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Kevin Sheedy - GWS AFL coach
Expansion will continue to be the buzzword of the Australian sporting landscape as it heads into 2010, with upstart franchises facing a decisive year of development across three codes.
Melbourne Heart will join the A-League in 2010, hoping to use the World Cup as a springboard into a healthy debut season, with all eyes on how quickly they can build a fanbase and how much of it will be stolen from the Melbourne Victory.
The AFL’s Greater Western Sydney comes to life with Kevin Sheedy leading them in the TAC Cup, and Gold Coast FC takes one step closer to its AFL inclusion as it steps up into the VFL (yes, it’s a tad odd geographically).
While these three clubs face another year of building the foundations of their clubs, Melbourne’s Super 15 franchise must prove it has the support to just get off the ground.
The NRL’s battle for respect. You have to feel sorry for the NRL. Great television ratings, stable crowd figures, a close and exciting competition, and yet all anyone talks about is the off-field indiscretions of some of its players.
The NRL can’t afford another year of those types of headlines. It needs the focus to return to the on-field product, which is pretty good.
With the AFL’s expansion into western Sydney and the Gold Coast, the perception of the NRL at present, rightly or wrongly, is that it’s a target. Also, the NRL, more than the AFL, has the most to worry about by football’s growth, especially as our World Cup bid is debated, with its limited expansion options in Australia, its smaller supporter base and its weaker fiscal and political power.
The image of the game must be improved in 2010 if the code is going to stand its ground.
Commonwealth Games standing on the edge. The news that England is considering withdrawing from the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Dehli has the future of the Games on a knife-edge heading into 2010.
Ironically, this was England’s great chance to threaten Australia’s run of topping every medal tally since 1990. England’s huge investment in sport leading up to the London 2012 Olympics has seen the country make huge inroads in a wide variety of sports, and in Beijing, let’s not forget, Great Britain was fourth in the medal tally, two ahead of Australia.
The Commonwealth Games was already struggling to retain interest and mystique. England’s withdrawal from Dehli could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Cricket facing its identity crisis. 2010 will be another crucial year for the ICC and the cricket community as it tries to balance and appease the increasingly overlapping forms of the game with the proliferation of Twenty20 competitions around the world, including the revamp of Australia’s own competition, straining an already overflowing calendar.
Worrying for the game is the widening gulf between the traditionalists who prefer Test cricket and those who see the dollar signs and new fans that could be won over with Twenty20.
In this respect, cricket faces ongoing questions over its identity – what the game is becoming and how, if it can at all, appease everyone’s tastes.
The Ashes series this time next year will at least provide the traditionalists with ammunition to use in the face of the Twenty20 brigade about why the history and the traditions of the game matter.
The Australian team is also facing its own identity crisis.
Shane Watson’s display following his dismissal of Chris Gayle at the Boxing Day Test typified for many the arrogance that has fostered in the Australian team under the captaincy of Ricky Ponting – an arrogance that has taken the gloss off our national team.
As Derryn commented here on The Roar: “The Aussie cricketers are becoming harder and harder to like. Most have no humility and act as if they are gods gift to the cricketing world. Most sports I am fine with following my country, but cricket at the moment is the exception.”
Such boorish behaviour is not new for Australian cricketers. Remember this effort from Warnie at the 1997 Ashes?
But perhaps this behaviour is now causing such consternation as it’s coming from a new generation who have not earned the respect, or right, that justified the exultant celebrations of Warnie’s time in the mind of cricketing fans.
But this developing reputation must be quashed in 2010 if the Australian team, and Test cricket in this country, is going to stay relevant into the future.
Scandals and controversy. 2009 was the year of the scandal – Tiger Woods, Brendan Fevola, Matthew Johns, Greg Inglis, just to name a few. Expect more of the same in 2010 with the media spotlight shining ever more intently on any indiscretion.
With this in mind, it’s time for sportsmen to acknowledge their responsibility to their teams and codes; understanding that their actions will have severe repercussions and they need to act with maturity – accepting they must sacrifice the binge-drinking ways of the MySpace generation if they want to be professional sportsmen.
The same applies for their American counterparts who face an even greater spotlight with TMZ, the popular celebrity gossip website, set to launch a sporting version of their site in 2010; ensuring sport is mashed even more with ‘celebrity’.