Coaches promise clash Fifa boss in ethics spotlight of styles in OFC decider
There is one team in OFC Champions League final that wants to put their foot on the other’s throat and never take it off, and there is one that would prefer to take their time and do the other slowly.
Team Wellington and Auckland City will begin their dance at the latter’s Kiwitea St home today, then continue it a week later at Dave Farrington Park in the capital, with continental glory and a place at the Club World Cup at stake.
They are familiar with each other, having met in five finals in the last three years, including the last two national league deciders, both won by Team Wellington, and the last two Champions League deciders, both won by Auckland City, who have had a stranglehold on the competition since 2011.
But what makes the budding rivalry so fascinating is that, this season at least, they play with extremely contrasting styles.
‘‘We try to play a very indirect style of football, and what I mean by that is that we try to play a very patient, short-passing game ... so we can be a tight team and have a lot of support around the ball,’’ says City coach Ramon Tribulietx.
That patience and support leads to possession, and that usually leads to more chances, as well as less for the opposition, though it’s never that simple.
‘‘There’s opposition out there that benefit when they don’t have the ball, because they’re just waiting for the counter-attack to hurt you, but if you have the ball, and you know how to move that ball to secure it ... then the opposition have a tough job ahead.
‘‘They’re going to have to run a lot more than you, and sooner or later, they’re going to feel it in their legs, and in their minds. Running around chasing shadows, you end up getting too tired and also mentally you tend to switch off.’’
Under coach Jose Figueira, Team Wellington are often, and especially against City, a team ‘‘that benefit when they don’t have the ball,’’ creating a dichotomy that will colour every moment of the final. ‘‘I look at the makeup of our squad, and we’re an aggressive team that’s got some good quality attacking players,’’ says Figueira.
‘‘We’ve got players who have an eye for goal, who are creative, and who want to play on the front foot. We want to try to control the game in terms of crafting those attacks, and trying to keep the foot on the throat of the opposition.’’ Fifa and the International Olympic Committee have been plunged into fresh corruption and ethics crises.
One of the most powerful men in world sport, Sheikh Ahmad AlFahad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, was apparently identified by the United States Department of Justice as a co-conspirator in an alleged $1.3 million bribery scam. The DOJ orchestrated the 2015 dawn raids and indictments that threatened Fifa’s very existence.
That was followed by a report in German newspaper Der Spiegel that Fifa president Gianni Infantino was the subject of another preliminary investigation by the governing body’s ethics committee into whether he had a prohibited influence on last month’s Confederation of African Football presidential election.
The news comes four weeks after Fifa announced the end of a 22-month internal investigation into sport’s biggest corruption scandal, one that brought down former president Sepp Blatter.
A reminder the criminal authorities were far from done with the governing body and its ousted president arrived on Thursday when the French financial prosecutors’ office announced it had joined the DOJ and the office of the Attorney General of Switzerland in launching an investigation into the award of the next two World Cups and had interviewed the 81-year-old.
That was followed by news from New York that a member of Fifa’s financial watchdog had pleaded guilty to taking around $1.3 million in bribes both from disgraced former Fifa presidential candidate Mohamed Bin Hammam and a member of the Kuwait Football Association and Olympic Council of Asia.
Richard Lai, a US citizen, president of the Guam Football Association, former Asian Football Confederation executive committee member, and a member of Fifa’s audit and compliance committee, was also suspended yesterday from all football-related activity for 90 days.
The indictment against him proved to be explosive after it named among his co-conspirators someone who was ‘‘at various times’’ a ‘‘high-ranking official of Fifa, the Kuwait Football Association (KFA), and the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA)’’.
That could only be Sheikh Ahmad, who is a member of both Fifa’s ruling council and the president of the OCA. He is also a member of the IOC and was in 2013 widely credited with helping Thomas Bach secure election as its president.
He is also close to Infantino, who is said by Der Spiegel to be facing his second preliminary ethics investigation since succeeding Blatter as president just over a year ago. The 47-year-old, who was cleared in August following a probe into flights he had taken and his failure to sign an employment contract, was recently accused of attempting to influence last month’s CAF presidential election, something he denied.
The contest resulted in the shock dethroning of former acting Fifa president Issa Hayatou, who had been head of African football since 1989, by Ahmad Ahmad from Madagascar. Ahmad has since been accused of also receiving money from Bin Hammam, although he denies any wrongdoing. Lai, meanwhile, admitted in court taking $133,000 from the Qatari to support the latter against Blatter during Fifa’s 2011 presidential election. The 55-year-old also confessed to receiving more than $1.1 million in bribes between 2009 and 2014 from a member of KFA ‘‘to use his influence to advance the interests of the Kuwaiti official, including helping the Kuwaiti official identify other members of the Asian Football Confederation to whom they could offer bribes’’. Telegraph, London