By Michael Lynch
STUNNING, simply stunning. Archie Thompson last night produced the most astonishing individual display seen in a domestic Australian football match when he scored five goals to lead Melbourne Victory to a 6-0 grand final rout over Adelaide United.
Thompson, the 28-year-old Socceroo frontman who 12 months ago had been on the verge of walking out on the club, won for himself Australian sporting immortality for an individual display.
His performance was as exhilarating and exciting as it was unexpected. Grand finals are supposed to be tight, closely contested affairs, but Thompson rewrote the script with a virtuoso performance. He ripped the heart from Adelaide and ensured that Ernie Merrick's side would become the first A-League team to win the minor premiership-championship double.
The record books will show that Melbourne Victory trounced Adelaide United 6-0 as the Reds — a man down after the 33rd-minute dismissal of skipper Ross Aloisi — fell apart in the face of a remorseless Melbourne onslaught. What the record will not show is the scale of Melbourne's domination and the quality of its play, the precision passing and fluid interchange.
The statistics will illustrate the magnitude of Thompson's astonishing achievement, but numbers alone cannot show the emotional energy of a 55,000-plus crowd to produce a performance that will live long in the memory.
Thompson is the league's most exciting player and he produced a master class in 90 amazing minutes with his full repertoire of skills.
He once scored 13 times for Australia in a game against American Samoa, but this was of an altogether different order.
Forty minutes was all the time it took him to score a first-half hat-trick — the first three-timer in a domestic grand final and the first by a Victory player. And he went two better in the second period when he sprang the Adelaide offside trap to round goalkeeper Daniel Beltrame to score his fourth and then slammed home a cross from Daniel Allsopp for his fifth.
At that stage, scoring against a depleted, dispirited and disjointed Adelaide was easy and, had it been a boxing match, referee Mark Shield may have felt compelled to stop the fight to prevent John Kosmina's Reds from more punishment.
Thompson's execution throughout was perfect, as his pace and the timing of his runs tore the Adelaide defence to pieces.
It is little wonder that soccer people believe the Victory's marquee man has all the tools to still play in Europe — if he wanted to.
Thanks to his exploits, the second half became a face-saving exercise for a broken Adelaide side whose faint hopes of staging any sort of comeback were sunk when their skipper Aloisi was sent off after picking up his second yellow card for a foul on Grant Brebner.
The dismissal summed up Adelaide's day. At that stage, the Reds were 2-0 down and with a mountain to climb.
Aloisi's reckless head-high challenge was the equivalent of soccer suicide, not just for him but for his team, for whom respectability on the scoreboard became the requirement.
Thompson's exploits also ensured that Melbourne Victory fans could spend the second 45 minutes in a chanting celebration of all things blue and white.
Midway through the second half, the roof at Telstra Dome was shut as the rain pelted down and it is a wonder that their raucous, rousing cheers failed to raise it from its rails.
Thompson, who had predicted last week that he would score three, made good his promise with a ruthless display of finishing that brought his goals tally for the season to 15 — two more than his teammate Allsopp.
After an opening quarter-hour in which the game was played at a frantic pace despite the high temperature, Melbourne began to get on top and it was soon apparent that the Victory was too quick and too slick, too fast and too fluid.
As they soon made obvious, they were far too good for an Adelaide side that was perhaps feeling the effects of its arduous 120-minute preliminary final a week earlier.
Thompson made the breakthrough in the 20th minute, converting a perfectly weighted pass from Fred that hit the post before crossing the line. His second came in the 29th minute, when he combined with Allsopp and another ideal ball from Fred, and his third 11 minutes later when Fred and Kevin Muscat worked an opening to set him up.
At this point the game was effectively over, but the Archie show rolled on. Before his fourth — which Adelaide players furiously protested was offside — he had struck the bar. But there was to be no stopping him, and even as the clock ticked down Thompson was hungry for a sixth. Adelaide had the ball in the net, but Nathan Burns' effort was disallowed, while Bruce Djite hit the woodwork.
Melbourne's sixth goal, a wonderful curling effort by substitute Kristian Sarkies seconds before the end, seemed unnecessarily cruel.
Whatever he does for the rest of his life, it is doubtful Thompson will ever have a day like yesterday.