- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
So Ms Kristina Keneally and her coterie of wise ministers have weaseled another one through parliament in the dark of night? What? Again?
Well, apparently yes. Another sporting team, playing rugby union or AFL or something, has been granted permission to make use of western Sydney’s vast sporting fields.
The NSW government is surely involved.
And you thought the decision to build a desal plant at Kurnell was short-sighted?
The government and some sporting overlords simply don’t get it. The fact is, that for the most part, there are two sports that matter to the people of western Sydney – rugby league and football (that’s soccer for the denialists).
AFL and rugby union barely register outside of latte-land. A quick look at either Sydney newspaper during the long hard winter months will tell you that.
Newish sporting clubs in Sydney have a patchy track record. The Swans and the Waratahs are already floundering in a tough sporting landscape.
Now the Greater Western Whatsies have sprung up and are being backed by ill-informed expansionists who only see the “upside”. Not sure if the Whatsies plan to play AFL or rugby union; either way it’s not going to be pretty.
There is no conclusive evidence that Sydney needs or wants a second AFL team. The Swans were uprooted from their spiritual home of South Melbourne and replanted in Sydney.
Apart from a blip in the mid 1990s, which neatly coincided with the Super League war, the Swans have attracted few new supporters who are not expat Victorians or related to expat Victorians. AFL interest in Sydney (and western Sydney in particular) is peripheral at best.
Speaking of peripheral, let’s talk Waratahs. Outside of pubs in small pockets of Sydney (you know the ones), a Super Something game is simply not on the radar for the overwhelming majority of the city’s 4.5 million people. How many people really care when the final of the competition is sometimes played on another far away continent by two groups of players even the diehards would struggle to recognise?
With this level of interest, the creation of a second Sydney-based rugby union team would be an unmitigated disaster.
Rugby union is just not in the blood in western Sydney. Put simply, the “event” buses to Waratah games (or even Wallaby games) aren’t coming in from Campbelltown, Doonside or Quakers Hill.
When AFL and rugby union attract water cooler talk in Sydney’s CBD offices, this is often cited as anecdotal proof of underlying interest in those sports. The trouble is the factory floors and building sites of western Sydney don’t have water coolers.
Instead everybody brings his or her own esky, which is full of cordial and devon sandwiches. And more often than not, rugby league is the topic du jour.
It will take a lot more than a shiny new team playing a peculiar new sport to win over the masses in western Sydney.
Has the rugby league season started yet?
What about now?
Reckon you can pick the winning team? Build your own dream team with Draftstars daily fantasy and compete on any match. For great odds on the NRL head on over to PlayUp. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.