I think you still have a couple of bitters at SBS … however I digress … There is little can be done to engage the bitters towards the existing A-League … hopefully the new Melbourne & Sydney team can get some of the bitters in…

Many of us can’t shake off the habit of following our overseas clubs because we were raised on it. The A-League has had less time to engender the same kind of loyalty, in a world where there is far less room for error than there once was. The fact that our league has a long way to go in improving standards- especially coaching and tactics- hasn’t really helped, as has the cliched and simplistic views of the game and ignorant generalisations seemingly thrown into our faces.

But I’m asking a serious question here- what is it that has made two ex-Socceroo strikers struggle at Sydney FC, and would they have failed anywhere else?

I think the issue is not much the ‘new dawners’ but the group of genuine football fans that still refuse to follow the A-League.

I see these in two camps. One is like Mike has mentioned are made up of fans that were committed NSL fans but now refute the A-League as ‘plastic’. I have some sympathy with their feelings. Traditional NSL teams such as South Melbourne, Marconi etc. have carried on the burden of maintaining football in this country when it was derided and scorned. I think I am not wrong that the players they have produced have had a major influence in our qualification for Germany and still echoes to this day.

It is also true that unlike new A-League teams, the old NSL teams had a tradition that went back for some time.

However this was also the problem. Whatever were the efforts of these teams to become more ‘Australian’ inevitably the connections to a particular group or another alienated potential fans. This re-enforced the view that ‘soccer’ was a foreign game played and watched by ‘foreign’ people.

This together with the inept administration of Soccer Australia (which often seemed ran the sport like an ethnic social club) made the sport the ‘sick child of Australian Sport’ as a sport journalist once described it.

If I can borrow an idiom from another sport, the FFA has the runs on the board. A well established and well run domestic league (that despite everything still has more support and media exposure than the NSL did, especially in its final years). Admission into Asia (which is a great coup) and two World Cup qualifications.

However in the rush to modernise the sport and distance itself from the ‘old soccer’ the FFA has ignored those who toiled to support the sport throughout the lean years, and these fans have some reason to feel unrecognised and dismissed. Especially from a FFA which is run by people who come from sports that looked down on football in the past.

I think enough time has passed for the FFA to initiate some rapprochement with the traditional football people. The sport as a whole could only benefit from it. And these fans are invaluable they love the sport and they really know about it.\

The other group is what dasilva already has described as ‘eurosnobs’ (this include British people of course) which poo poo the A-League as ‘rubbish’. These people I suspect have grown up in countries fortunate enough to have major leagues and continue to watch them through their pay TV. This is a much more difficult group to convince as they are really not that committed to Australian football and its progress. Many A-League fans know that the competition is not one of the top ones in the world (and neither are most of the ones played in the world, but that’s another argument) but following an A-League team is partly a statement that we want football to prosper in Australia. Eurosnobs couldn’t probably care less, wanting only top level football which realistically is only present in Italy, Spain, England, Germany, Argentina, Brasil etc.

And that Sydney United team. Some how they made “Zdonkey” David Zdrilic look good. A friend of mine said to me at the time “he’s just in the right team at the right time”- and how right he was, because we all know what a dud Zdrilic would be.

But it makes you wonder- why have strikers been more likely to fail at Sydney FC than elsewhere? Smeltz and Dadi didn’t exactly have sparkling records before, yet they thrive in this league.

However I think it’s more easier to get AFL, Rugby, League and non-football fans to watch the A-league then it is to get ex-NSL fanatics and Eurosnobs (at least AFL fans understand the concept of supporting the local league regardless of unflattering or non-existance international comparison) to go watch the A-league.

According to Pippinu half of the members of Melbourne Victory are also members of an AFL club.

I have a feeling that the proportion of them who were actually regular attendance of NSL clubs in the past were probably less then half.