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It is said that if you forget the lessons of history, you will repeat the same mistakes, Arguably, the Crawford Report is the most significant report on Football in Australia.
The report left no doubt about the root cause of where football found itself: broke, corrupt, inept management, few if any national polices, driven and run by self-interest.
The core of the problems lied in the management team and the management structure, with a national competition run by clubs whose base support was ethnic driven.
There were over-reactions to these clubs. Simon Hill’s famous article, Can you Smell the Fear, was based on one such reporting of a Sydney United game when race riots were reported massively in the press but at the rugby league match the same day, more than ten times the arrests were made without even a mention in the media.
However, where there is smoke, there is fire and without doubt the behaviour of some fans at some of the old NSL ethnic based clubs let the mainstream media take pot shots at football.
I have often said football caused its own problems in the past. This has lead to the uneasy feeling between Old Soccer and New Football.
Without doubt, the traditional mainstream media that supports the AFL and NRL would love some of those old NSL stories to reappear in the A-League. It could do enormous damage to link new football and old soccer riots with A-League FA Cup crowd behaviour together.
Many critics and long term football fans have asked, nay begged, now demand, that the old NSL clubs be brought back into the fold. The much mooted FA Cup is often seen as the way to unite the old and the new.
SBS often run articles outlining the need to unite and how beneficial this will be. In this light, I was reading an SBS blog on the need for an FA Cup and a poster posted the following comment:
“I’m one of the many old NSL supporters who now follows an A-League club and the A-League in general and I’m still not convinced, 6 years on, that the danger of our sport shooting itself in the foot one more (and perhaps for the last time) has disappeared.
“To this day my old club Sydney Olympic is still supported only by Greeks, Sydney United only by Croatians, APIA by Italians and so on.
“Is that fact more acceptable today than back in 2004 when our successful A-League was created without the inclusion of mono-ethnic clubs and is it in the long-term interests of our sport to throw these mono-ethnic clubs a lifeline by re-engaging them in a national-type competition once again?
“The newer followers of our national competition wouldn’t know how dangerous or even fatal for our sport that might prove to be, but us older supporters know from bitter experience that the old saying ‘soccer always manages to shoot itself in the foot’ is just an innocuous move like this one away.”
The question I ask is: are the clubs and fans of the more hard core NSL clubs ready to abide by the crowd behaviour rules, including national slogan issues.
My own interpretation is Frank Lowy and the FFA are terrified of what the press will do to football if ever a major crowd behaviour incident took place. I remember MV and SFC supporters simply chanting was reported in the Melbourne press as a riot.
I guess this is one of the reasons FFA is so strict on home ends, but that is another article in itself.
In any family, for a reunion to take place, there needs to be some recognition of sins of the past and some kind of resolution that we accept we did wrong and will not do the bad stuff again.
My reading of the Tea Leafs is that as football grows, its media has to grow as well.
In this respect, SBS could be a great deal of help.
SBS has history and many connections with the NSL clubs. SBS has never admitted (because it encouraged) the NSL ethnic based clubs did anything wrong.
SBS often write about the benefits the NSL clubs could bring to the FFA and the A-League. SBS never talk about the other side of the coin: what harm some of the still ethnic clubs could do if their fans played up.
SBS could lead the NSL clubs to a place where the risk of an incident or incidents that could damage football are very minor, present this to FFA and help unite the tribes.
This would be good for football and good for SBS.
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