Update time!
For my own
part am looking forward to the Australia versus Jordan World Cup Qualifier in a
couple of hours time.
The games
are effectively “must win” games which is probably the type of scenario which
engages the greater public and gets the team into gear.
What is
getting tongues wagging from the fans perspective is the recent formal ousting
of the Green and Gold Army from the home end and replacing it with a mob called
“Terrace Australis”.
The active
support for the team at national level has been waning for some time now, but
if this article by Micahel Lynch (http://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/socceroos-look-for-wintry-advantage-20130611-2o195.html)
is anything to go by one wonders if it is getting to the point of re-writing
history and the context in which “Terrace Australis” has come about.
A picture doing the rounds from the MVFC forum
For my own
part I spent a few games in the home end at Australia matches, plus I have been
overseas with the Green and Gold Army to the 2007 Asian Cup and the World Cup
Qualifier in Japan in 2009 for the 2010 South Africa World Cup. I spent much of
the time with fans from other A-League teams and there was never any hint of
discord or any adverse effect on our support as a result.
As far as
the idea that this Terrace Australis mob has been formed out of representatives
of other groups seems a bit questionable also, because this initiative seemed
to just come out of the blue at some kind of fan forum up in Sydney where to
put it bluntly a bunch of Sydney people like David Gallopp, Mark Bosnich and
Lucas Neill basically all got together and said the national team support needs
to be better.
Part of this
probably all stems from the fact that they’ve seen the explosive emergence of
the Western Sydney support and as soon as qualification is at stake and they
need the public and active fan base behind the team they’ve started wondering
why the support is so crap.
Funny how
this question never seemed to occur during the much smoother qualification for
the 2010 World Cup, which once again raises the question of the esteem that the
powers that be hold for active fans in this country.
If the FFA
want to know why support for the national team is so crap, firstly they should
look at the ticketing issues, namely when they sell them they never made enough
of an effort to actually explain to some people that they were buying in an
active area and the customs of people standing, a de-facto General Admission
culture (stand where you want in order to socialise with others in the fan
community) and something of an obligation to actually make an effort to chant.
Naturally
after getting booted and treated like crap by security because some clown is
whingeing about someone “sitting in their seat” or obscuring their vision
because they are standing.
Needless to
say if you are an active fan there comes a point where it isn’t really worth it
and that’s without going into the issues of the Socceroos not playing on a
regular basis.
On top of
that there is the FFA opting to choose the generic sports fan group the “Fanatics”
as their world cup ticketing partner instead of the football specific “Green
and Gold Army” for the 2006 and 2010 World Cups.
This
obviously played a role in undermining the capacity for the football fan scene
to develop. The Green and Gold Army probably haven’t helped themselves by
becoming a little too commercialised with a Betfair partnership but at the end
of the day it is a case of the FFA having reaped what they have sowed.
The new
Terrace Australis has been met with a fair amount of suspicion is some
quarters, and I can’t say I blame people for being suspicious either given how
the FFA has been apathetic at best or even undermined the active fan scene at
worst, then come out all ‘gung-ho’ in support of a new mob - FFA cheersquad
anyone? – some of their chant ideas certainly look cringeworthy in some
respects but that is hardly surprising from a new entity to be fair.
Not to
mention the fact that it doesen’t seem to have organically developed out of the
national fan fraternity but basically seems to be in large part the product of
a Sydney based administrator, a Sydney based commentator and a Sydney based
player.
I found the
suggestion someone put forward that supporting well at tonights match as being
highly important to Melbourne’s sporting reputation, and I have to say I
strongly disagree with that.
Melburnians
will come in decent numbers but frankly it is how Melbourne Victory are
supported week-in week-out that will define our respectability.
This has
often been taken for granted over the years, with the Sydney media hardly noticing
the fact that Melbourne fans travel in strong numbers for interstate clashes
consistently, then get into a jizz-fest when one of the NSW based teams finally
get their act together and mange to get away fans a couple of hours down the
road in proper numbers at last.
So the idea
that if the Sydney form of Terrace Australis is more effective than the
Melburnian form will somehow damage our reputation is rather absurd, all it
will do is reflect that this is at its core a Terrace Sydney movement.
And that’s
without going into the irony that it’s the utterly pathetic support at a game
based in Sydney that was the final straw. It’s not like we’ll actually lose any
matches as suggested, because there is already a built-in bias towards Sydney
in this regard, with Melbourne guaranteed only one match per year in comparison
the two games per year that Sydney are guaranteed.
At the end
of the day I’ll be up high in the wing area, putting my full support for an
Australia win, but with a side interest to see how this new mob goes through
its paces.
Long term they are going to face the same challenges that their predecessors faced, that is there is a certain challenge in facilitating away active support throughout Asia, and the issue of facilitating active support network throughout a country the size of Europe which only plays a handful of home matches per year at most.
