymaniya boast glittering new shopping malls and apartment complexes.

Political autonomy has coincided with a rise in the fortunes of Erbil FC.

Founded in 1968, the club didn’t reach the Iraqi Premier League until the 1987-88 season and was in and out of the upper tier until the beginning of the last decade.

When the 2003-04 season was abandoned due to the American invasion the club had recorded its best season to date - top of its division after 10 matches.

In 2004 Erbil quickly emerged as the nation’s new powerhouse, sweeping to three consecutive titles from 2006-09, reaching the semifinals the two years after that and last year winning another trophy as the competition moved to a single-season format.

The reason for the club’s success is simple: the north of the country is the most stable and Erbil is able to attract the cream of Iraqi talent.

The club has a well-run front office, players are well-paid - the average salary is around $120,000 - the playing and training facilities are good and the club is the only one in Iraq to have a foreign coach and players.

Erbil has become so strong that of the national squad named by Zico for the World Cup qualifier with Australia, no fewer than seven members were from the club.That includes goalkeeper Jalal Hassan, who isn’t even first-choice at the yellows.

There is, however, a pressing concern.

Erbil is a club with a clear Kurdish identity. The locals know it as ‘Hawler,’ the Kurdish name for Erbil. It uses Kurdish script on its team badge and it plays at the Franso Hariri Stadium, named after a former governor of the city who was assassinated in 2001.

Yet of the side that turned out in last week’s AFC Cup semifinal against Thai club Chonburi, there were only three Kurdish players in the starting eleven.

This doesn’t sit well with many of the locals – the vast majority of whom are Kurds, proudly waving the Kurdish flag, chanting in Kurdish and clad in the red, white and green of their ‘informal’ national side.

The identity crisis

The mood was clear immediately. When the team lineup was announced most names were met with an approving murmur but when Miran Khesro, Sarhang Mohsen and Halgurd Mulla Mohammed - the three Kurds - were called, that became a roar.

I got talking with Dastan at the halftime break.

“Look, we don’t like the Arabs and they don’t like us,” he said.

“You know what they say to us when we go to Baghdad to play their teams? They call us the Jews of Iraq, they chant and sing that Erbil is the Israel of Iraq.

“If that means we are fighting for our own state, then we don’t mind it.”

Neither, it seems, does the club.

Ideally, it would love to be dominated by Kurdish players but for now there are more pressing aims.

The only way it can raise its international profile is through recruiting the best players – whether Kurd or Arab – and by winning the Iraqi league.

Sport as a gun

Later in the week I visited the offices of the Kurdistan Football Association and met with their General-Secretary, Salam Hussein who, when asked why a region that is fighting for independence would play in the Iraqi league, said:

“We’re trying to use sport as the ‘gun’ to help us become an independent country,” he said. “We know sport can help our cause for independence, to try and achieve political aims.”

“FIFA though says we are a federal region and we must play in Iraq so this is our only open door.

“If we don’t participate in the Iraqi league then we can’t participate in the Champions League or the AFC Cup - this is the first way to help us develop.”

The development is being accelerated at a regional level. While the senior side at Erbil is dominating the Iraqi Premier League, the reserve side plays in the Kurdistan Super League – a four-tier competition for clubs within Iraqi Kurdistan.

During my stay in the country, I got the chance to watch a Kurdish Cup match where the ‘second’ Erbil was surprisingly defeated in the Round of 16 by Ala.

The standard was good, with both teams comfortable in possession, eager to play out from the back and looking to close down their opponent quickly.

There were two red cards, plenty of chances and some animated characters both on the pitch and the sidelines but ultimately the match was a demonstration of what the Kurdistan FA is looking to achieve: raising the standard of coaching by bringing in outside trainers (from Chile, Serbia and Poland) as well as focusing on tactical organisation. One official told me: “we have the talent, all these kids can play but when it comes to organisation, they’re a total mess.”

Later I spoke with Erbil’s midfield creator, known as Shwan Mamo - a former Kurdistan international and veteran of the local club who is regarded as one of the finest Kurds to have played for Erbil.

“It’s every Kurdish boy’s dream to play for the Kurdistan national team because even if you start from nothing then everyone will know you and you become part of the fight for Kurdistan,” he said. “For me, this is much more important than the Iraqi national team.”

“Iraq, they called me many times to try and play. For youth teams, for the Olympic team and once I went but I decided I didn’t want to play for them.

“I am Kurdish. I don’t want to go to the Iraqi national team and sit on the bench. For us Kurdish people we don’t want to go to Baghdad and join this team.”

An ever-present danger

Travelling to Baghdad is just one of the problems Erbil’s senior team faces, as Shwan Mamo explained.

“We don’t have many problems here in Kurdistan, things are OK. But the problem is when we must play matches in places like Basra and Baghdad.

“After 2003 when we went to Baghdad we always had a security team at training or matches or when we went outside but now when we go no-one will come and protect us.

“We can only hope that God will help us when we go and play football with those clubs. It’s all up to God. We are scared that there will be bombs, or suicide guys or some kind of explosion.”

The mission to raise the club’s profile is also going to plan. A rampant 4-1 first leg semifinal win in the AFC Cup has put Erbil within touching distance of a major Asian final that will focus more attention on the fight for an independent Kurdistan.

Not that all the players at Erbil FC share that ambition though.

Scorer of two goals in the semifinal, 22 year-old Amjad Radhi is not only one of the most exciting young players in the country but he’s a former Baghdad resident who now calls Erbil home.

“There is no difference between the regions of this country,” he said. “Iraq is one Iraq and it’s not a problem that I see both Iraqi and Kurdish flags at the match, the people here are very good and a lot of players are my friends.

“Even we have Kurdish players in the national team and they are my friends. Before I played at a club in Baghdad, Al Quwa Al-Juwiya and it’s the same here, it’s all Iraq. Dohuk, Erbil, Sulaymaniya – it’s all Iraq.”

The day before I was scheduled to leave the country came another reminder of the troubles facing this ancient land.

In a single day a roadside bomb, near women selling vegetables in Baghdad, killed four. Three policemen were wounded by an explosive device in in Mosul. A man was arrested planting an IED in Falluja. Prisoners broke out of a jail in Tikrit and a suicide bomber was arrested in Wasit just as he was about to get into his loaded car.

These cities will field local clubs when the new season gets underway this month. The country has a hell of a challenge ahead of it.

A happy kid but one that’s come from a hard place.

He arrived with his mother a month ago from Syria after his father had been killed in the conflict ravaging that country; a civil war that has so far claimed 30,000 lives and seen a stream of refugees flee into Jordan as well as Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq.

Official estimates put the number of refugees at 300,000 – almost half of whom are children or teenagers, with that number rising by 2,000 people every day.

Against this backdrop football seems almost a trivial pursuit but the game, at least to some degree, is still going on.

While the Syrian Premier League has been ‘suspended’ since May one club side, Al Shorta, was still involved in the latter stages of the AFC Cup tournament and has continued to compete, albeit with home matches moved to neutral venues.

On Wednesday the club’s run finally came to an end when it was beaten in the quarter-finals of the competition by Thai side Chonburi and after watching that match I was invited to the hotel where the team was staying.

There I had dinner with the side’s captain, Qusay Habib, a polite, well-spoken man who talked candidly of the horror affecting his country.

“It’s not safe now in Syria, it’s not safe in Damascus, it’s not safe in all of Syria.”

“You know, for us, it’s remarkable that we could reach this level. With this problem we arrived at this level so it’s good for us – in Syria now you can’t train, you can’t arrange matches, you can’t play matches and you can’t go outside to play matches, there are too many problems in Syria.”

Those problems have also deeply affected football; once proud clubs such as Al Karamah (2006 Champions League runners-up) and Al Ittihad - from the cities of Homs and Aleppo which have borne the brunt of much of the fighting – have been shut down.

A small number of players have found clubs abroad - not all though, as Habib explained, were so lucky.

“At least one player from Aleppo has died, I don’t know how but I just heard he’s died. He was about to come here to Jordan to play with the Al Faisaly club and he died.”

Habib is a big name in Syrian football: a highly-rated midfielder who was a member of the national team at the most recent Asian Cup in Qatar and already captain of his club side.

When I put it to him that sportsmen are often made a target during conflict throughout the region, his response was delivered in an optimistic, rather than forceful, tone.

“Now we must return to Damascus by bus. It’s three hours from here in Amman and I think we’ll be OK. You know, we are football players but sometimes you are unlucky. Maybe we will fight with the Free Army but, Inshallah, we will be OK.”

Al Shorta is the team of the Syrian Police and as such, logic suggests, is firmly behind the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, whom US President Barack Obama described on Tuesday as “a dictator who massacres his people.”

Habib, though, insists his job is just to play football and not get caught up in politics, but the daily struggle to survive is biting hard.

Already fluent in English, he’s decided to start studying Japanese because he must try to make a future somehow in a country where he says everybody has to work four jobs just to get by.

“I just hope for our country that this can finish. I want it finished today, you know things are now so hard. I don’t really have any money, now the club gives me just enough to eat, to survive, but it’s a big problem in Syria.”

“No clubs have money and nobody is watching football, now everybody just they watch the news. People think, there are problems today, what are the problems tomorrow? It’s like this.”

Habib concedes that Syrian football may take a generation to recover, with the league not expected to return for several years even after the fighting has quelled.

“If now the problems finish maybe even after 2 or 3 years there is no league in Syria and these players are finished. This is the problem in the player’s mind – do I want to play football or do I want to leave Syria?”

Against this backdrop the Syrian FA has decided to make Al Shorta the de-facto national team and with perhaps just a handful of additions elsewhere the side will represent the nation in Kuwait at December’s West Asian Championships.

That is, if the situation remains relatively stable in Damascus, which is the only city where the side can train safely.

“In Damascus, we have problems but at least you can walk to go to training but around Damascus, sure there are a lot of problems.”

“But sometimes even in Damascus … boom … you have a bomb.”

With the club bowing out of the AFC Cup the foreign players at Al Shorta – including Brazilian Geilson, a former teammate of Robinho at Santos - have already decided to leave, doing so directly from Jordan. But for the locals, that’s not a ready option.

“Sure, I want to leave, too many people are suffering in Syria. I’d love to play for a big club in the Asian Champions League and show how I can play but my family is all in Syria.”

“Every day I worry about them and when I’m away all the time I call and ask is Damascus safe or are there problems. Hamdullah, we don’t have any problems.”

As dinner finishes and I ponder my life in the ‘west’ Qusay, an impressive man of 25, whose only wish is to play football in peace, reminds me just how hard that is in a country that’s being torn apart.

“When our country quietens down then maybe we can play again. I want my country to be safe but you don’t know how things are; one day you can walk to training and next to a car, if you are unlucky, boof.”

For those in awkward time zones, such as Australia, it meant a sleepless night and some serious fatigue at work the following day.

It was perhaps not the best time to be having a major operation carried out by a football-loving doctor, but that’s exactly what happened to fringe Australia midfielder Nathan Burns.

“Thankfully it wasn’t actually the doctor but rather the anesthetist, the guy who knocks you out," Burns recalled. "The last thing I remember before I went under was talking football with them.

"We were talking about the Manchester City match the night before and the doctor actually stayed up all night watching the game. We were talking football and then I woke up later on all cut up.”

Happily, with everything in its correct place including some major repairs to the damaged meniscus in his knee that had all but obliterated Burns’ start at K-League club Incheon.

After a mixed four-year stint in Greece and with that nation’s financial troubles eating deeply into football, the 24 year-old had decided it was time for a fresh start when Korea came calling. Barely a fortnight into pre-season things started to fall apart.

“It was just one of those things. I was at training and went to shoot and landed on my knee awkwardly and just felt a pop and knew it wasn’t a good sign,” Burns said.

The initial diagnosis was a crack in the meniscus that the club thought it could manage but after a month and a half of strength work Burns got through only three league matches upon his return and knew that an operation was the only option.

With the help of the football-fatigued anesthetist that took place in Sydney in May and after six weeks in Australia and a further five in Korea completing the rehab program Burns is finally ready to return to action.

“Definitely this month I’ll be back playing. I’m back training now, my knee’s feeling a lot better but it was just a tough period because I came to Korea looking to play a full season but sometimes things don’t pan out like you want them to," he said.

"I’m just more disappointed that I didn’t get a full season in but there’s 14 more games and I can still make a good year of it.”

It also allows him to show the club just what he’s capable of. With a foreign player quota in the K-League, expectation is always high on visa players and Burns claims he felt the pressure of not being able to contribute as Incheon slid to a disappointing ninth placed finish that saw it miss the championship playoffs.

“I didn’t get anything directly from the board or the club but there’s definitely a lot of pressure on the foreign players and I felt it," Burns said. "You don’t get that respect from your coaches and teammates until you prove yourself and being injured so early never really gave me the chance to show my qualities so I did feel the pressure to maybe continue playing injured and play for the coach.”

Meeting the player who hails from Blayney in NSW in the eerily quiet new area of Incheon, surrounded by freshly-built skyscrapers yet to open for business, I was expecting to find Burns not quite at ease with his new surroundings. On the contrary, it was clear he’s settled quickly into life in Korea’s third most populous city.

“I actually quite enjoy living in Korea, it’s one of my favourite places I’ve been," Burns said. "Greece was good, beautiful scenery and lifestyle but everything was unorganised, where Korea’s much more organised and like Australia where everything is run by the minute.

“The respect also is like nothing I’ve ever seen and I really admire that.

"The senior players and the coaches are respected and there’s no attitudes or egos in the team. Everyone’s got their place and they know where they stand and if you’ve got a good attitude then you’ve got a good team.

"It was a big change coming from Europe where there’s a lot of major egos in football.”

It was also a big change from his chaotic departure from Greece. AEK, one of the country’s most storied clubs, is still paying installments on the six-months of unpaid wages it owes Burns.

That was a large part of the decision to leave Greece and after turning down offers from several A-League clubs including Newcastle, Sydney and Adelaide, he claims his clear preference was to move to north-Asia.

“I was trying to push for Japan or Korea because at time of the year it was better with those leagues just starting their seasons," Burns said.

"I didn’t play much in the past six months in Greece and wanted to go to a league where I could do a full pre-season and then a 40-match season.

"I was really happy to sign this three-year deal and I’m really excited to come to Korea and play but obviously I didn’t get off to the best start.”

But what of those who claim that Asia is a step backwards for Burns, having played in Europe and made more than half a dozen appearances in the UEFA Europa League?

“You might look at it like Europe’s the highest level of football but the Korean and the Asian market is getting so much better," Burns said. "You only have to see the Olympics to see the level in Japan and Korea.

"They finished third and fourth and that’s saying something isn’t it? For the future especially, I’ve been watching the young players in particular and they’re going to be really good come the next few World Cups.

“What the Koreans bring to the game is a real work-ethic.

"They just will not stop chasing the ball, their engines are amazing. It’s a physical battle, they’re so sharp, they run the whole 90 minutes so it’s not easy to come here and think you’re going to walk all over someone.

"Even if you’ve got the skills to beat a guy, if you beat him he’ll chase you and you have to beat him again and that’s kind of the philosophy.”

After last being involved in the national setup at the 2011 Asian Cup, where he featured twice as Australia lost in the final, Burns is hopeful that his imminent return to league action will help re-ignite his Socceroos prospects, particularly with the qualifiers for the EAFF Championships in December likely to feature predominantly Australia and Asia-based players.

“To get called up for the Socceroos is the ultimate and the good thing about Australia being in Asia it that the opportunities are there but first thing’s first is getting myself right, playing for my club and then the better you do for your club the more you can help your country out," Burns said. "Holger always seems to pick players that are in form so if I’m in good form then I could go back to the Socceroos.”

And maybe prompt another couple of late night viewings from the football-loving anaesthetist.

The alarm bell rings and off he rushes to fight a fire spewing from a stricken jet or to extinguish a smoldering blaze deep inside Muscat’s Seeb Airport.

There may not have been an emergency like this in his time on duty, and for that he’s thankful, but from firefighter to professional footballer Ali Al Habsi has had an improbable journey to the top.

As Wigan prepares to start its Premier League campaign at home to Chelsea it’s fair to say that not many of the Blues’ star-studded squad began their professional careers so late, in a country with limited infrastructure and from a land that had never before produced a professional European-based player.

It’s also a fair bet that none came to be there after a previous career as a firefighter.

“Before I started as a professional I worked for one year in Seeb Airport as a fireman and my life changed straight away. Even looking back for me it’s an amazing story,” Al Habsi tells me from the foyer of a plush hotel in his country’s capital, Muscat.

I first met Ali eight years ago at the 2004 Asian Cup, when he was a young keeper playing in Norway for Lyn Oslo. While his professional career has reached unexpected heights since then, nothing has changed about the man - a humble person, deeply rooted in his family and a wonderful ambassador for his homeland.

He’s right when he says it’s an amazing story.

Not only did he have the stint as a firefighter, he didn’t even pick up the goalkeeping gloves until he was 15.

Growing up several hours outside the capital he began playing as a striker and when converted to a goalkeeper it was a tough education. There were no grass pitches in his town and so he learnt his trade among the sand and stones of Al Mudhaibi.

“At that time we didn’t even have a grass pitch. We just played in the sand, we trained on sand and it’s something that makes me so happy where I am now,” he explains. “When you start at this level and as a goalkeeper you don’t even have a grass pitch to train on its really hard.”

If it wasn’t for that relatively late-career conversion and a fortunate series of events shortly thereafter, Al Habsi may still be manning the international airport’s fire station instead of the Latics’ goal.

Barely a year after starting out as a keeper he was selected for an Under-17 national training camp where he was spotted by the goalkeeping coach for the senior Omani side, former Blackpool and Manchester City custodian John Burridge.

“I was 16 when John Burridge saw me and he said I will make you a very good keeper and I’ll put you in the Premier League. When he told me that I was sure he was joking,” Al Habsi says.

“I mean from Oman and you go to the Premier League, this is something that no one can understand. For us, just watching a game on TV is like wow and how can you think you can play in the Premier League?

“He said all you have to do is concentrate, work with me, train hard and you will make it one day so I did as he said. Every morning and every afternoon we trained.

“But then I finished my school and as everyone knows the league here is not professional and you have to have a job. I found a job as a fireman. I worked there for one year then when I was 17 I got a two-week trial with Big Sam at Bolton Wanderers.

“He was really, really interested in me but at that time I couldn’t get a work permit for the Premier League.

“I was 17 years old and I didn’t have any experience with the national team, the Oman league is not professional and nothing was enough for me to get a work permit so I came back here to Oman and continued to play with my local team in the third division.”

Burridge though was determined that his star pupil would make it and arranged for the goalkeeping coach from Norwegian club Lyn Oslo to come to Muscat and watch Al Habsi in the final of the local cup competition.

“I was lucky that I had a very good game and we won the cup and after the game he went straight home and said I want this goalkeeper and the owner was still not sure but the keeper coach said do everything, just sign him and you’ll be proud in the future.”

A professional contract offer followed but Al Habsi had a difficult decision to make.

“It was the first time in the history of Omani football that a player had gone to Europe and had a contract. “My family and my parents were not sure because the contract was not that big. At that time I could get the same money staying here in Oman and working but it was my dream to go to Europe and start slowly at a low level to reach the top level.

“So I spoke with my parents and said please just give me the chance and I will do everything I can to honour myself, my family and my country and my parents said if you really want this chance just go and play.”

So from the heat of the Middle East to a northern European winter Al Habsi backed his bags and headed to Norway

“It was really hard for a few months but gradually I got used to the weather and the way of training and in the middle of the season I got my chance and kicked on from there.

“In the second season in Norway I got goalkeeper of the year and many clubs from England were really interested. Bolton Wanderers and Manchester City were two of them. I finished the third season in Norway and I made my big contract, my dream with Bolton Wanderers to play in the Premier League.”

Thereafter began a new and frustrating adventure. The first two years at the Reebok he was third choice behind Jussi Jaaskelainen and Ian Walker but when the Finn went down midway through the 2007/08 season Al Habsi was finally handed his chance.

“I played the last 10 games in the league and I played my best games for Bolton then,” he recalls. “It was a big moment also for the club, they had been struggling all season and there was a lot of pressure but I’d been waiting for this chance and we managed to stay up and I played big games.

“The following season I didn’t play any games and I wasn’t happy because the fans told me you deserve to be the number one because you kept the club in the Premier League but in the end it’s the manager’s choice. “After that I had to do something, I was 27 years-old, time is going and I didn’t play any games. Then when Owen Coyle came to Bolton I went to him and told him that I can’t stay as a number two anymore and I need a loan or another club. He said of course if a good club comes you can go and then Wigan came and it was something huge for me.

“I went there and got player of the year in Wigan and after the season finished Martinez decided to buy me from Bolton. The Bolton fans were not happy but I signed permanently with Wigan at the start of last season and I had another fantastic season. In two seasons I’ve had more than 70 games in the Premier League.

“It’s brilliant – four years with Bolton and I played just 10 games then I go to Wigan and in two seasons play more than 70. It’s fantastic to be in the Premier League, it’s something special but there’s much more to come. I have more to do, I’m still 30 years old and I’m looking forward to the next couple of seasons.”

Part of what’s to come is planning for his post-football career. He says he’d like to help other young Omanis become professionals in Europe as well as setting up an academy in his homeland but for now there are no immediate plans for retirement.

“Of course you have to have a target and dreams and for me I want to play for another 10 years and reach 40. When you look at the Premier League and there are many keepers still at 40 years; I want to play in the Champions League one day and play with a big team,” he says.

“I’m so happy now at Wigan and I’m enjoying myself but everyone dreams of playing at a high level.”

Even the teenage firefighter at Seeb Airport waiting for an emergency that never came.

“No, there were no emergencies! The only emergency was the weather! The weather in Oman is always an emergency. It’s 50 degrees, you don’t get a fire like that!”

Watch out Chelsea when the heat’s on this Sunday.

In the women’s section, Japan backed up its historic triumph in last year’s World Cup with a string of impressive performances as it set up a rematch of that epic final with United States.

It dominated the gold medal match, creating a string of chances, being denied a clear-cut penalty and hitting the post on numerous occasions. Japan played ‘modern’ football throughout: possession, fluidity of movement, touch and creativity.

The Nadeshiko are now clearly the benchmark in the women’s game.

The Olympics though, across all sports, throw up some serious anomalies.

Why, for example, do both losing semifinalists in the boxing receive bronze medals but not in the case of football?

Why aren’t 18 medals counted on the official tally?

Why do Sepp Blatter and Worawi Makudi get to present the medals?!

Why is the men’s tournament an underage one yet the women can compete with their full senior side?

Why also is the women’s tournament restricted to 12 nations rather than the 16 on the men’s side?

Someone needs to ask these questions and try and get a logical answer but given that the World Cup should take priority, I’m firmly in favour of the format used in the men’s section although I’d like to see the competition expanded to take in more nations.

An Under-23 event seems a logical step between the two age-group World Cups and the senior one. It also offers a fantastic bridge between those young talents already exposed to senior football and generation-next.

Looking back through the history of the tournament there is an incredible roll-call of talent who have shone on the Olympic stage from the great Japanese striker Kunishige Kamamoto in 1968 through to Romario two decades later. More modern players include Xavi, Hernan Crespo, Carlos Tevez and Lionel Messi.

From an Asian perspective this will be the first time a male side has won a medal since Japan in 1968 but all three nations have exceeded expectations.

UAE, which denied Australia a place in the tournament, led against Uruguay, pulled level against Great Britain in front of a packed Wembley Stadium and then picked up its first ever point in the Olympics with a 1-1 draw with Senegal in the final group match. It also had one of the outstanding players in the tournament in Omar Abdulrahman.

Korea knocked off the heavily favoured British side before falling to Brazil in the semis while Japan put in perhaps the most impressive performance in sweeping away Spain in its opening group match.

I’ve selected my AFC team of the tournament with thoughts on who has stood out and is ready to push and become key components of their full respective national teams.

These are just some of the players that could set Asian football alight over the coming decade:

Goalkeeper

Shuichi Gonda - Japan: An easy choice given the injuries to the Korean goalkeepers and the shambolic defending from UAE. Gonda was a solid presence at the back for Japan, quick to come off his line, a good communicator and a very good distributor whether with feet or hands. It will be interesting to see if he can push Eiji Kawashima for the senior position.

Central defender:

Kim Young-Gwon - Korea Republic: The former FC Tokyo and Omiya man was the most assured of the Korean central defenders in a side that conceded only two goals in reaching the last four. He was occasionally caught out of position and had a torrid time against Leandro Damiao in the semi-final loss.

Maya Yoshida - Japan: The most impressive defender across the three AFC nations. Led the line brilliantly, organising a defensive unit that frequently changed due to injuries and rotation. Very good in one-on-one situations and excellent distribution as well. The only blot on the copybook was his role in Mexico’s first goal in the semifinals.

Left defender:

Yun Suk-yoon - Korea Republic This was a hardly a standout tournament for any of the left-sided defenders with Yun ust ahead of Japan’s Yuhei Tokunaga. Blessed with natural speed and looks comfortable on the ball but his positioning and ability to track back were exposed on several occasions.

Right defender:

Kim Chang-soo - Korea Republic Injured early in the quarter-final win over Great Britain, Kim was one of two key players missing for Korea in the subsequent loss to Brazil but was a solid presence in all three group matches, particularly in an impressive display against Mexico.

Defensive midfielder:

KI Sung-yueng - Korea Republic: Along with Omar Abdulrahman was the standout performer from the three AFC nations. Dictated the tempo for a Korean side that dominated possession in all three group matches. An excellent presence at the fulcrum of the 4-2-3-1 in breaking up play and his set pieces were also very good. He has been linked with a move to Arsenal from his current home at Celtic - a long way from his schoolboy days in Brisbane!

Defensive midfielder:

Koo Ja-Cheol - Korea Republic: Although deployed in a more advanced role here space had to be found for the second half of the so-called ‘Koo-Ki monster’ partnership which is set to form the bedrock for the senior national side for many years. Looked dangerous when cutting in from wide on the left and when played centrally was a key component of a midfield unit that is very comfortable in possession.

Left midfielder:

Kensuke Nagai - Japan: Often interchanging with Yuki Otsu in the central striking role, Nagai’s pace caused no end of problems for both Spain and Morocco in the first two group games before his early goal set up the quarter-final win over Egypt. There are still question marks over his finishing as demonstrated against the Spanish but should that improve he may make an impact on the senior side.

Right midfielder:

Hiroshi Kiyotake - Japan: Although Kiyotake didn’t turn in a single ‘standout’ performance he was consistent throughout. Often the focus due to his sublime technical skill and attacking threat, the newly signed Nurnberg man was a key cog in the ‘defensive front four’ that pressed relentlessly in the game-changing victory over Spain. His work in winning the ball, and feeding Nagai for Japan’s opener against Egypt was also exceptional.

Attacking midfielder:

Omar Abdulrahman - UAE: The orchestrator in chief for the UAE and arguably the best Asian player at the tournament. Provided the assists for both of Ismail Matar’s goals and was at the heart of everything good the Middle Eastern nation did. Abdul Rahman was described by England’s Micah Richards as a star of the future and is on trial at Manchester City.

Striker:

Ismail Matar - UAE: Long considered one of his nation’s finest ever players, the 29 year-old looked rejuvenated here. Has lost a considerable amount of weight and appeared fitter and faster than he has for many years. Scored two of the UAE’s three goals with the strike against Senegal showing the touch of a natural finisher.

Spain, heavy favourite for the Olympic gold medal and with three members of the senior squad that had won the European Championship (two of whom scored in the final) just a month earlier, was humbled by a Japan side that hadn't rated a mention as a medal contender.

An aggressive defensive display that gave the Spanish little time and space to play, a disciplined tactical approach and an ability to carve out chances seemingly at will surprised many. If the finishing had been better it could easily have been a three or four-goal margin rather than the one that separated the two sides.

This was one of the most emphatic announcements made in recent memory and the celebrations post-match (although somewhat over the top) showed just what it meant to Japan – vindication that two decades of work was finally bearing fruit; that now it can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any nation.

Continuing on from the senior side's impressive displays in South Africa and Qatar and the U-17’s fantastic showing at last year's World Cup (where it defeated Argentina and drew with France in the Group stage only to lose 3-2 to Brazil in the quarter-finals), Japan has arguably been the most impressive nation at the 2012 Olympic Games thus far.

It breezed through a difficult section without losing a match and was one of only two nations to progress to the knockout stage without conceding a goal.

Many are now suggesting Japan has progressed from being merely a dominant Asian nation to becoming one of the planet's genuine heavyweights.

A country with a fantastic league that is proving itself as the region's leading producer of talent – the recent moves of Shinji Kagawa, Hiroshi Kiyotake and Hiroki Sakai bear testament to that – and one that is producing players of a technical standard that are on a par with any of their peers.

Yet barely 20 ago there was no professional league in the country, only a handful of players had ventured outside Japan, the nation had never qualified for a World Cup nor won an Asian Cup.

Japan now is outplaying nations with more than a 100 years head start. So how did it happen?

To help fill in some of the gaps I spoke with Tom Byer, an American who finished his playing days in the old JSL with Hitachi in 1986 and who since has dedicated his life to working with grassroots football in the country.

Byer brought the Coerver program to Japan in 1993 and in 2008 established his own company, T3, with a focus on technical excellence at the grassroots. Just this week he was appointed by the Chinese Football Association to run its nationwide school development program.

He was a regular fixture on Japanese TV for more than a decade where he would run a daily segment focusing on technique and still contributes to a range of media outlets – all aimed at improving the ability of young Japanese players.

Click here for the transcript of a wide ranging interview in which Byer outlines just how Japanese football has progressed and how it plans to keep improving.

A club in fine balance with a goalkeeper who is being tracked by some of Europe’s biggest clubs. A series of solid defenders with a fantastic reading of the game. A classic ‘game breaking’ number ten. Two old-fashioned wingers and a goal-scoring centre forward.

A side that’s won its domestic competition seven times in the past eight seasons and one that’s been a finalist in an Asian club tournament for the last six years.

Just don’t expect Dordoi Bishkek to win the ACL anytime soon.

It’s pretty hard when you’re not allowed to enter.

The AFC has done a fantastic job in promoting and developing the Champions League as the elite tier of club football on the continent and some of the changes made this week have been logical and well-received.

These include moves to play the Round of 16 over two legs and an amendment that allows for simultaneous kickoffs for the final group stage matches, yet there remains a series of anomalies that need to be seriously looked at.

None more so than the system which denies clubs such as Dordoi the right to participate.

This week the AFC announced a new ‘points system’ for member associations (MAs) and clubs wanting to enter future editions of the tournament that involves a score out of 1000 based on such factors as technical standards, business models and media coverage. The most recent analysis done by the AFC found that only three nations – Japan, Qatar and Uzbekistan – meet the full criteria.

Much of the analysis though is lacking in detail and logic. Qatar, a nation whose league is poorly attended and where until recently, tickets were free, scored 50 out of 100. Meanwhile Australia registered only 60 points despite having one of the best average attendances of all Asian leagues.

Indonesia, where second-division matches often attract five-figure crowds, was awarded only 37 points.

Korea Republic scored only 33 out of 50 for the stadium requirement section despite a large number of K-League venues being used for the 2002 World Cup and generally the venues being of an exceptional standard.

How are these decisions reached?

The other problem is that by then allocating a bulk of spots to those leagues it leaves the developing nations behind.

Nations such as Kyrgyzstan where Dordoi is the only professional club – the only club with an owner prepared to fund and back it. But for what reward - a perpetual place in the third-tier AFC President’s Cup where it is so superior to the other sides in the tournament that it’s not funny?

When I saw it in group stage action recently it won its three matches, scoring 17 and conceding three.

Here, as in many other developing nations, the handful of well funded and well-run clubs are weighed down by the rest of the pack.

Hence there’s no Kyrgyz representative but we have four clubs from Uzbekistan. A nation where, last year aside, there’s been only two clubs competing for the league.

There are four direct spots for Qatar but just one for Thailand and none at all for Indonesia – both genuine football-loving nations.

As we’ve seen in Europe what also happens is that most of the clubs who have won the tournament have done so without actually being the champion of their own league.

In fact, over the ten years of the ACL only three (Al Ain in 2003, Al Ittihad in 2004 and Urawa in 2007) have won it after qualifying by being their league’s domestic title-holder.

Al Sadd last season went all to the way to title after coming through the playoffs.

So, why can’t the AFC implement a system similar to that at UEFA, where every single champion club, regardless of its league’s relative strength, gets a chance to qualify?

Sure, maybe clubs from Mongolia or Bhutan may struggle to qualify, but the stars from Bishkek will be licking their lips at the chance to take on the ‘big boys.’

This week's Weekly Soccer Digest had on its front cover a compilation of Japanese stars heading to the 2012 Olympic Games – Hiroshi Kiyotake, Maya Yoshida and Takashi Usami from the men’s team and Homare Sawa, Aya Miyama and Nahomi Kawasumi from the women's.

On the back page was a sponsor's advertisement that featured Sawa and Miyama alongside Inter Milan's Yuto Nagatomo.

Inside there were nine pages dedicated to the 'Nadeshiko', including in-depth feature articles with Yuki Ogimi and Miyama.

Soccer Magazine took a similar approach with nine pages on the Nadeshiko including a feature-length profile on forward Karina Maruyama.

As an aside, there's also two full-length glossy magazines dedicated entirely to the Nadeshiko's Olympic campaign.

In Australia, a nation renowned as being slightly obsessed with the Games, you'd struggle to find one dedicated to the entire event.

On the one hand, Japan is a nation that seriously gets women's football yet on the other, there's still a long way to go.

A week earlier, the JFA had shown that the chasm between male and female football in Japan is as wide as ever.

For reasons yet to be fully explained, aside from mumblings about relative size, it announced that the male side (an U-23 selection, remember) would be flying business class to London whilst the women (the senior women's world champion) will be 'offered an upgrade' to premium economy.

Just to repeat, the reigning FIFA World Cup champion – which by most measures is vastly more popular in Japan than its male equivalent – will fly a different class to the men on the same plane.

A baffling decision that has upset many in a nation where female football is booming after the emotional 2011 World Cup campaign that came just three months after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated much of the country.

The rise of the women's game

The L-League, a 22-team competition across two divisions, has long been one of the key developmental tools for the game in Japan but has historically struggled to attract sponsors and crowds.

How different things have been in the past 12 months: at one point immediately after the FIFA 2011 Women's World Cup average crowds were almost topping 20,000 and this season there has also been many headlining-grabbing turnouts.

The star-studded runaway league leader INAC Kobe is averaging almost 8,000 and the final match before the mid-season break between NTV Verdy and Kobe drew almost 17,000.

Sponsorship and TV coverage are now widespread: the big-names from the national team can be seen all over the country spruiking a range of products from biscuits to cup noodles to chewing gum.

Okayama Yunogo Belle, currently third in the league, has 34 sponsors listed on its official homepage.

All the L.League games are available on subscription television and many are shown live on local regional stations; the Nadeshiko league is now a seriously popular – and big – business.

Yet despite this – and to the surprise of many – the league is not fully professional.

Lack of full-time professionals

Ticket prices are either very low or free and there are less than 10 genuinely professional players in the league. All of those play for INAC Kobe while a handful of other players at different clubs have 'part-time' jobs with company sponsors that allow them to focus to a larger degree on football.

The rest are forced to, as are most female players throughout the world, work to supplement their football earnings.

Even at the World Cup last year there were almost half-a-dozen players with full-time jobs, including Mizuho Sakaguchi who worked at a chemical factory, Megumi Kaminobe who was a public gym instructor and Miho Fukumoto who was a receptionist.

Imagine Xavi having to man the phones or Iniesta mixing chemicals in between training!

In an interview with the Asahi Newspaper last year the JFA's head of female football, Eiji Ueda, argued that this was justifiable as female players make up less than 5 per cent of the registered footballers in Japan.

The same article looked at the funding disparity between the two national sides with the men's national U-22 team being allocated $10.5 million yen last year, compared to $1.7 million for the female side – the world champion.

All this at a time when the Nadeshiko are playing some of the finest football seen in the history of the women's game, as the Matildas found out last Wednesday evening in Tokyo.

In the first match of a double-header with the men's U-23 side, Japan totally outplayed Australia; dominant in possession, patient in its build-up play and with crisp passing and movement it was on a totally different level to the Matildas.

Australia national women's coach Tom Sermanni described the side as being like the 'female version of Barcelona and Spain' – sentiments echoed by several of the players I spoke with afterwards.

Yet barely half a decade ago the two nations were not that far apart in terms of both results and performance, so what happened?

Development of women's football

The genesis of the revitalization of the Japanese side can be traced to both the establishment and improvements in the L.League and the 2002 'Captain's Mission' issued by JFA Chairman Saburo Kawabuchi, which placed a significant emphasis on the development of female football.

Increased funding was allocated and national training centres were established to develop elite female talent.

There was an increased focus on technical development at all levels and the JFA ensured that the national team would have regular, competitive internationals.

The development model though is still a fractured one with four main pillars: the high school and university systems, local football clubs, the L.League and the JFA Elite Academies – formerly in Fukushima but now based in Shimizu and Osaka.

JFA constantly monitors players emerging from these four streams and periodically call the best to a series of training camps, which form the NTCs. It is from these camps that the bulk of the national team players have emerged.

Additionally, the establishment of the L.League in 1989 meant that there was a competitive domestic tournament from which young players could develop and be scouted.

Thankfully, there's no longer the somewhat sexist names that began in those founding years – the likes of Shimizu FC Lovely Ladies, Nikko Securities Dream Ladies and the Asahi Bunny Ladies.

There's also now a second division with promotion and relegation and with a particular emphasis on sports schools and universities including a high school side in Sendai.

Of the current Olympic squad all bar four play domestically in Japan and virtually all of the side have progressed from the L.League.

With the four female national teams – U-13, U-17, U-20 and the Nadeshiko all doing well in recent years the future looks bright for the game in Japan; in fact it may dominate female football for a long time.

Yet despite all the positive steps there still remains a huge disparity between men and women in terms of salary, funding and, arguably, respect.

One side at the pointy end of the plane and the other behind it, says it all.

Manchester United is making a habit of picking up players whose early football careers were polished on the fields of Japan's Kansai region.

Both Park (with Kyoto Sanga) and Kagawa (with Cerezo Osaka) began their professional careers just below the centre of the island of Honshu and both quickly flourished.

I have vivid memories of watching a young Park, on a freezing New Year's Day in Tokyo in 2003, shine as unfancied Kyoto defeated Kashima Antlers to claim the Emperor's Cup; scoring one and setting up the other in what was his last match for the club before leaving for the Netherlands.

As Guus Hiddink did you could immediately tell he would turn out to be a special player.

Likewise Kagawa, the exceptional midfield prober, who could turn out to be a key cog for United this season.

His years with Cerezo were both showered in goals (averaging almost one every 2.5 matches from midfield) and defined by a refusal to leave the club he started with even as it floundered in the Japanese second division and offers of bigger opportunities constantly arrived.

The move to Borussia Dortmund brought widespread attention and I'm still dumbfounded by a discussion with a colleague who claimed he hadn't done enough to earn inclusion on the shortlist for last year's FIFA Ballon d'Or.

Making both the Kicker Team of the Season and the ESM European Team of the Season, playing a key role as his club won the Bundesliga and his nation the Asian Cup (even in an injury marred second half of the season) is surely a remarkable return.

But those lists don't include Asian players, right?

The mark of the man first demonstrated by his loyalty to Cerezo has been reinforced by his claims that he isn't worthy of the famous number 7 shirt at United and would rather make his own legacy in the No. 26.

Considering three of the most recent custodians of that particular number were Gabriel Obertan, Manucho and Massimo Taibi, he may not have to try particularly hard.

All of which brings us to Kiyotake; a man whose change of clubs has been overshadowed by that of Kagawa but in which there is a neat symmetry.

So neat in fact that when I arrived in Osaka last weekend to watch Kiyotake's farewell match I was literally beaten to the last spot in the elevator from the basement of Nagai Stadium by none other than Kagawa himself.

He was in town to farewell his former team-mate and even though the pair played together for less than six months at Cerezo their partnership is one that's set to continue at national team level for many, many years.

Although Kiyotake is perhaps more comfortable on his left than Kagawa, both players are, as is the case with most young Japanese, strong with both feet and with a range of passing that wouldn't look out of place handed in as classwork in the school of Xavi and Iniesta.

Both have an innate sense of how to find 'empty' space and how to position themselves to perform what Pedro last year termed the 'base-level Barcelona philosophy' of RPM – receive, pass and move.

Kagawa is perhaps the better finisher of the pair but both are capable of playing centrally or out wide, fine technicians that represent the best of the Japanese production line – and to round off the similarities both are officially listed as being exactly the same height (1.72 metres).

Can Kiyotake live up to the remarkable success generated by his former team-mate?

Certainly, at Dortmund, Kagawa moved to a club at a higher level than Nurnberg but already there are big expectations being placed upon the 22 year old with manager Dieter Hecking claiming his $1.5 million signing is, "a good player in one-on-one situations and one who exudes a goal threat."

And how right Hecking was, Kiyotake scoring in a 4-0 pre-season friendly win against Eintracht Bamberg on Thursday night.

Kiyotake's adaptation to the Bundesliga will be delayed by the London Olympic Games where he will be a central component of a young Japanese side that is full of promise but should he, as expected, shine in the Under-23 tournament then winning a place in the first XI at the Frankenstadion should come relatively quickly.

He's certainly unlikely to face any of the light-hearted challenges posed by his departing team-mates in Osaka.

At the end of last weekend's draw with high-flying Urawa Red Diamonds (Cerezo's equalizer coming after Kiyotake had been replaced), the entire squad donned 'Kiyo' shirts and lined up in a huge mass in front of the northern goal; the man of the moment proceeding to dribble past 25 players and 'score' a final time for the club he joined in 2010.

He was then presented with flowers and tributes by both Kagawa and the man who embodies the club more than any other - former captain Hiroaki Morishima - before tearing up as he made his own speech thanking the club, his wife and young son.

Which prompted one of the stranger scenes I've witnessed at a football match as the massed banks of almost 30,000 Cerezo supporters broke out in an impromptu chant dedicated to his wife Mariko.

It was a fitting tribute to the player who, after making his name at hometown club Oita Trinita, quickly became a hero to the pink half of Osaka.

A player who now joins the growing ranks of Japanese in Germany but who may turn out to be one of the best.

Manchester United, are you watching?