Australia's Hyundai A-League regular season wraps up this weekend, and for the first time in the league's short history a team from New Zealand has qualified for the playoffs. While playoff soccer will be new territory for the Wellington Phoenix, it will be familiar ground for one of their players, former New England Revolution defender Tony Lochhead.
Selected by New England in the 2005 MLS SuperDraft, Lochhead was a squad member on the Revs team that lost on penalty kicks to the Houston Dynamo in MLS Cup 2006. Two years earlier, in 2004, the Kiwi left back was a member of the California-Santa Barbara Gauchos that lost on penalty kicks in the NCAA championship game to Indiana.
Last week, Lochhead finally got to celebrate a big penalty goal, with Paul Ifill converting from the spot to give the Phoenix a 1-0 win at Gold Coast United that clinched Wellington's historic playoff berth. Lochhead has been a Phoenix defensive anchor all season and is also a mainstay of the New Zealand national team's back four as well.
On March 4, Lochhead will be back in his old southern California stomping grounds playing for the All Whites against Mexico at the Rose Bowl. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is also in Pasadena and frankly you almost have to be a rocket scientist to understand the A-League playoff system.
If you thought the MLS playoffs had some quirks over the years, the A-League system is probably not for you. Rube Goldberg, though, would be proud. Six of the A-League's 10 teams qualify for the playoffs. The teams that finish first and second in the standings (or the ladder as the Aussies call it) at the end of the regular season play each other over two legs to determine who goes to the Grand Final, the equivalent of the MLS Cup.
This is where the advanced degree in mathematics comes in handy. The regular season third-place team plays the sixth-place team, and the fourth-place team plays the fifth-place team in single elimination games. The winners of those two games then play each other to advance to a game against the loser of the first place-second place two-leg series. The winner of that contest also advances to the Grand Final. As the fair dinkum Aussie who explained this Sudoku puzzle proclaimed, "Simple, really!"
You might beg to differ on that, but the key for Lochhead and his Phoenix teammates is to clinch fourth place in the final standings on the last day of the regular season this weekend. Phoenix is unbeaten at home in 16 consecutive games and would gain home-field advantage for the first playoff round with a win over the Central Coast Mariners on Feb. 12.
The A-League's slogan this season is "Be Part of Something Bigger." With a playoff appearance at hand, and the 2010 FIFA World Cup on the horizon, there is no question that Lochhead, who was waived by the Revs back in April 2007, is getting set for bigger and better things in, and for, his native New Zealand.
Mark C. Young is an Emmy Award-winning freelance writer/TV
producer who has covered several FIFA World Cups and Olympic Games. He
is a contributor to Goal.com and also writes for the blog "No Mas."
