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For the last couple of days, I’d been looking forward to writing about how A-League fans in Melbourne will react to the emergence of the Heart and how torn I feel as an original Melbourne Victory supporter. That’ll have to wait though as, unfortunately, the coverage of Everton’s friendly with the A-League’s newest franchise has got under my skin.
In particular, I’m talking about The Age’s use of two, primarily, AFL writers to cover a “soccer” game.
This is not a football versus AFL article, though. As I’ve written before, I couldn’t care less for that tedious and ultimately pointless debate.
My concern here is with the reporting of the game in Australia, and the A-League in particular, by the general media.
Quite simply, it’s just not good enough.
Lets start with Greg Baum’s analysis of the game, “Melbourne finds a new Heart beat.”
The first edition of the article that ran on theage.com.au said the Everton Down Under organisers’ hopes for a 15,000 person crowd were “dashed”. A comment I found particularly surprising seeing as the official attendance figure was 19,621.
Right now, if you click through to Baum’s piece, you’ll read this instead:
“Ambitiously, organisers priced tickets from $49 to $142, slashing some to $19 when, unsurprisingly, they refused to move. Officially, the crowd was nearly 20,000, a creative reckoning. Across town, a new stadium built specifically for Heart and for soccer, lay in darkness. It was confounding.”
What made it a “creative reckoning”? Because one of The Age’s writers looked out across the stadium and thought, “Mate, I reckon there’s not even 15,000 people here?”
We’ve been through this made-up-numbers game before when The Daily Telegraph ran a shameless “exposé” on the attendance figure from a Sydney FC game based on looking at pictures.
So why take such a cheap shot Greg, if you’ve got no proof? And why did The Age’s sub-editors let it through?
“Confounding,” indeed.
Dan Silkstone’s match report for The Age has some equally worrying moments.
For example: “The Heart was born, not of demand for a second team but out of an FFA reluctance to cede the whole of Melbourne to the Victory. Lacking any natural constituency, it has gone about creating itself for footballing purists.”
It seems pretty obvious to me there was actually a need.
While there are plenty of “football purists” who follow the Victory, a huge swath of round ball lovers have felt isolated by Melbourne’s inaugural A-League club. Ernie Merrick’s men, with their Scottish theme song and kick and rush football, aren’t their team and never will be.
I could go on and on about all the other reasons for the Heart’s existence but there’s so much more to tackle in Silkestone’s article. Like why he thinks the Heart are “suddenly existent”!
Maybe I’m the only one, but I’ve known about the Heart for quite some time. In fact, they even ran, an admittedly tawdry, competition in Melbourne’s biggest selling newspaper to name the side. Weren’t you guys involved in that?
Oh.
Anyway, Dan, the Everton friendly wasn’t the Heart’s first game, just the only one you’d written about.
These might seem like minor points, and there’s plenty more of them within these two pieces but they are crucial.
It’s no longer okay for the Australian media to take such a blasé approach to reporting neither the A-League nor the Socceroos.
The game’s followers are highly educated and will just go elsewhere, while Fairfax’s other readers who are interested in finding out more about their city’s new A-League team miss out on a fair and balanced report.
While I doubt it, maybe those behind the Heart are simply happy to be getting two writers from one major newspaper to cover their glamour friendlies.
But I’m not.
Fairfax sent a team of 10 to South Africa to cover the Socceroos’ World Cup campaign. While they seem happy to lap up the increase in sales such a tournament brings with it, when it comes to the local game this sort of disregard isn’t acceptable.
Baum and Silkstone in particular are good, experienced writers and Fairfax has some wonderful football specialists like Sebastian Hassett so what’s gone wrong?
Its possible FFA’s recent decision to sue Fairfax hasn’t helped but I doubt that’s the main reason behind these latest articles. In fact, this actually isn’t new from The Age.
Greg Baum was similarly dismissive of Juventus’ friendly against Melbourne Victory back in 2008 calling it a “circus”.
At the time Baum misjudged the significance of a visit of such a team, even if almost all their biggest players were missing, and also what it meant to a large part of the Italian community in Australia.
This time, Fairfax are misjudging the whole thing.
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