A-League of their own

Stand up Mark Milligan, David Carney and Michael Beauchamp.

This is what its all about. 1-0 would have been a satisfactory result. 2-0 a better one, but 4-0 is emphatic. Against the run of play, yes. But for once the Australians played like a mature football outfit, kept their heads and just marked up (most of the time). Ironically it was the young guns who led the way.

There are few better ways to silence your critics, and it's the way we all hoped it would have been from the start.

The analysis will sober us up, and the hangover will reveal that we now have to sleep with an in-form Japan on Saturday night, and that at the end of the day we beat a minnow of world football and it felt like beating Brazil.

But as I noted here, days like these are where we steel ourselves for our Asian qualification path, World Cup 2010 and beyond. And the Socceroos of the future led the way.