The Circus - 13 September

Shock or ruse?

It's nice to have fans and The Circus now knows the Socceroos are big fans of it.

How else could they have played like they believed they were exactly as good as The Circus has been saying since ... oh ... about then.

Not that there's any shame in losing to Jordan mind you. After all, next week we could get done by Samantha Fox.

Jordan is ranked a mere 62 places below Australia in the FIFA fizzy drink world rankings, at 87. Seasonally adjusted, that makes the 2-1 loss into a 7-0 thumping.

Or, to use a term from Keynesian economics, Australia's performance was "utter" crap".

Holger Osieck thinks so too. He's promising to bring in new players but unless one of them is Lionel Messi, The Circus fears Australia's only chance of seeing Brazil in 2014 will be as extras in the next 'Rio' film.

Yes, The Circus knows that is an animation but the Aussies certainly looked drawn on at stages in Amman.

Let's hope it was all just some devilishly clever ploy to lull next opponent, and bogey team (the Socceroos have a few of those now, don't they?), Iraq into a false sense of security.

Either that, or we could just start "misplacing" opponents' kits and "finding" them again after being handed large quantities of cash.

It seemed to work for Colombia which, not only found Uruguay's uniforms, but four goals as they coasted to the kind of easy win Holger Osieck would no doubt pay a pretty penny for.

A new dawn of the dead

The aftermath of the Jordan loss has many calling for the introduction of "the yoof" and it will be a difficult one for Osieck to ignore, with several of his players looking about as fresh-faced as William H. Macy.

Stan Lazaridis reckons a chance should be given to 20-year-old Eli Babalj, a young man he describes as "Mark Viduka reborn" ... which is something considering Dukes isn't even dead. 

Now at the risk of getting trolled like a reality TV B-lister, The Circus would like to remind everyone that Viduka's scoring record at international level was not stellar.

On the flip side, he was the most influential player in Australia's greatest ever team, and captained the Socceroos to the last-16 of The World Cup.

So, yeah, Viduka reborn? The Circus could live with that.

But let's keep the new players "reborn" and not "reanimated". On current evidence, there are enough zombies running around out there as it is.

Rack or Rune

The pressure of World Cup qualifying can certainly affect players, on and off the field.

You don't have to be fluent in Norwegian to work out goalkeeper Rune Almenning Jarstein was not overly impressed with the questions he was getting in an interview following the qualifier against Slovenia:

The Socceroos should have Jarstein's problems – Norway won.

Spoken word

"Trust the England football team to bring our glorious summer of sport to a juddering halt. Trust them to extinguish both the Olympic flame and the Olympic spirit. Just 24 hours after the parade, they rained all over it. P****d all over it, in fact." – Football writer from The Sun Steven Howard keeps a sense of perspective when critiquing England's performance against Ukraine.

The Socceroos should have Howard's problems – England drew.