In this photo released by the Xinhua news agency, Petrovski Sasho of Australia's Newcastle Jets leaps over a player of China's Beijing Guo'an during the AFC Champions League group E round soccer match in Beijing on Tuesday on March 10, 2009. Beijing Guo'an won 2-0. AP Photo/Xinhua, Zhang Duo
The Bad News Bears are really pushing it now. While it’s very easy to be sympathetic to the dressing-room complaints of the Newcastle Jets, and this scribe is as someone who got royally f***ed over by a number of employers of my own over the years, the wisdom of threatening a boycott of a crucial game right on the cusp of getting through to the quarter-finals of the ACL really does have to be questioned.
What on earth they thinking?
Jets owner Con Constantine is right to say the issue of ACL player bonuses, which has brought this standoff to a head, has nothing to do with him or the Jets.
“It’s between the PFA and FFA… one says it’s apples, the other says it’s bananas,” he said. “The team will be on the plane on Saturday.
And anyone who doesn’t want to play for Newcastle Jets and thinks he’s bigger than the club, then we have no problems. He stays in Newcastle and we put a younger player in to replace him.”
Which is a bit of a worry, as the Jets have just about enough “younger players” as it is. Any more and they’ll be less of a football team and more a boy band.
But Constantine is still part of the issue and it would be disingenuous of him to deny it. If the Jets players had been happy campers all along and there wasn’t so much simmering resentment among them, as there has conspicuously been (as anyone who read Ljubo Milicevic’s interview with Sebastian Hassett last week), such trifles wouldn’t have become flashpoints.
Jets director of football Remo Nogarotto has admitted “when it comes to dramas at our joint, there is always a fair bit of contributory negligence”.
And that is refreshing to hear.
That’s where the solution to the Jets’ problems needs to start and end. The players obviously feel aggrieved by a number of issues – there has scarcely been a good-news story out of the club for 12 months – and it doesn’t help their salaries are paid by a guy who has an unusual proprietorial affection for every dollar that leaves his wallet.
Much has been made of Constantine’s singlehanded propping up of the club. It is something for which he rightfully deserves much credit.
But being a stinge by the same token has diminished, I believe, a lot of the potential the club has had. People love a larger-than-life benefector but no one likes a Scrooge McDuck – and that is exactly how Constantine is seen by the media, Jets fans and his own players.
He needs to literally and metaphorically loosen up a bit.
As for the players, they would be well served by bearing in mind they are not just playing for themselves but their city, the A-League and for Australia. They have a moral duty to put their best foot forward and be focused on qualifying.
The ACL has already been tarnished in the past week by the antics of one club and it does need not another team, in particular one of our own, to bring it down once more. Especially so when the FFA is working so hard to increase Australia’s berth quota in Asia’s premier football competition.
A boycott is a disastrous outcome for everybody. No one stands to win.
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