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Last night was not a good evening for Australian football. The Under-19s failed to make it out of their group in the Asian Championships and will not be at next year’s Under-20 World Cup.
This is a tournament that had previously provided a feast for Australian football fans in the otherwise famine period between 1974 and 2006.
And the senior team slumped to defeat against Qatar, the first time they have been vanquished by the tiny Gulf nation (on the park at least, there was the small matter of losing a certain World Cup bid to them but my therapist tells me I’ve gotten over that).
However, gloom and doom are for other columns because we are mere days away from the next instalment in what is quickly becoming the best rivalry in the A-League, if not the cluttered landscape of Australian club sport.
It has taken less than three seasons for Sydney FC and the Western Sydney Wanderers to become the hottest ticket in town and on Saturday night, an expected sell-out crowd of some 42,000 will add to the allure and the story of this footballing city.
There was some chest-thumping in the media this week from David Gallop aimed squarely at his former employers at the National Rugby League, who he claims weren’t able to sell out Sydney Football Stadium for any NRL game this season. While that’s absolutely true, I don’t think it’s necessary to be the rowdy cousin while inflaming some sort of football-rugby league conflict.
There is much to be gained for a club like Western Sydney to unite with their co-tenants at Wanderland, the Parramatta Eels. It would be beneficial to combine forces in order to try and convince the government to upgrade Parramatta Stadium. And there was that small matter of the NRL grand final and 83,000 fans.
But I digress. The Sydney derby has become, in a small space of time, monumental for the A-League and the FFA, and in this instance the governing body should take a lot of credit for its success. It was FFA who nurtured the Wanderers in the first two years and got just about everything right in terms of fan consultation, name, colours, home ground, coaching appointments and backroom staff.
Thereby, they created the perfect antagonist for Sydney FC’s control of the Harbour City. I wonder if the same result would have been achieved if it had all happened the other way around.
Ten years ago, when the National Soccer League had finally succumbed in its brave fight to give football fans a national club competition and the seeds were being planted for a brand new league, the temptation would have been great for the FFA to have plonked their Sydney license right into the NSL heartland. It’s a big “what if” but had the A-League’s first Sydney club been the Wanderers of today, would it have been as easy to have created Sydney FC as a second team?
Frank Lowy has been quoted as saying that he felt at the time that a Sydney club needed to play out of the SFS, and thus for seven seasons, Sydney really was sky blue.
Whether by design or luck, the anointing of Sydney FC and the holding off of the Wanderers appears to have been a masterstroke. It gave time for some post NSL wounds to heal and for the tribal rumble of support to build.
While not forgetting that the Wanderers were the fallback position after the disaster that was Gold Coast United, it was a great fallback position, and perhaps the FFA learned from the mistake of the Melbourne Heart introduction.
While the Melbourne derby was also an instant hit, the Heart weren’t any different to the Victory, apart from being a few years younger and a bit of an afterthought. They played out of the same ground, appeared to appeal to the same area and demographic and seemed different in shirt colour only. I’m happy to be corrected about this from Melbourne fans.
The creation of the Wanderers as the antagonist to Sydney FC’s foundation club status could not have been scripted better. Sydney’s greater west is a heaving heartbeat of our wonderful game and the fans of the Wanderers, having got the club they truly yearned for, have lit up the league with their amazing support.
They have challenged the blue half of Sydney to show their passion and numbers, and their rival fans have responded. A 25,000 crowd for the opening game of the season, with no Alessandro Del Piero-like marquee fandom pulling the masses through the gates, is testament to that. Yes, I know there was a certain Mr Villa in the other team but it was a better crowd than I’d say many Sydney FC officials were expecting.
As we roll towards the next Sydney derby, we can tip a hat to the FFA, who may have taken a circuitous route via Southport and Townsville to finally arrive in Parramatta, but who made it in the end. The Sydney derby has become a jewel in the city’s major events crown.
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