Has anyone seen our record against South Korea over the last 40 years.
It’s pretty shocking.
Arguably the South Korea NT is the strongest it has been at any point in its history.
We were only 60 seconds away from actually getting the win.

Make it to the 95th minute of game leading 1-0, and 49 out of 50 times you are going to win the game.
That’s football.
The key thing is that one Spurs superstar was up against a Hibernian defender in crucial moments of the game, so yeh, stuff like that is more likely to happen.

I agree with a fair bit of the very first post made by JAJ.
I’m not sure if everything can be sheeted back home to Danny Townsend.
For the first 15 years of the A-League we were all screaming for a football person to run the comp.
Well, we got him.
And some of the recent decisions which didn’t work out, well, much of that is being done out of necessity, because financially, the comp is on its knees at the moment.
You don’t sell a one-third ownership of a comp to a foreign venture capital firm unless you’re pretty desperate, and I doubt Townsend had much to do with that decision.
And that wasn’t the first foreign group gaining influence over how the comp is run.
As we stand, the comp (along with half the clubs) are at the behest of foreign players, who may or may not have the best interests of Australian football at heart.
In truth, I’m not sure anyone is really at fault.
Lowy set the scene for where we today, for better or worse, but there would not have been a fully professional league without him, even if we can disagree with the direction he took.
From the first season, it has been a bit of an up and down ride, a few seasons up, a few seasons down, then a few seasons up (but not as good as the previous up), then more than a few season down, etc; etc.
After 20 years, I think we can conclude: I doubt it mattered how it was done. This is professional football in Australia. It’s going about as well as it was ever going to go.
It is what it is.

I understand the football side of the argument.
But the APL isn’t thinking about that at all, it’s really about keeping the whole thing alive for another season or two.
The things you mention are good, but they won’t balance the books.
Indeed, there’s an extra cost to it all, recalling that the APL currently pays for production costs of every game broadcast.
On the bright side, the two nominated sides are likely to draw more than WU and Macarthur.
However, if the annual grant has been cut in half from what it was 3 or 4 years ago, these new owners will need extremely deep polckets.

It’s not about strategy.
It’s about a much needed $50 million in the coffers to keep the whole thing together for another season or two.

I have followed the A-League from day one, from the very first training session in a car park without change rooms.
It was a bold first step to basically dismantle the former national league, bar the ethnic clubs from getting involved, and starting up franchises from scratch.
Bold, very bold.
Sort of worked for a while, but in the end, are enough people going to form a life long emotional attachment to a privately owned franchise that has been around for 5 minutes?
It’s a big ask.
As for the media situation, wow, how things have changed.
For something like the first 20 years of the internet being widely available in Australia, TWG ruled the roost, covered everything, did it really well, had a comments function early in the piece, and the best bit: it was actually paid for by the taxpayer! The FA didn’t have to spend one cent on it!
Then you had the eccellent 442 online site, hundreds of articles, thousands of football fans online at the same time, once again, didn’t cost the FFA one cent!
Good deal with Foxtel, great coverage, mid week shows, regular features on the 24/7 sports news channel – the FFA didn’t have to contribute production costs (as happens now with Paramount).
Early on I was involved in the Victory fan site. It was huge, might have been close to the biggest sports site in Australia at the time. Didn’t cost the FFA a cent. Doesn’t exist any more.
In recent years, the APL has had to basically sell the farm to replace much of the above, $40 million spent, and it barely lasted a couple of years.
What’s next?
Selling licenses at an exorbitant price to dubious overseas owners to keep the lights on for a couple more years.

Lose your current (small) fan base and build another one?
I can’t imagine what could go wrong with a strategy like that.

For the 20 years of the A-League’s existence Australia has experienced a mining boom (more or less).
So we’ve probably mined all the good fortune that there was to mine out of that boom.
That mining boom helped fund a large chunk of the $300 million in losses incurred over that period.
Thank you mining boom.
What’s left?
Dodgy overseas backers.

Don’t worry, we’re about to sell two more licenses which will bring in $50 million.
If it took the APL 3 years to burn through $140 million of Silver Lake’s funding then at a conservative estimate, the $50 million should keep the lights on for about a year.

This bit of the reporting is certainly a worry:
“APL have..struggled to meet the trigger clauses within the broadcast deal significantly reducing the amount of money given back to..clubs. Club grants, once..more than $3m a year, have been cut in half & there are fears it could be..less as..belt tightening spreads..”

If clubs were all making huge losses when they had a decent TV deal, can you imagine what the losses are looking like now?

I think all Australian football fans are missing Fußball ist unser Leben.
He did a lot to promote the game, and it’s no coincidence that there has been a steady decline in the A-League since his sudden disappearance.
He foresaw that streaming would be the saviour of the A-League 5 or 6 years before the arrival of Paramount.
He may still end up being right on this point.
He wrote some terrific articles on how to advance the game in Australia, two I can recall off the top of my head:
– using volunteers to build football stadiums at next to no cost.
– putting the A-League on youtube and earning revenue via a sponsorship voucher scheme, whereby, anytime someone clicked a link to a sponsor, the A-League would earn 20 cents. 100 million clicks could earn the A-league $20 million. Money for jam.
He foresaw a time when Youtube, Twitter and Facebook would be fighting over each other to pay big money for the rights to the A-League.

Some good points.
When I see these sorts of articles, I do wonder how well people know the Melbourne sports market.
The City of Melbourne has one of the world’s greatest sporting precincts, and people flood to this precinct on a weekly basis all year round.
For anyone to think that games hosted in the backblocks of Dandenong or Werribee will somehow improve attendances from what they are in the city (for a club actually called City) is a little be misguided.

“Impunity for macho actions is over,” Díaz said. “Rubiales cannot continue in office.”

This sums it up for me, it’s as if FIFA’s boys club continues with no accountability, all the more galling that it would happen at the very end of what was the best ever WWC.

People might think it unfair to bring FIFA into it, but you know what? Who was responsible for bringing in the Saudis as a major sponsor of a WWC? Give me a break.

And now we hear that the FA is wanting to sue the player involved, basically for making the rather obvious statement that the violation was not sought by her. Where is FIFA in this? Is Infantino still rabbiting on about his daughters?

If this doesn’t have the outcome that we all know is the only appropriate one, it leaves a massive stain on FIFA, the Spanish FA and the WWC.

“Around me, were seated some interesting characters, obviously devoid of any real knowledge of the game, but as passionate as a bandwagon fan could be. ”

Just prior to the tournament starting, I posted about my recollections around the Olympics football games, where games often had big crowds, but I was completely surrounded by people who knew nothing about the game (I guess a bit like those that may have attended Handball or other olympic events).

With the Matildas being household names, it’s fair to have a hope that there might be a bump in AWL games, but the fact is that at least 80% of the Matildas are playing overseas, certainly all the best known names are. I think there will be a bump, but in the scheme of things I’m expecting it to be a pretty small bump.

The administators are doing their best to ride the tournament wave and get people excited about the start of the AWL season, which is proper, but equally, we all know the glow will fade with each passing day.
C’est la vie.

Just in case people aren’t aware, the France game counts as a draw for the purposes of the record books and rankings.
So Matildas ended the tournament with 3 wins, a draw and 3 losses for the purposes of the rankings.
It’s a little bit surprising that we dropped a spot, but then again, these sorts of rankings often deliver quirky results, and when it’s all said and done, this isn’t entirely out of the ball park, it’s just one spot.

I think football can tweak it slightly in their favour (relative to what has been the norm for 100 years now).

I wonder how they allocate funding for rectangular fields across the relevant football codes and how they might allocate the money spent on ovals? (between AFL and cricket.
Indeed, I’m involved with a club that uses two football pitches during the Winter months established either side of a cricket pitch used in the Summer.

That’s a fair perspective.
Sport can be a brutal business, but lobbying governments for taxpayer money is the most brutal sport of all.

At the end of the day, as good as we were for most of the tournament, we probably showed that we are a fraction short of top 3 material. No embarrassment in that.
Given England now has a very strong Premier League, and the whole squad is playing Premier League, they are not going to drop out of that top 3 any time soon.
How can we improve the Matildas going forward? That’s easy, get the majority into the Premier League.
About both of our last two opponents, they were clearly better on the night, but I’d like to mention a couple of goals they scored:
– that first one against England was about as perfect a strike as you will ever seen, and
– actually, that 2nd Swedish goal may have been even better, true captain’s goal.

Fowler’s last two games were relatively poor, but she’s young, and during the tournament as a whole, she showed oodles of class, indeed, at a level that we are not used to seeing in Australian national teams.

It’s a good point, having Raso and Foord wide AND Kerr and Fowler both forward of midfield was perhaps a touch ambitious, especially at the pointy end of the tournament.

It’s been a hell of a ride, followed by the whole nation.
Everyone is a Matildas fan.
We may never be the same as a nation again.
We end the tournament with 3 wins, 3 losses and a draw.

Foz getting stuck in, all guns blazing.

Matildas can be proud of their tournament, and their performance tonight against a much better team.

What stood out for me for the English was their overall professionalism and their close in ball control was another level again (Mary Fowler probably the only one who come close to that level for the Matildas).

Also notable that the English stuck with a back three, and didn’t mind letting the aussies stack the flanks with overlaps. While Foord and Raso absolutely dominated in the games against Canada and Denmark, they definitely met their match tonight. Neither was given an inch by the English defence.

We know: current Euro holders, and they all, and I do mean the whole team, they all play with Premier League clubs.

We can’t be surprised that there might be a gap cross the whole squad.

Crazy last few minutes in the Spain v Sweden semi final

Moe
I have it on good authority that 99% of spectators going to AFL games in Sydney and Brisbane are émigrés from Southern states.