Remember, remember the 25th of October: Football's coming of age

I just wonder if in years to come, football fans here in Australia will look back on Saturday, October 25, 2014 and say, “Yep, we got noticed that night”.

In Australia’s two biggest cities, two huge club games in two different competitions drew a combined 65,000 fans into two football cauldrons.

That both Parramatta Stadium and Docklands Stadium were more closely aligned with other footy codes not so long ago might be one key indicator of the march of club football.

Of course, football fans with longer memories than a decade prior have seen so-called watershed moments before.

Way back, just three years after the political upheaval of the sacking of a democratically elected government, the National Soccer League moved swiftly to replace foundation club Mooroolbark United, who lasted only the inaugural season of Australia’s first ever club competition.

The new kids in the league were Newcastle KB United, and their entry was every bit as dynamic as that of the Western Sydney Wanderers. Huge crowds flocked to the grandly named International Sports Centre in Broadmeadow to see a team dressed in the same colour scheme as the cans of beer they were named after.

KB, as they became affectionately known, drew average crowds of 15,000 in their first few seasons, but like a lot of those early football bright spots, they crashed back down to earth.

Gough Whitlam, who passed away just days ago and led that democratically elected government, was a great friend of Western Sydney. While not as enthusiastic a sports lover as some of his successors, Gough would probably have taken great pride in the phenomenon that is the Wanderers.

And where KB failed, the Wanderers show no signs of doing so. On this night of nights they faced a veritable giant in the Asian Football Confederation, Al Hilal, who have won 31 domestic titles in their history. It was a classic David and Goliath story in the first leg of the ACL final.

The Wanderers refused to move away from Wanderland, where the atmosphere generated by the real marquee of the club – their fans – is worth a goal’s start, even though they could conceivably have tripled the attendance. It was a thumbing of the nose to populism that Gough would have enjoyed.

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, derby day had sold out Etihad Stadium. It’s somewhat ironic that the re-branded Melbourne City’s parent club Manchester City play out of a stadium with the same name. City (the Melbourne version) were the visitors on this night, bringing with them the mercurial, magical, yet disappearing David Villa.

And on this night, the greatest scorer in Spain’s national team history was relatively anonymous as a much lesser heralded foreign player and an Australian record holder combined to score all of Melbourne Victory’s goals in a thrilling 5-2 win over their own noisy neighbours.

Besart Berisha will one day be known as the greatest import in A-League history. Passionate, verging on rolling-eye crazy, the Albanian scored a hat-trick in his first Melbourne derby. When he was signed by the Victory this season from title holders Brisbane Roar, most assumed it would be a quiet shunting aside for Archie Thompson, who is entitled to long service leave as he begins his 10th season.

Instead, Archie, who once scored 21 goals in just two international matches back-to-back (not even Villa can say that), grabbed the other two goals and remains as relevant to the A-League as he did when he scored Victory’s first ever goal 10 years earlier.

While 45,000 Melburnians packed out the Docklands, back in Sydney’s west, a duo that might have sounded like a tag team in those glory days of Australian TV wrestling were helping the Wanderers to a first leg win in the Champions League final.

Tomi Juric and Ante Covic were outstanding at opposite ends of the park. Juric scored the only goal, hit the post and generally made life a misery for the Al Hilal defence in a 30-minute cameo that swung the game for the home side. Covic, at 39 the elder statesman of the A-League, was the brick wall the Wanderers needed as the Saudi champions threatened to overrun them in the latter stages of the game.

The veteran goalkeeper made two outstanding late saves in the final minutes to deny Al Hilal a vital away goal to take back home with them. Sydney might have been sky blue last week but for the next seven days it is surely red and black.

If Tony Popovic’s gallant hooped warriors can repeat their earlier round deeds and not concede away from home next week, it will be a victory of historical significance for football at club level.

And we’ll remember that it, along with a magnificent Melbourne derby, all began on October 25.