TERRACE FFA OR TERRACE SYDNEY?

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.