Socceroos can frustrate Japan into result: Aloisi

John Aloisi knows better than most the feeling of beating Japan on the world stage.

And he knows one way the Socceroos can end their 15-year wait for a win over the Samurai Blue, and their first in Japan: frustrate them into submission.

Aloisi, who scored in Australia’s famous 2006 World Cup win over Japan in Kaiserslautern, is confident Tony Popovic is the perfect person to engineer just that on Tuesday night.

Popovic prides himself on his defence, which will be determined to stifle Japan’s attack at every turn.

“The longer you go (without conceding) – and I know with a Popovic team he’ll make sure that they’re really organised and hard to break down, and then with a little bit of quality going forward you can cause them problems – so you expect that could frustrate the Japanese,” Aloisi told AAP.

“At this point in time, yes, we always want to see our national team playing a certain style of football and attacking and scoring goals, but we need results and I think Popa can get those results.”

Aloisi remembers believing Japan didn’t want to play the powerful Socceroos teams of the 2000s.

“We felt like we were able to overrun and overpower Japan when we were back in 2006,” he said.

“Technically they were probably still better than us, even though we had some really good technical players. But we knew that we would overrun, overpower them and win the game

“Whether that means we’re in their faces, it’s probably just a term. But it’s that, ‘I’m not gonna give you time on the ball – we’re gonna be pressing you, we’re gonna be making it hard for you to create something’.

“I know that Mitch Duke’s team’s (J1 League leaders Machida Zelvia) done that. They just press, they press, they press, they go long, they press’ – they’re probably more comfortable without the ball than with the ball.

“I don’t know what Popa’s gonna do but I can imagine that he will try and make it uncomfortable for the Japanese.”

Aloisi believes a point for Australia in Saitama would be “huge” – but going one better would be seriously special.

“A win would be one of our biggest results,” he said.

“Forget about over there, it’s ’09 here. That’s 15 years. So that’s a long period of time since we’ve won a game against Japan

“So a win there would be one of our biggest results, especially in qualification.

“In World Cups we’ve had a few big results but in qualification that would be our biggest result.”