'You idiots in your beds!'

SBS is celebrating 50 years, and because it's 11 years to the day since the Tim Cahill wonderstrike at World Cup 2014, shared this video. Below it is my post from that night.

Ange & The Boss is streaming on DocPlay. This goal was in the first cut of the film in our ‘Ange montage’ but was taken out because FIFA make all customers buy a minimum of 60 seconds of footage, at US$24,000/minute. I nod to Australian writer Bec Shaw’s superb tweet (below) for the title of this piece.

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18th June 2014, Richmond

I arrived in Bridge Road at 1.40 this morning, and scored that impossible park right opposite the Town Hall that’s only ever going to happen during the magic of a World Cup.

Our destination was the The Sporting Globe, formerly Spargo’s, and when I made my way upstairs into the sweating, drinking throng, I met a bloke called Andrew, who told me he used to occasionally bring dates here. We both glanced at the big TVs and the heaving maleness of the room. It was perfect sports bar territory – froth and fries. ‘Lucky girls,’ I said to Andrew.

Tonight, though, we all had a date with destiny. Australia versus the Netherlands. The World Cup’s lowest ranked team, us, against the first round’s star attraction, them.

I gave us no chance.

Even allowing for a Dutch letdown (sounds like something that happens under a doona), or the faint hope that a googling Robin Van Persie spent four sleepless days image searching for versions of himself in Superman capes, this just couldn’t happen. In terms of star power, the Socceroos boasted an aging Tim Cahill, plying his trade in the American MLS, and the man our Prime Minister knows as ‘Mike’ Jedinak, the captain of the English Premier League’s eleventh best side.