10 Dec 2008(Wed)

The joy felt by coach Oswaldo de Oliveira and his Kashima Antlers players on Saturday night, having seen off Consadole Sapporo in their final league game to secure a well-deserved second straight J League title, will not have come without an element of regret. The FIFA Club World Cup has offered a place to the champions of its host nation since 2007, but despite a Japanese club never having won the AFC Champions League before then, the triumphs of first Urawa Reds and now Gamba Osaka have meant that this right to compete on the world stage has had to be given to the ACL runners-up – this year, Adelaide United – instead. On both occasions, Kashima have been the unlucky ones to be denied.

 

The rule that states that only one club from any given country may take part makes sense in principle, but its fallacies are exposed when juxtaposed with another condition that ensures that no two teams from the same continent can qualify for the semi-finals. Assuming they win their play-off with the Oceania representatives, the ACL runners-up must always then play the Asian champions in the last 8. Adelaide will have to overcome Waitakere United – an amateur side from New Zealand who admit they cannot hope to compete on the same level – in the opening game on Thursday, but just like Urawa versus Sepahan Part III last year, the quarter-final is likely to be a rematch of Adelaide’s ACL final with Gamba. Surely even an all-Japanese tie between Gamba and Kashima in the FIFA event would be of greater interest to the fans.

 

FIFA president Sepp Blatter was once famously dismissed by a German journalist as ‘having 50 ideas a day, and 51 of them are bad’, but even so, Gamba will not be complaining too loudly. Despite the slight unfairness of giving Adelaide a third opportunity to derail their international dreams, they will feel far more confident of beating an opponent they have already put to the sword twice as recently as last month than they would have done of beating the champions of their own domestic league. The strange choice of an evening kick-off for the game this Sunday – the first quarter-final, by comparison, is on Saturday lunchtime – means that supporters will miss the last bullet trains from Nagoya and face a tiring journey back to Osaka by road, but tired faces at work on Monday will still be smiling if Gamba can keep up their ACL momentum. For them, of course, a bigger target even than the world title itself is a dream semi-final pairing with Manchester United.

 

European interest levels in the Club World Cup are certainly not as high as in the rest of the world, and United do still have a league game away to Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday evening (Sunday morning, Japanese time) before they even travel to Yokohama. Nonetheless, Sir Alex Ferguson has repeated his aim to return with the trophy and the full-strength squad he has named will indeed be favourites; a position reinforced by the unlikely identify of the South American representatives, LDU Quito. Ahead of the Copa Libertadores final this summer, it had been expected that Brazilian giants Fluminense – and their former Urawa striker Washington, who has been linked in the last week with a move to Gamba – would be lining up in Japan at the end of the year, but LDU Quito achieved a shock win on penalties to take the first ever continental title for an Ecuadorean side.

 

The attacking play of LDU Quito and their 23-year-old right winger Luis Bolaños should still not be underestimated, but having lost his partner in crime on the opposite flank, Joffre Guerrón, to Getafe of Spain, they will surely need a performance to match their levels of motivation if they are to have a chance of competing with United. Indeed, a semi-final with Mexican side Pachuca or with Al-Ahly of Egypt – arguably the biggest club side in Africa – will too present a significant hurdle, and it is not out of the question that a team from outside the two traditionally dominant continents could make it to the final this year.

 

This competition has had a troubled history in its various forms, from the frequent violence and boycotts in the two-legged Intercontinental Cup era of the 1960s and 70s, to the recent doubts over its format since metamorphosing into the Club World Cup. However, with the continued active backing of FIFA it is certain to remain part of the footballing calendar, and the more open and competitive the tournament can become on a genuinely global level, the brighter its future will be. One hopes that exciting football from the likes of Gamba Osaka, Manchester United, and LDU Quito will take this year’s edition to another level for fans around the world.