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Supporters in Adelaide care more about football than fans in Brisbane. What else can we conclude from the fact Josep Gombau was voted coach of the A-League All Stars over Mike Mulvey?
It may be a Mickey Mouse fixture to some, but the now-annual A-League All Stars encounter enticed more than 16,000 A-League fans to cast their vote for Adelaide United tactician Josep Gombau to coach the All Stars against Juventus.
I’ll come right out and state that I’m a big fan of Gombau, and more specifically the way his Adelaide United team plays.
The Spaniard has been a breath of fresh air in a competition in which too many coaches prefer to grind out results through dour football instead of employing a genuine attacking style.
But I found it the height of madness when Gombau launched an astonishing verbal assault on journalist Val Migliaccio earlier this season, and I’m glad I wasn’t the only one.
The Courier Mail’s redoubtable Marco Monteverde wrote as much in a scathing rebuke published earlier in the week on the decision to appoint Gombau as All Stars manager.
Monteverde argues that as the coach of a premiership winning team, the most suitable candidate in Mulvey was overlooked in a straight-out popularity contest – and I’m inclined to agree.
There was a great editorial in the March edition of When Saturday Comes which argues that Manchester City manager Manual Pellegrini is viewed as boring by the English press because he refuses to engage in media mind games.
When it comes to generating post-match soundbites, the nonchalant Pellegrini generally shrugs his shoulders, offers some barely multisyllabic thoughts on the game and shuffles away with scant regard for anything the media says.
It’s not the same with Mulvey – who is actually incredibly insightful behind a microphone – but it speaks to the fact that the more demonstrative coaches receive a disproportionate amount of media attention.
But perhaps the most overlooked aspect of why Gombau received more votes than Mulvey is simply the fact that the citizens of Adelaide care more about football than they do in Brisbane.
Call it a ‘pissant town’ or a parochial one, but Adelaide is a city which seems to care deeply about how it’s perceived on a national stage.
Contrast that with Brisbane, where despite two A-League championships the Roar have struggled to make their mark on a city-wide consciousness.
It’s a bit like that with any kind of popularity contest, where quality often takes a back seat to whatever is generating the noise of the crowd.
One of the best examples of that from this week alone are the nominations for the reliably baffling Football Fans Downunder awards.
It’s not because I failed to garner a single nomination that I say that – my popularity plateaued the minute I began to look like Milo Aukerman and has flatlined ever since – but because the vast majority of A-League fans wouldn’t have the first clue what FFDU even is.
Yet somehow, by virtue of filling a gap in the market, an otherwise anonymous online community has positioned itself as an honorary organisation worthy of doling out awards for the quality of Australia’s football coverage.
With any luck, one of this year’s victors might create their own chuckle-worthy Wikipedia entry like someone did a couple years ago, and the rest of the A-League’s multifaceted football community can get on with the serious business of trying to analyse the game.
But what the awards illustrate, just the like the A-League All Stars voting process, is that those who make the most noise almost invariably generate the most popularity.
And the most fascinating potential narrative of any possible Brisbane-Adelaide showdown is how their respective coaches conduct themselves.
Gombau may well jump for joy should his team get on the scoresheet, but if the Roar team win the A-League title, it’ll be Mulvey who has the last laugh.