SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA STADIUM, CA \u2014 Tony Popovic responded bullishly when asked to explain the rationale behind his Socceroos XI in Santa Clara today, declaring \u201cI\u2019ll always back my decision\u201d as he made six changes to the line-up for Australia\u2019s 0-0 draw with Paraguay. <\/p>\n
Popovic brought Aziz Behich, Jackson Irvine, Lucas Herrington, Nestory Irankunda, Cristian Volpato and Connor Metcalfe in for Jacob Italiano, Paul Okon-Engstler, Cameron Burgess, Mohamed Toure, Mathew Leckie and Nishan Velupillay, and the ensuing performance was enough to see the side progress to the World Cup knockout stage. <\/p>\n
Every word Tony Popovic said after a 0-0 \u2018win\u2019 as Australia sealed a sport in the FIFA World Cup knockout stages<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI think if you look back on where we started, over seventy players have played since we\u2019ve been here for the Socceroos. All twenty six players are here to play a role,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not 11 players only, because before the first game, you would have told me you were surprised with a selection, and if we didn\u2019t get the result, you\u2019d be the first one saying, why did I select them?<\/p>\n \u201cThen we leave a couple out the second game, then you ask why are those two not selected? <\/p>\n \u201cAnd now we make six changes, and now you ask me again, why are those six in and the other ones out? <\/p>\n \u201cThat will continue because that\u2019s the analysis that we have back home. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to go into that.<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n \u201cWhat I will say is that every player is important.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one is entitled to the shirt. And each game is different. And (there are) different circumstances and different situations for each game at a different time. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd for this game, this is a team I believe needed to play. That\u2019s it. And I\u2019ll always back my decision.\u201d <\/p>\n Popovic switched Toure for Irankunda, with the Watford attacker deployed centrally against the South Americans.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, the system allows a nine and two tens, so it\u2019s the same regardless of who\u2019s up there as a nine,\u201d he explained of the system.<\/p>\n \u201cSo they\u2019re not up there alone, they\u2019re up there with the other players. He\u2019s a different type of nine. and we just felt today that he could offer something, which he did.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Paraguay if you look at their record it\u2019s very difficult to score against them. And I like to think that we dominated the game in a crucial World Cup qualifier with a very young squad in the third match (when) everything\u2019s on the line and the players showed composure, patience, quality, and resilience.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd you don\u2019t expect a lot of chances, but when they come you have to try and take them and I thought Nestor played a real part today in our performance and how we, well I say win \u2013 winning for me that we went through. So, delighted.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA STADIUM, CA \u2014 Tony Popovic responded bullishly when asked to explain the rationale behind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,67584,44,6248],"class_list":["post-761021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nestory-irankunda","tag-news","tag-tony-popovic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}