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The Herald Sun‘s front page claim that football fans are the most violent was nothing more than a media beat-up designed to take attention away from the A-League finals. With a lull in the cricket leaving only the AFL’s snoozefest NAB Cup to write about, the newspaper went for a tried-and-true tabloid special on what must otherwise have been a slow news day.
The salacious scoop had many a bogan and boofhead wailing and gnashing their teeth across News Limited websites, with imagery abounding of the foreign round-ball game descending upon our shores to destroy Australian culture and our cherished way of life.
If ever proof was needed of Australia’s insular island mentality, it can always be found in the hysteria which surrounds football supporters and their choice of sport, and trotting out the tired old “football fans are violent” line is a sure-fire way to shift newspapers and guarantee website hits on a lazy old Friday morning.
I don’t doubt Superintendent Rod Wilson’s claims that certain folk demonstrate “violent tendencies” and display a “poor attitude towards police” in Melbourne.
That’s because any time I walk down the street on a Friday or Saturday night in the so-called sporting capital of Australia, I’m usually in fear for my life.
If Supt Wilson thinks Melbourne can be a violent place, he’s right, because the city has struggled to contain anti-social elements for years.
But those anti-social elements aren’t exclusively football fans, and suggestions that A-League games are any more violent than their AFL or NRL counterparts are anecdotal at best.
Yet the problem for Football Federation Australia – who rebuked the sensational Herald Sun’s front page headline, albeit belatedly – are stories like the one journalist Paul Tatnell published earlier in the week.
Tatnell was attacked on his way out of the Melbourne derby at Etihad Stadium by a person police believe was a 16-year-old Melbourne Heart supporter.
That the alleged perpetrator is supposedly a Heart fan is not the most relevant factor, because in my opinion we don’t have a problem with A-League supporters, we have a problem with society.
If sport is a mirror of society, then it’s no surprise to see a minority of hoodlums running around and ruining things for everyone else.
Unfortunately for the A-League it only takes one gutless teenager to land a single punch and generate a negative front page headline at the same time.
But the Victorian police are wrong if they think that kind of incident means all football fans deserve to be tarnished with the same brush, when like any strata of society, the overwhelming majority of A-League fans are law-abiding citizens.
What the A-League does need to do, however, is rid itself of the persistent minority who insist on lighting flares and intimidating away fans as though it’s a bona fide component of the matchday experience.
Every time a fan lights a flare, or threatens a police officer or throws a punch at a random stranger on the footbridge outside Etihad Stadium, it gives newspapers like The Herald Sun licence to run stories about “violent football fans.”
And it justifies the use of outside security consultants like Hatamoto in the eyes of the FFA.
I wouldn’t just like to see these boneheads tossed out of A-League stadia, I’d like to see them eradicated from society altogether.
But until we address some serious social issues in this complex land of ours, it’s wrong and unfair to tarnish A-League fans as trouble-makers when it’s only a small minority causing problems.
After all, most of us are just as sick and tired of violent cretins at football games as the sub-editors at The Herald Sun.