The Premier League has become something of the home-and-away rounds of the Champions League. Just ask Roberto Mancini. Still, there is something uniquely Australian about the A-League and its finals system, and that really sticks in the craw of some people. Not, understandably, in Tarek Elrich’s. Few in the A-League have experienced the pressure of finals football as often as Adelaide United’s full-back. In a competition not yet a decade old, he suits up for his seventh finals campaign this Friday night.
He’s won a grand final with Newcastle, and lost one with the Wanderers. He’s been bundled out in the first week, like last year with the Reds, then taken out the inaugural FFA Cup with that same squad just a few months later. His first A-League goal came in the finals, and it was decisive in Newcastle reaching their one and only grand final. Other moments have haunted him for years, like those from his grand final with Western Sydney. “You’d think, ‘What if...?’ and ‘I wish I did this’,” Elrich says. “You’re thinking that for a year, two years. Even now, I’m thinking, ‘I wish things were different. I wish we’d done this different’, you know. But you can’t get that time again. There’s no next week. It’s done.”
Finals football is where reputations are forged in the Australian game. A few minutes of inspired at-the-death play is what made then-Brisbane coach Ange Postecoglou a Gandalf and not a Golem. They are, Elrich says, what “Aussies pride themselves on. Rugby league, AFL, we all do it. It’s so different to Europe.” It might be a relatively foreign concept to his Catalan coach, Josep Gombau, and his Latin team-mates, but winning the FFA Cup showed this is a group that can deal with the pressure of these sudden-death battles. You might say they thrived on it. They had to beat half the A-League roster to lift the Cup; no other team beat more than two top-tier sides. They didn’t spend a single second in arrears, despite having the hardest draw in the competition.
It’s their current form they might need to worry about now. Adelaide come in to the A-League finals having lost four of their past nine games, and were beaten just weeks ago by their opponents this week, Brisbane. They finished third thanks only to Perth being disqualified, though at least they did finish with a bang. There were shades of Maradona vs England as Elrich ran the length of the field to score against Melbourne City on Saturday. On this evidence it seems inconceivable, but it was the just the fifth goal of his professional career, and his second this decade. They ended up winning 4-1.
It has been quite an exciting couple of months for Elrich. He was part of the Socceroos squad that travelled to Germany and a few days after they held the world champions to a draw, he got his first cap, in Macedonia. At 28, he seems a strange choice for Postecoglou, whose mantra since being elevated to national coach has been all about youth. Not a wrong choice, just one that goes against the grain. “Yeah, it’s late,” Elrich says, “but there’s a World Cup ahead and I’ll be 31 then, so, now that I’ve got my foot in there, I’ll do whatever it takes to stay there.”
It’s a call-up that may never have been able to happen. After his time with the Jets came to an end, Elrich was without a contract and at a bit of loose end. Lebanon had been trying to get him into their national team for years, and not knowing what else to do with himself, he relented. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll get myself a bit of international exposure by going to Lebanon’. It wasn’t so much about picking countries, because I still had dreams of playing for Australia. I just wanted to get my career back on track. I just wanted to be playing A-League football.”
He wasn’t impressed by what he saw: not with the administration, how they trained, the facilities they used. “Even rocking up with your own gear. It just wasn’t run to the way I was used to. The A-League standard was better, in terms of professionalism.” By the time he arrived back home, he was closer to signing up with a new outfit from Western Sydney than he was to finishing his paperwork for the Cedars. “When I came back, I just didn’t reply to emails and I didn’t chase it up anymore because it didn’t seem like I was doing the right thing. And I felt like I was doing the wrong thing by Australia, and knowing that Australia has done so much for me and for my football career and I’d be letting them down if I was to play for Lebanon.”
Elrich played some games for Australia at youth level, and travelled to India and Sri Lanka with the team. If he thought conditions were bad in Lebanon, this was an altogether different proposition. “It was full on,” he remembers. The heat, the state of the pitch, even the traffic was something else. “It was just total chaos. Trying to get from the hotel to the training pitch is a two kilometre drive and it takes you 45 minutes. There are cars and motorbikes and mopeds everywhere. Crazy. It’s a third world country, and standard of living is a bit hard on the people there. So you see a lot of the people there roughing it, but you don’t see any complaints. It opens your eyes right up, and makes you appreciate what you have here in Australia.”
They are the type of conditions the Socceroos might face over the next year as they travel throughout Asia for their World Cup qualifiers. For now though, Elrich’s focus is on extending his A-League season for as long as possible. And his advice to his team-mates not used to the concept of finals is simple: don’t change. “Josep [Gombau] has got it drilled into us that no matter the result, or what we are doing, or if we are behind, or if we are leading, just continue playing our style. Don’t change for the situation. We know we have got this plan, so follow it. That’s all it is.
“The coach does hours and hours and hours of analysing the other team and seeing where their strengths and weaknesses are to help us on the weekend. So, listen to that. Do your job in that situation, and if it doesn’t t work, you can say, ‘Hey, I gave it my all and did all that you asked of me, but they were just the better team’.”
