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#84 // Armiento → Mileusnic Adelaide United 4 – 3 Brisbane Roar

The AssistAustralia A-League

In Australia, it’s hot in December. Cooler in July.

They say the toilet water flushes in the opposite direction.

And the soccer, it turns out—is completely off the wall.

 

 

 

97th minute.

Adelaide United playing with 10 men after a red card at the start of the game.

Down 3-0 just before halftime.

And then, they score.

Brisbane get a red card, and then another.

Adelaide score again. Then again.

And in the final moment of the game—this assist, this goal…

And a 4-3 win.

 

 

 

What is going on down there? Under there?

 

 

You have to assume most A-League games don’t turn out this way, but still, you have to wonder—might it be true that all things do run backwards there?

 

Where there wouldn’t normally be red cards: red cards.

Where there would be a normal scoreline: a comic-book one.

It’s bedlam. Madness. A game that’s gone troppo, as they’d say in Australia.

The thing played out like a WWE event—as if scripted to produce the goofiest, most contentious, entertaining preamble to Vince McMahon strutting down the sideline and onto the field, giving the referee a bodyslam, smacking the goalkeeper with a metal chair.

 

 

But amid all the wildness, we had one of those moments we tend to look for here.

The ball at Carlo Armiento’s feet. A cross with his left to the back post.

And the winning assist, into the net off the head of Nikola Mileusnic.

 

 

Not quite the most unique bit of assistance, but a terrific curling cross.

And credit given, to keep his cool—delivering that ball, finishing the game without his legs going wobbly and his knees buckling out there on the field…

Without caving to the paranoid feeling like he’s just entered a surreal new dimension, world, corner of the universe, a place grounded in a single natural law that says:

The soccer, it will be mental.

 

 

He kept it together.

He delivered the pass.

And, somehow, Adelaide United win the game.

 

Is this what it’s always like, down there?