- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Tickets are flying out the door and the latest Johnny Warren Medal winner will line up for the hosts, but will the Allianz Stadium pitch ruin the spectacle of Sunday’s A-League grand final?
For all the A-League’s issues – and we have to admit it has a few – next Sunday’s grand final represents another showpiece occasion for our game.
You’d better get in quick if you’re keen to buy tickets in the public sale, given that members have already sold out several bays and the visitors are expected to bring a record travelling contingent.
Meanwhile, the Sky Blues officially possess the best player in the game in the form of Milos Ninkovic, after the Serbian playmaker won the Johnny Warren Medal last night.
Ninkovic is the sort of player fans wax lyrical about in Europe, and his skills will no doubt be appreciated by a restlessly sold-out Allianz Stadium crowd of more than 42,000 on Sunday.
The majority of fans will be wearing sky blue for Sydney FC’s first home grand final since the inaugural A-League season – although, as always when Melbourne Victory are in town for a major clash, there’ll be a wall of navy blue at one end of the ground as well.
The stage is set for Australian football’s showpiece event and the sheer interest in the game – as evidenced by the amount of column inches it will generate this week – proves once again that the A-League grand final stirs the imagination like no other fixture.
Why, then, should we be worried about the pitch?
Lost amid the controversy of last Saturday’s two VAR decisions was the fact that the Allianz Stadium pitch was not exactly worthy of hosting a semi-final.
You could argue it was hardly worth hosting a football game of any kind – and it’s been that way for the entire second half of the season.
Perhaps the biggest concern for fans of the round-ball game is not the fact that the Allianz Stadium pitch is forever blighted by rugby league markings, crater-sized divots and bare patches of turf merely spray-painted green.
No, what surely rankles more is the fact that the SCG Trust – which administers Allianz Stadium – seemingly couldn’t care less.
A quick look at the board of trustees arguably reveals why. It includes the chairman of a current AFL club, the former chairman of another AFL club, a former News Corp chairman with long-standing links to rugby league, a former Wallabies coach and another former Wallabies player, and two ex-Australian international cricketers, among others.
Is there a dedicated football fan among them? Of course not.
So why should the SCG Trust care that one of its major tenants – one that routinely draws bigger crowds than either of its stadium co-tenants the Sydney Roosters and New South Wales Waratahs – plays on a pitch that is barely fit for purpose?
And when said team has the potential to draw fans away from rival codes… well, you don’t have to connect the dots.
Still, if Sydney FC didn’t want to share a multi-purpose venue used heavily by other codes, then perhaps it’s time they invested in a stadium of their own.
That’s easier said than done in a city boasting some of the highest property prices in the world, while Sydney FC’s reclusive Russian owner David Traktovenko would probably point to his hometown club Zenit Saint Petersburg as proof of everything that can go wrong with a new stadium build.
So it is that we’re left with a stadium that spends plenty of time and money on ground maintenance, only to undo all of that hard work by hosting Coldplay concerts on the playing surface.
Here’s hoping the pitch plays better than it did in the semi-final, and the likes of Ninkovic and James Troisi can showcase their stuff on a decent surface.
The A-League deserves it. Not because we love football, but because this is one of the biggest sporting events of the year.