www.youtube.com/watch?v=pziKluqYnd4&feature=relatedF*ck you Terry Venables, I will never forgive you for this. LET'S NOT PLAY IVANOVIC, NO, WE WON'T NEED HIM. IDIOT!!!
F*ck you Peter Hoare, the people of this great nation will get their revenge on you one day.
I'd say something about Aurelio missing 27 832 shots on goal, but he's a nice enough guy, so no need to remind him of it.
I'd forgotten how much this still hurts - for me, this is equal, if not slightly more painful than the Totti penalty. Utter, utter heartbreak....... I didn't think it was possible for a 14 year old to sulk for a week straight about "the wogball" (as it was known back then). November 2005 almost made up for this, November 2009 just might do the trick.
Last week. 29/11/97. Words cannot describe...
To borrow a theme from a thread on the Smurfs' forum, here are Dibo’s top 5 heartbreaking defeats in football:
5. Newcastle 1 Mariners 0, January 2007.
Pretty much sealed their finals spot and froze us out. any amount of talk about how we were by far the better side, how they were so lucky to have Covic on white hot form that day, how we still had a mathematical chance could not make up for the fact that we went away and lost a season-defining derby by a single goal.
4. Uruguay 3 d Australia 0 (Uruguay progresses 3-1 on aggregate)
I was more angry than upset after this. For starters, I was angry that we didn't do more with the game in Melbourne, where the job really needed to be done. An advantage through a single penalty to Kevin Muscat was always going to be tough to maintain at the Centenario.
Then once over there, the tie-equalising goal was almost inevitable, what wasn't was the way the team seemed to drop away towards the end as if wilting under the pressure of 60,000 celestes there and 20 million at home. The sight of Richard Morales celebrating his final, tie-sealing goal was guaranteed to raise fury in me for the next four years.
I couldn’t even feel sympathy for Tony Vidmar for months after that, as pitiful and heart-rending as the scene of him bawling like a child as he left the field was. Now I feel for him even more, given he lost another chance four years later through illness. Tony slotting away his penalty in Sydney was like a carthartic release though – when that happened I felt demons had been slain and history had been righted. Little did any of us know that a couple of months later the poor bastard was going to be hit with the sucker punch from hell.
3. Sydney 1 d Mariners 0.
This was an odd one because there was actually a lot of happiness mixed in, but the fact that we lost a game we utterly dominated large sections of was still wrenching.
Amazing crowd, amazing turnout of yellows, and this match alone was probably the thing that sealed the mariners' existence into the future, but the sight of all-night Dwight holding the trophy aloft was just awful.
Any time I see Corica's goal it still hits me like a thump to the chest.
2. Italy 1 d Australia 0
More than a little part of me says that if we couldn’t stuff one past Buffon with a man advantage for an hour then we didn’t deserve a quarter final spot. In my ‘rational’ moments I think that’s probably true. But football isn’t rational, it’s about heart, with joy and tears on the line. I watched this match in Leichhardt, where there were thousands of Aussie and Italian supporters (and Italian-Aussies too, with shirts and scarves split up the middle) and until the penalty came I felt (as I wasn’t really up to thinking) that surely it would come, surely we would get the winner, even if it took extra time. I’d even considered the fact that we won our last penalty shootout, so we’d have to be a chance there.
But Lucas Neill didn’t keep his feet, Grosso took the opportunity, and we all know what happened next.
1. Australia 2 d Iran 2 (Iran progresses on away goals)
How *weren’t* we about 3-0 up after 15 minutes? I’ve got this memory (that’s all, I’ve never watched that game since) of us being camped around their penalty area, pinging crosses and shots from everywhere, saves and narrow misses galore, and somehow we couldn’t conjure a goal. How we went to the interval leading by only one is still a complete mystery.
The intervening years and the euphoria I was feeling for most of it means that the second half is a haze. I very vaguely remember the goal, and I do remember the stoppage for that prized f***wit, but more than that I just remember the inevitability when they had jagged one back and then their striker came through again, I knew we were f***ed. And it seemed to me that we just weren’t going to get back into it either, it was all over already. I couldn’t stop watching, but my hopes were dashed already. The sight of Bosnich sitting on his ample arse wondering what the f*** happened seemed to be analogous to what all of us felt.
