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Having attended the Mariners Victory game on Friday night, I was surprised if not appalled by a section of the Mariners support whinging about games being played at North Sydney and Brookvale.
They were basically saying that those of us who support the Mariners in Northern Sydney have no right to see an odd home game or two outside the Central Coast.
They should be reminded that the Mariners were born out of the wreckage of the old Northern Spirit, a demise in my opinion largely caused by the tie up with a then insolvent Glasgow Rangers.
The Mariners’ first manager coach was Lawrie McKinna, also coach of Northern Spirit, and the main core of foundation players were from the old Spirit side too, including John Hutchinson.
Mariners members and supporters should realise if they want to keep their team at Gosford the owner, a hard-nosed businessman, is going to want to see at least 10,000 bums on seats every game, otherwise they will either split the games between Gosford and Northern Sydney or take it away altogether to maybe Canberra or Wollongong.
To give an an example of how a relatively small provincial EPL club competes with larger cities in the EPL, look at Newcastle United. With a rough population of around 250,000, they have around 50,000 season ticket holders and that’s with a crap owner Mike Ashley and an underperforming team. Mad, maybe, but definitely passionate about their team.
I’ll own up to fact I’m a Geordie born and bred, I’ve supported them as a lad and still do whenever I get the chance to see games at St James Park on my trips back. But I’ve been out here 40 years or so and supported the old Spirit club and since their inception the Mariners as well.
I hate to say it but Aussie supporters are very fickle about their support for clubs like the Mariners. The fact is that if you don’t support the club it will die or be taken away from you, owners are businessmen whose only interest is bums on seats and making money if they can.
So if Mariners fans want to keep their team at Gosford maybe they’d better start supporting their club and acknowledge that those of us who support them from Northern Sydney have the right to see an odd game or two south of the Hawkesbury.
Otherwise we might start campaigning for the Northern Spirit to be revived – I imagine someone somewhere has the rights to the Northern Spirit name and might be quite happy to sell those rights to a new owner.
So it’s in your own hands, Mariners supporters.
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