Authorities continue to pay scant regard to the role football plays in forging deeper ties with our Asian neighbours.
Two weeks ago I visited a market near the city of Erbil in northern Iraq looking for a replica shirt of the local club side that I’d spent the previous days covering for SBS.
Nestled in amongst the yellow strip – yellow of different hues, to be fair – of Erbil and the ever-present Real Madrid and Barcelona fakes I stumbled across, of all things, an Adelaide United shirt.
It was an AFC Champions League strip complete with a giant Coopers advert (a product that may struggle to crack the tricky Iraq market) and the No. 10 on the front.
http://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/scott-mc ... ng-bridgesLooking at the reverse side, expecting to see Vidosic, there was another surprise as "Podolski" was emblazoned below the collar, but despite the "No. 10 identity crisis" the very fact there was a shirt from Adelaide in Iraq at all was a demonstration of the power of football throughout the continent.
A fantastic article on Australia's desire to be more involved in Asia but ignoring one of the best pathways of football to do it. But Australian Football still has their part to play by embracing more Asian players in the HAL.