Goal drought baffles Archie

Ace striker Archie Thompson is still coming to terms with his paltry scoring return in the A-League after playing some of the best football of his life.

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Thompson, 29, has terminated his league commitments with Melbourne Victory with only six goals from 21 matches.

That’s one more than he scored in one single match last year when he helped Victory smash Adelaide United 6-0 in an extraordinary Grand Final.

Strikers usually live and die by the number of goals they score.

However the strange thing about New Zealand-born Thompson is that although he has had no luck with his finishing he has been in scintillating form for most of the season.

His electrifying pace, mobility, distribution and general play have been consistently of the highest order.

So much so that he leads the A-League table of assists for the season with five, the last of which came against Sydney FC last Sunday when he laid on Danny Allsopp's equaliser.

Watching him torment Sydney, it was hard to believe that this actually was a man down on confidence due to the goal drought he seems unable to shake himself out of.

"I feel like I’ve played some of the best football of my career this season," Thompson said after a Socceroos' workout at Marconi Stadium in Sydney.

"Yet not being able to put the ball in the back of the net or not getting the opportunity is frustrating."

"As a striker it’s disappointing not to get goals especially when you’re playing such good football."

Thompson said that he should not carry the blame for Victory’s failure to successfully defend the title won so emphatically last season.

"There are 11 players on the field and there is nobody to blame, really," he pointed out.

"Sometimes there were opportunities I should have scored and opportunities other people should have scored."

"Games did not go our way in the early part of the season and if we played the whole season like we did the last few weeks we would have given the finals a shake."

"We were leading the Central Coast with 10 men for the whole game and ended up losing. There was that home game against Newcastle that we should have won but we lost."

"You just keep going back to games that just slipped away from us."

"However I think that now we’ve got some momentum going into the AFC Champions League which is what we wanted to do in the last few weeks, which is good."

Melbourne and Adelaide will represent Australia in the forthcoming ACL from next month and Thompson is looking forward to being part of Asia’s most lucrative club competition.

But first there is this little matter of a crucial Socceroos’ World Cup qualifier against Qatar on February 6.

National coach Pim Verbeek will announce his squad for Qatar in Sydney on Wednesday morning.

On current form Thompson should walk into Verbeek’s side to face the Qataris although he did look a bit flat at training.

"I was a bit tired from the game on Sunday. I think they call it 'Doms' … delayed onset muscle soreness.”

"It’s getting harder for guys like myself to back up after a game. I’m not getting any younger. Sometimes I forget how old I am, actually. When you see the young blokes out there and they’re so keen on running … it’s a bit hard."

Thompson declared last week that he thought his rivals for one of Verbeek’s expected two striking spots were at an advantage because their teams were in the finals and his was not, even though Sydney’s Alex Brosque and Central Coast’s John Aloisi sat out the session due to nagging injury concerns. The other is Newcastle’s Joel Griffiths, who trained regularly.

"It should not matter," Thompson said. "But remember also those guys have been doing well and scoring."

Thompson said he had high hopes of being picked to play against Qatar in the Australians’ first match of a long and tortuous qualifying campaign that hopefully should lead them to the promised land of South Africa in 2010.

"I expect to play and I know I would be disappointed not to," Thompson conceded. "But then again it’s the same for everybody else."

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