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What does Harry Kewell have to do with the current protracted pay dispute between the AFL and the AFLPA? The answer is nothing. Most sensible people with a modicum of knowledge in the sporting industry would tell you this.
However, in a rambling piece ostensibly designed to tell the AFL players to know their place in the AFL scheme of things, Collingwood President Eddie McGuire used the Kewell soap opera to bring out that old creaky Trojan horse, yet again, for a spot of soccer bashing.
“For once it looked as if local soccer was scoring a well-deserved goal. But not for the first time in soccer’s chequered history in this country, the goal turned into an own one,” Eddie opined as he began to grind his well worn axe for his Sunday Herald Sun audience.
The reason for all this blithering stemmed from Eddie’s “exclusive” announcement two weeks ago on Triple M radio that a deal had been done to bring Kewell to A-League club, Melbourne Victory.
Eddie should have known better. A deal is never done until pen meets paper on the dotted line.
Should Kewell’s deal with Victory not eventuate, then he has only got himself to blame for being made to look silly. Eddie’s sole interest was in getting the scoop and getting one over the soccer media.
Rather than accept reality, that he prematurely jumped the gun on the Kewell story, he treated his audience with treated lines like: “Sooner or later the greed and corruption in soccer will bring it undone.”
He then pressed the fear button for his AFL audience by hyperbolically adding: “The same will happen only quicker in AFL if one side squeezes too hard.”
Which brings me to the central tenet of Eddie’s Sunday morning AFL sermon – “the great soccer-AFL divide.” On behalf of myself and the readers of this piece let me ask you, Eddie:
What divide? Is this an analogy to the divide between good and evil?
What does the labyrinthine world that is the international soccer player market, where players are paid according to their market worth, have to do with the closed shop that is the AFL?
We are talking about a market that involves dozens of professional leagues, hundreds of teams and tens of thousands of players, where Kewell and Mandic’s current dalliance with the market is but a little pimple on international soccer’s great big rump.
Yes, significant on a local scale, small beer on a global scale.
What does all this have to do with AFLPA’s reasonable request for their players to be paid 27 per cent of AFL revenue?
Why compare apples with oranges?
Why don’t you just admit the “soccer bashing” was just a ploy to distract readers from the patent absurdity of some of your arguments?
I had to laugh when you brought up Andrew Demetriou’s past as an ex-AFLPA leader to support the notion that the AFL boss truly has the players interest at heart.
This is clearly a dispute between management and the workers. If Demetriou was on the workers’ side, there would be no dispute.
Name dropping another ALP mate (former ACTU leader) Bill Kelty was also utterly irrelevant. He’s not representing the workers, he doing Demetriou’s bidding.
Eddie, you finished the piece with this quite remarkable observation: “Soccer lives on a screw-you basis. AFL survives on goodwill.”
Do you have any idea how soccer has survived in Australia?
Well, here’s the answer provided by the Ethiopian born ambassador for the “United Through Football” program here in Victoria, Melbourne Heart player, Kamal Ibrahim: “The world game is used by newly arrived and culturally diverse communities to connect with their new home – Australia and local community.”
If that is not the definition of goodwill, I don’t know what is.
So, Eddie, make your arguments about the AFL project and players sacrificing for the greater good, but making cheap jibes at the expense of another code is just not cricket.
The saga concerning one player and your little involvement in it does not justify that pitiful closing remark.
In closing, I just wish to say that I accept your indifference to the A-League and your wish for soccer in Australia to forever remain the AFL’s shadow.
You just need to stay classy about it.
Next week, can we please have a column from you extolling the evenness of the AFL competition in the light of your team’s 117 point demolition of the Kangaroos?
If ever there was a contest between the haves and the have-nots, then this was it.
Last night at a function on the eve of Glasgow Celtic’s friendly against Melbourne Victory at Crown Casino, Eddie McGuire professed his undying love for the Bhoys.
According to a tweet from Michael Lynch, Andy Harper asked “what you are doing here?”
P.S: In a gesture of goodwill, I voluntarily called the game soccer in this piece.
Art Sapphire is the pseudonym for Athas Zafiris, and is on Twitter @ArtSapphire.
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