This Saturday night, the final of the Asian Cup, which I’m led to believe is a soccer tournament of some note, will be played.

It sits somewhere between the World Cup and the FFA Cup in prestige.

Apparently, in Australia you now need to call soccer, ‘football’ or you get a heap of people telling you ‘it’s not called that anymore’ and getting really angry about it, like it’s a life-or-death thing.

You can feel the tears through their emails and tweets.

The Asian Cup tournament has been a big success here in Australia with good crowds and TV audiences. Crowds have also been very well behaved.

To be honest, at the start of the year, if you’d been asked, what would have more crowd problems, the Asian Cup or a darts tournament? You would have said the Asian Cup every single time.

Life surprises you sometimes.

This Saturday is the Final and it will be played in Sydney between the Socceroos and South Korea or the Korea Republic as they’re known in soccer football parlance.

Venue

The venue is Stadium Australia, arguably Australia’s worst stadium for watching sport, which is weird because that’s what it’s designed for.

The surface of Stadium Australia is often akin to something you’d find at a local sporting facility in a poor municipality.

On the upside, the stadium takes forever to get to and has less atmosphere than the Moon.

The Teams:

Australia

Australia is known as the ‘Socceroos’, which is confusing giving it’s called football. Don’t they know this? Idiots!

The Socceroos feature sharpshooter Tim Cahill and a heap of other players who do lots of good stuff.

Cahill has saved Australia more times than our abundance of natural resources.

He’ll be the one that scores a goal when Australia needs it most.

Tactically, the Socceroos like to move the ball around the field and then push forward and try to put the ‘ball’ in the ‘net’.

I’m sorry if that explanation is a bit technical for newcomers to the sport.

South Korea

South Korea is a country in Asia and a quick Google search shows it is not the Korea in the movie Team America.

Geographically, it is just South of North Korea, which has a nice logic to it.

The South Koreans are known as ‘the Reds’, which cleverly comes from the colour of their uniforms.

I’ve got no idea if South Korean fans care if you call it soccer or not.

Tactically, the Reds like to start with low-end manufacturing leveraging cheap wages, then rapidly industrialising into more sophisticated industries until they start to price themselves out of the market.

Like Australia, their team is also made up of soccer players.

Officiating

Officiating in football is the worst. Not only is the standard usually appalling, there is always the threat that they’ve all been paid off by bookies or corrupt FIFA officials (yes, that is a tautology).

Prediction

Australia lost to the Korea Republic in an earlier game 1-nil but it was a dead rubber so you can’t read much into it, except to say Korea is a very good team.

Expect to Australia to reverse that result in a tight affair.