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The Roar

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Happy New Year to the A-League's persistent critics!

4th January, 2016
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Will Wanderers fans show up in Perth? (AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts)
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4th January, 2016
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Kudos to Sydney FC chairman Tony Pignata for inviting out for coffee one of the A-League’s most belligerent critics.

On December 28, a war of words erupted on Twitter between Malcolm Conn – Senior Communications Manager for Cricket Australia – and prominent sports reporter for The Age, Rohan Connolly.

In a series of now-deleted tweets, Conn said “soccer in Australia is all out there on its own in abuse” and went on to call football fans “Class A grubs”.

Conn also told Connolly, “I guarantee far more of your non-whites going to cricket than soccer in Oz,” before deleting his tweets amid a flurry of condemnation.

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Bizarre as they were, Conn’s comments should come as no surprise. After all, this is a bloke the Fear Of A Round Ball blog once dedicated an entire post to.

What is surprising is the fact that Conn holds a position of considerable influence at Cricket Australia.

His Twitter bio states as much, not that Conn wants me to know. Like many A-League fans, he blocked me on Twitter some time ago.

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While Conn uses his Twitter account to encourage his 26,000 followers to watch cricket, a more puzzling exercise is his persistent denigration of another potential support base.

Plenty of Aussies follow multiple sports, so why Conn should choose to so vociferously attack the A-League is perhaps something Pignata can get to the bottom of.

At any rate, Conn’s labelling of football fans as “grubs” resulted in me not bothering to take my girlfriend to Brisbane Heat’s clash with the Hobart Hurricanes the following evening.

Instead, I spent my disposable income on tickets to the Brisbane International tennis, and I bet I’m not the only A-League fan to remove my hard-earned from cricket’s potential funding pool.

How this helps Cricket Australia’s bottom line is beyond me, however they seem content to persist with a media head who continues to alienate would-be fans.

Maybe it’s a News Corp thing – Conn was their chief cricket writer for 22 years – but he’s not the only News employee, old and new, with an axe to grind against the A-League.

Spending Christmas with my family in Sydney, I came across a Rebecca Wilson editorial in The Daily Telegraph in which she claimed the A-League had lost its lustre.

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“The A-League’s conversion to a summer sport was, without doubt, a masterstroke,” opined Wilson – thereby starting her piece with a factual error.

Never mind that the A-League has always been played in summer, Wilson soldiered on in a similar vein for the next 500 or so words, ignoring facts and reminding readers – as if there was any doubt – that she hates football.

What struck me as odd was not that Wilson was given a back-page platform to air her views, but rather that The Daily Telegraph considers this part of a viable business model.

My Dad has been a faithful Telegraph subscriber for decades, but in my household we read the Sydney Morning Herald. No prizes for guessing why.

In his recent excoriation of Football Federation Australia, Guardian journalist Joe Gorman revealed an open secret – that FFA was leaking major stories to The Daily Telegraph in return for favourable coverage.

It was a tactic that worked for a while, but with the Big Bash League now commanding the lion’s share of media attention, FFA might as well get on the front foot and start defending the A-League.

That’s exactly what they did in tweeting a response to Wilson’s column on Boxing Day, and their initiative is to be applauded.

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Wilson isn’t even on Twitter, though no doubt she would have blocked me just like Rita Panahi, Richard Hinds and their erstwhile News Corp stablemate Malcolm Conn have all already done.

That’s no skin off my nose. But if I can wish for one thing in 2016, it’s that the A-League’s pathologically obsessed critics are consistently held to account.

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