Socceroos v Switzerland scores, odds, how to watch, news, team lists
Good morning Australia from beautiful San Diego. This morning will be fun, I hope. Tony Popovic picked an entertaining starting 11.
Only four players from the team that competed against Mexico last week retained their places; the back three are Alessandro Circati, Harry Souttar and Lucas Herrington, as well as midfielder Aiden O’Neill. Everything else is different. Do the math; That makes seven changes to the Socceroos’ World Cup squad, including Cristian Volpato and Tete Yengi, two obvious players who will no longer be dismissed. The substitutes also get some minutes in Kai Trewin and Aziz Behich, plus Nestory Irankunda on the wing and Paul Okon-Engstler in midfield. And Patrick Beach is in the castle. This is seven. Wow.
Fun fact: This player, whose average age is 24.6, was Popovic’s youngest starting 11 appearance as Socceroos coach. The previous record was 25.9 against Canada last year, so that’s a full year younger. Wild.
It will be fascinating to see how this attack in particular works and whether the Socceroos can make it work from the start. They weren’t at the Rose Bowl, but there were 80,000 Mexican fans in the stands at the time, and there’s almost no one here at Snapdragon Stadium. Not a huge surprise considering it starts at noon in a part of the world where I don’t think the Australian and Swiss diasporas are very large.
Popovic told us yesterday that he wasn’t looking for a specific “answer” from this match and was keen to devote as many minutes as possible to these matches; Therefore, we expect a maximum of 11 changes to be made. Looks like there is no VAR today, what a small blessing.
