Are we expecting too much too soon?

So, Craig foster is a great man, Churchillian, Gandiesque ??, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln are some other pretty reputable guys. Where does he fit in with all these guys, where does he sit in the Australian sporting hall of fame as far as great sports men go, .... top 5000 ... i doubt it. I'm sorry, but i could not undeerstand the bulk of the rest of your post.

Yeah just attracted to my wife. You are so defensive. Not sure why you having a go at me I was just being factious to the guy above who blames the great man Craig Foster for people not following football

Yep sure, i guess militant lesbians stop from you from being attracted to women as well !.

You mentioned the Maltese, but failed to mention the Gozitans.

Could not agree more. It's people like Paul Kent & Phil Rothfield & their attitudes who stops me from attending RL matches & the AFL CEO & his attitude who prevents me from AFL matches.

I support both NRL and the A League, I watch both leagues and have great passion for them, going to Sydney FC and NRL games regularly But what frustrates me about Football in Australia is exactly what's written on this page bad mouthing all the other sports and not accepting the truth which is that Football isn't the biggest sport in Australia and the A league won't challenge the AFL or NRL in the next decade, But the what angers me the most are people like Craig Foster who do more harm to the code that good and his comments such as the post on twitter "Timmy's flood appeal offer above $200,000.. Wow.. Phenomenal response.. Now tell me about the power of football to move Australians!" NO just sold some gear for a couple thousand each. and "Cricket successfully developed 'characters', stories, personalities. Nothing similar occurring in football at present.!" So players aren't allowed to have humour or a voice. This undermines what great efforts Football fans have done by just annoying the rest of the Australians who support other codes by dividing instead of uniting. How can Football become as big as we all hope it will be with Craig Foster saying crap on SBS like Football is Indias new favourite Sport (Even though they have only have one stadium in the whole country which JUST passes FIFA Standards and the national team can't even train in the country due to the poor strata). I'm sorry to annoy Football fans but its the truth and this is why the A League can't pull higher numbers to games because people like Craig are Dividing the die hard fans and the ones who may only go to a game once a year. Craig Foster seperates football fans from the rest by saying there better and putting the casual suporter offside. (BTW the FFA needs to show that all Australians enjoy Football) Sorry for the rant but thats my Two Cents

You're right about short memories,.JAJI. Involved in the Crawford report you may have been but you've obviously forgotten what it said about the game's leadership and who it needed to be accountable to if were ever going to have legitimacy in the eyes of the broader football community. Lowy's rich but is he rich enough to live forever? So what happens post-Lowy? If Galati, Avery, Brondolino and co. we're so terrible, and they were, perhaps you can explain to us Saint Frank's thinking when he was working his backside off in 05-06 to dismantle Crawford's reforms that were designed to rid the joint of club-appointed dickwits and keep them out the corridors of power for ever after? Why did Frank whimp it when his very specific brief upon being appointed by the Howard govt was to drive home those reforms? More to the point, when will the penny drop with the pro-Lowy barrackers out there that when Lowy goes we don't get Lowy Jnr, we revert to exactly the kind of government we had ten years ago by a bunch of faceless unaccountable club hacks whose only qualification for the job is backroom deal-making, back-stabbing and a propensity to accept gratuities because they don't stand for anyone or anything but themselves. There's no mystery about FFA's future, it's already come to a state federation near you. Four years of operation under their "new football" voting structure -- just like the old soccer voting structure -- and you'd be hard pressed to find one person in all of Australia with a single good thing to say about any of the state federations' performances. If there is any consensus at all, it's that they've achieved the impossible and are behaving with even less transparency than their appalling predecessors and achieving even worse results. Who are these cronies and cretins and deadbeats that clubs have appointed to the state federations? Who or what do they represent and what have they got to do with "new football"? The answers are nobodies, nothing and nothing. God only knows what they stand for but we can guess, and among them are those who'll be heading off to College St later this year to get the fight underway to decide who assumes Lowy's crown. And what an utterly mindless, football-irrelevant barney it will be. About all we can say for sure at this stage is that the Hungarians are on their way out. The Greeks and eastern Europeans are too conflicted to work together but none of them can do it on their own. The Dutch and Scots can't be taken seriously because they don't play dirty enough politics to be a threat to anyone. The English are hopeless at politics generally and football politics in particular. The Australians haven't a clue what's going on, they're too busy drinking to ever start thinking ahead. That leaves the Maltese and Italians, and as always the Italians have the numbers. But where are they going to find some Italian with the requisite skills to lead a national football association? What's Tony Labbozetta up to? That's right. Tony well knows that post-Lowy there will be nothing to prevent him grabbing the top job by the exact same means he grabbed the top job previously. The broader football community won't even have a right to know who voted for him or on what grounds. And all Tony needs is 13 of the states' 24 votes, which is exactly the same number of votes he needed pre-Lowy. Knowing Tony's resourcefulness and his determination to make a comeback to football administration, I think he can probably manage that. All bow to Saint Frank eh, the bloke who handed your beloved game's future back to the bad guys so they wouldn't stuff up his beloved WC bid. What a great man. Selfless. .

I don't have a problem with casual supporters but I do agree that there isn't enough people with a real passion for the game here in Australia. Well actually there's plenty of people with passion but not many have real understanding of the game. For example, there are plenty passionate folk who give up their time to coach junior teams. That's all well and good but what we need are junior coaches that have done the new FFA coaching courses. People who are really passionate will want to learn more. There aren't enough people like this in Australia.

The sensationalist media you mean. Good observation Steve.

Wilbur an impressive post, but at the end of it, I wasn't sure what your beef is - that junior clubs are fleecing parents? Is that the main beef?

Well Wilbur Poster I was actually involved in the Crawford Report and I can safely say that what the FFA has achieved in the last 7 years, with a few bumps and bruises, is a thousand times better than what was going on before 2004. Who do you want running our game - the most respected businessman in the country who devotes endless hours to the game for sheer love OR the likes of...drum roll...........Dominic Galati, Les Avery, Tony Labozetta and Paul Afkos with their endless array of related party transactions, dodgy dealings and poor organisation.... Some people have very short memories...... remind how in the NSL days the clubs further down the food chain and juniors were in full support? How many clubs were in attendance at the 2004 NSL Grand Final in front of a paltry 8,000 at Parramatta Stadium

Love your optimism, Jared, but your come-lately MVFCness shines through. If you're an average MV fan your investment in the game will amount to three hours and fifty bucks a fortnight in-season and your stock-in-trade will be an ignorance of what it was really like pre-HAL, how the game here works now outside of HAL, and an unwavering conviction that the HAL fan is the centre of the Australian football universe and if HAL is successful so is Australian football, and vice versa. In the meantime, others understand that football has been in Australia since 1880, not 2004, and to underline how it didn't get underway the day before yesterday it already has over half a million players registered players among a million or so Australians who say football is their favourite game on earth, and another few million Australians who say they are happy to support the game if its accessible to them. Get the picture? While you think HAL is going swimmingly, its weekly attendances of 30-40,000 are more indicative of Lowy's epic failure to unite the tribes than they are of a foundation to build a future on. Sure, Lowy's spin might have got a few AFL fans in the gate to shell out some small change but when those who actually play the game and fund it with their club fees are unhappy enough about what's going on beneath HAL to have voted with their feet and given FFA's planned money-spinner a big miss, the problems obviously go much deeper than giving the league some time to bed down and its fan base to grow. Realistically, if it wasn't so soon after we last bulldozed history and pretended to have started all over again, that's what we'd be talking about doing now so badly have things gone the last couple of years. Only if your horizons began and ended with the A-League and the Socceroos could you think otherwise. Can HAL manage to survive largely on AFL and NRL fans who know so little about what's really going on inside Australian football that they're happy to give it a big tick? Can any national league -- the last one, this one or the next one -- survive let alone prosper while the state federations and the clubs they oversee resolutely refuse to get their acts together and stop alienating those who play the game? As it stands FFA is doing with the A-League the dumbest thing an advertiser can possibly do, which is promote a dud product. It attracts kids whose introduction to playing the game will almost invariably involve a deadbeat club that skjns them alive for money and does everything it can to make sure any respect the kid and their family ever had for football is lost in as short a time as possible. But that's how we do it under Lowy -- pretend the game has reformed itself using the A-League as the flimsy evidence, and then expose as many people as possible to the diabolical truth about Australian football, onel that Lowy hasn't even bothered to address because it required more than a coat of paint. Thus, more people are learning about the way football and its clubs really work here and they are turning their backs on it sooner rather than later. You'd only need to spend an hour at the grassroots to understand that. If you really value the A-League Jared, and you really want it to stick around, my advice is to get yourself a copy of the Crawford report and read every word of it, and then get out there and start campaigning for its implementation beginning with the reform of the state federations' constitutions because until that happens, HAL ain't going anywhere.

just shrugged their shoulders? really?! What about after the mauling we got from Germany, i don't remember the media merely shrugging their shoulders. Lets go to another extreme however, which do you think would the average Australian prefer, to win the next world cup or to win the next three ashes series?

Fussball - Australians are much more passionate about the cricket team than the soccer team. Aussies are gutted about losing the Ashes but just shrugged their shoulders about getting knocked out of the wc.

eh if you are implying that Roarchild mixed the two up, I don't think that's the case, he would know them both - he was simply drawing a parallel, and I think it's a good parallel.

kev keegan;kenny dalgliesh -

Perhaps we are expecting too much too soon. However, great things are not achieved unless one has ambition. It drives people to do better. So although Australian football is doing relatively well, it won't improve unless it is vigilent and trying to get better. Potential can only take you so far. So I think the discussions around the A-League and youth development are definitely warranted and these critisisms will eventually lead to improvement. As for the Socceroos, the way the they played under Guus Hiddink showed the potential that they have. Having seen that, a lot of the football community knows what is possible. That is why the Pim Verbeek era was so highly criticised. Keep in mind, that Pim Verbeek was the 7th highest paid coach at the World Cup (I understand that this figure did not take into account the cost of living). So a good performance in the Asian Cup is not unreasonable even though our "golden generation" are older and slower.

Fantastic piece, Jared. Well written, and I couldn't agree more with most of your sentiments. The progress we've made so far has indeed been cause for optimism, and the fact that such a minor footballing country in world terms has been able to go to World Cups and get past strong countries like Serbia and Croatia, and push giants like Italy and Brazil, is indeed something to give a whole lot of heart to everyone with an interest in Australian football.

Thanks Leftie nice read....

Keep on keeping on Jared. Fantastic article and I don't care if you're passionate about 200 different sports - the fact football/soccer is one of them gladdens my football heart no end!