By paladisious - 19 Jul 2016 3:39 AM
The Joeys are currently kicking about in the 2016 AFF U-16 Youth Championship, as all our male and female youth teams do every two years, but strangely the Socceroos are absent from the senior edition, the locally very popular AFF Championship, also known as the Suzuki Cup, while lately we've been sending our Female U20s to the Women's senior edition.
Australia has been a full member of the AFF, the South East Asian federation, since a unanimous vote from the existing members in 2013.
I think it'd be a great boost to have the Socceroos involved in this competition in this part of the world that is hugely passionate for football, and growing all the time in economic importance.
The comp is every two years, providing some more regular meaningful matches, and the Semi Finals and Finals are played as home and away ties, also meaning valuable meaningful home matches for FFA to market, and that's even without hosting a Group Stage, another event that would bring fantastic attention to football in Australia and bring back those Asian Cup feels. One state could easily host a group stage on their own.
One stumbling block is scheduling, held for three weeks every second year in late November, early December, in the early stages of the A-League season. If the Socceroos were competing in this year's edition and made the finals, any A-League players called up would miss rounds 7 through to 11, although the Chinese and Korean seasons both end neatly just before the cup.
The other countries might be reticent to risk a full strength Socceroos side stealing the show every time, but we could easily agree to only play Australian/Asian based players, which would be a necessity anyway given the scheduling of the tournament.
I think the good for entering would definitely outweigh the bad, I'd love to see Australia more integrate with our immediate region through football, and I'd love to see us host more meaningful games more often.
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