Aussies’ Asia Cup belief
Qatar ‘a happy place’
It’s been nine years since their famous Asian Cup win on home soil and Socceroos star Craig Goodwin “genuinely believes” the Aussies can go all the way at this year’s tournament in Qatar that begins next week.
The Socceroos are one of the favourites to win the event on the back of their strong World Cup showing in 2022 and they’ll be out to make an early statement when they face Bahrain in a warm-up match on Sunday morning.
The match will be a great chance for some of the players to get used to the hot conditions in the Middle East – something Goodwin has grown accustomed to at his Saudi club Al-Wehda where he scored a goal and set another up last week.
The Socceroos are 25th in the FIFA rankings, with Japan, Iran and South Korea the only Asian nations ahead of them.
It’s why there’s a quiet optimism they can go all the way having reached the quarter-finals in 2019 when they were bundled out by the UAE.
“I genuinely believe we have the squad to win the Asian Cup,” Goodwin said.
“It’s going to be hard and difficult but we have a good group with a good mentality. We have the potential to do something special here.”
Australia opens its campaign against India next Saturday before taking on Syria and Uzbekistan in Group B.
It’s easy to get caught up in the emotion of the Socceroos returning to Qatar, where they got past the group stage and were eventually knocked out by Lionel Messi and Argentina, who went on to win the World Cup, but Goodwin said it was a clean slate this time around.
“Qatar has been a happy place for myself and for us but it’s about coming in with a different mindset and mentality. Coming in with more hunger to do more great things here,” he said.
“None of us can get caught up in the thought process that we’ve done well here in the past and that it’s going to come easy.
“We have aspirations to win the Asian Cup and to do that we have to have a ruthless mentality and to be focused on what’s coming next.
“Although we’re very happy with what we’ve done here in the past, that is in the past and we’ve got the here and now to focus on to try to bring the Asian Cup back to Australia.”