Sharp shooters up for grand final goal rush

IF SUNDAY’S A-League grand final is to be a shootout, one can only hope that rival coaches Kevin Muscat and Graham Arnold come armed with bazookas.

It’s a prospect that has even the players excited.

Both coaches have the weaponry, as Melbourne Victory and Sydney FC possess two of the more explosive attacks ever seen in the competition’s history.

But grand finals are so often tight, tense affairs.

The nine previous ALeague title deciders have averaged two goals per game in regulation time, a figure that drops to 1.5 per game when Victory’s 2007 6-0 demolition of Adelaide is taken from the equation.

Just imagine, however, if Muscat and Arnold both said, “I don’t care how many goals you score against us, we’re just going to score more”.

It could result in one of the m ore entertaining grand finals in Australian sports history, let alone A-League history.

With 56 goals at an average of 2.07 per game in the regular season, Victory fell just two shy of Brisbane’s goals-scored record set in 2010-11.

Its “fab four”, Besart Berisha, Fahid Ben Khalfallah, Kosta Barbarouses and Gui Finkler, has been so good that not even the league’s all-time leading scorer, Archie Thompson, will join the starting line-up.

Sydney, meanwhile, has scored 52 goals in the regular season, its highest tally in club history. Since the Asian Cup break it has scored 41 goals in 14 games — including the 4-1 semi-final win over Adelaide last week.

Marc Janko, Austria’s captain and Sydney’s international marquee player, earns much of the plaudits. He did, after all, win the league’s golden boot award with a tally of 16 goals.

But if we needed any reminding of the potency of those around him — this weekend Chris Naumoff, Alex Brosque and Bernie Ibini will also line up in the front four — then we’ve got it in recent weeks.

Though Janko has failed to score in the past seven games, Sydney has continued to score for fun. Ibini has scored in each of his past three games while Brosque has scored six times in the past four matches and looms as a huge threat on Sunday.

Like Victory, Sydney also has the luxury of leaving a proven goalscorer on the bench. Shane Smeltz, second only to Thompson on the alltime A-League scorers charts with 85 goals, also can’t crack his side’s starting line-up.

Finkler said the weekend’s game was a meeting between the competition’s two best teams.

“Hopefully it’s a good, entertaining game with a lot of goals, just like it was in the semi-finals.,” Finkler said.