- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Talking with a Victory supporter the other day about the goings-on in the VPL, I could see the confusion in his eyes. He was thinking visible panty line.
Fair enough. I don’t know where baby pigeons live. Why should an A-League supporter know where home-grown A-League players come from?
Then again, I’m not chewing my knuckles over pigeons.
Thanks, he said, but he just didn’t feel welcome at those lower leagues. Those clubs had turned their backs on the A-League. They hated his A-League club and they hated A-League supporters. He knew that.
He knew the story. They were all bitter about the NSL, even those haters attached to the three thousand or so clubs that never actually competed in the NSL including the ones that spent 20 years petitioning all and sundry to have it closed down because it was sucking the grassroots dry and arguing for a radical rethink of the national league…
He wouldn’t be darkening their ticket box and sending them the message that he tolerated bigotry and ignorance.
So, he said, what was I planning for the off-season? Other than dropping by the football club five or six times a week?
Only the HAL-snob gets an off-season. Elsewhere the football never ends. There are winter leagues, summer leagues, pre-seasons, post-seasons, it goes all year and longer now the national curriculum has kicked in.
We’re keen on achieving football excellence. Good on us. The national curriculum wants juniors exposed to more football and they are being exposed to more football.
For those dabbling in grassroots football who also follow the A-League, it pans out at about 19.8 months of football in every 12.
That doesn’t apply to many though. Active A-League supporters are in the minority, which is probably a good thing, because if more than half of the 1.7 million participants plus their entourages turned up they wouldn’t fit into the stadiums anyway.
HAL doesn’t have to worry about that because the majority at the grassroots are gainfully employed attending to football’s future and are so mentally and physically exhausted by about Week 2 of their 300-day-a-year 15-year journey through junior football they can’t get up the ramp to onto the concourse.
That is, they are not singling the A-League out by staying away from it in their droves. It goes with having a kid who’s set his sights on the A-League. They stop going to the cinema and taking holidays too. No one sees them any more. It’s just them, a ball and the cabbage.
It’s a gruelling journey, the Designated Pathway, and there are all sorts of prices being paid because battalions of kids have set their hearts on the A-League.
Ironically, the A-League looks to be paying some of them.
They’ve bought the product and now they don’t have time to sit around watching football or television, they’ve got work to do. If it’s any consolation to the coalminers, Sony is suffering too.
Junior football is where the mass of participants and their families are so it should be the engine-room for A-League attendances. It probably would be, too, if the federations hadn’t gone and designed such a mad, bad and expensive youth development program to help supply, again ironically, the A-League.
The A-League probably won’t be seeing them or their designated drivers for a while; not until a club signs the kid.
The increased workloads since we went Dutch and the knock-on effects have been a hot topic at the grassroots for about five years. Lifestyles, hobbies and relaxations have been jettisoned in the name of improving Australia’s standing in the world of football.
Alas, the lurid details rarely get a run on HAL’s terraces and forums where wiser ideas are afoot about the reasons behind the Great Disconnect. Everyone agrees on what those reasons are and unanimously so since the ones that disagreed were taken out the back and shot.
Most of those were trying to explain the concept of grassroots overload, and why not being across the A-League was not, as the tiny-minded HAL-snob is wont to allege, evidence of their being anti-something.
Most think the NSL was a telco and some think HAL is a computer. Some call it soccer because they know karate. It takes all kinds and football takes us all.
That was the other half of my point about the HAL-snob getting out to the cabbage patches.
If he knew what everyone else was doing and why they were doing it, he might begin to comprehend how the grassroots minutiae affects the A-League and vice-versa, and could himself help combat the bigotry and ignorance that bug him so.
Are you the ultimate team manager? Pick your own superstar team and go head to head with other football fans for glory and cash prizes on Draftstars. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.