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The massive crowd that will descend upon McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle tonight makes a mockery of the claim that fans no longer care about the A-League.
The Jets enjoy the chance to break their attendance record for the visit of Melbourne City, as Novocastrians continue to snap up tickets in impressive numbers.
The biggest A-League crowd at the venue stands at 24,338 for the visit of Sydney FC in the finals more than ten years ago, but the stadium has since been refurbished and tickets are flying out the door for Newcastle’s first finals appearance since 2010.
And the return from injury of Nigel Boogaard and Venezuelan star Ronald Vargas gives Newcastle fans even more reason to hope for a first grand final appearance since they won the competition back in 2008.
The buzz around the city and the clamour for tickets for the semi-final proves – not for the first time – that football fans will turn out for the A-League if conditions are right.
But – and there’s always a ‘but’ with the A-League – too often it’s Football Federation Australia themselves ensuring that conditions are wrong.
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Take finals ticket prices. Before the premiership campaign was even over, I predicted that FFA would lumber fans with “punch-in-the-face ticket prices” for the finals, and I knew I’d be right because recent history has demonstrated how slow they are to learn.
And what happened? FFA charged a premium for tickets, dismal crowds of 7,757 and 15,502 showed up for the two respective elimination finals at AAMI Park, and the marketing whizzes at FFA scratched their heads and wondered why, despite repeatedly being informed that tickets were too expensive, so many fans chose to stay away.
Now, after Melbourne City star Dario Vidosic said “we would love to have a full stadium, but seeing the ticket prices as well it is difficult,” and some FFA executives denied on Twitter that high ticket prices were the reason for the low attendance last Friday, comes the news that FFA has decided to lower ticket prices for the semi-finals and grand final.
Hallelujah! Let’s chalk that one up to common sense, shall we?
And let’s also address, from our end as fans of the game, an issue I’ve seen creeping into the way we talk about football.
This season more than any other, I’ve had people message me privately to offer their personal thoughts on the game. That’s great for me because it shows that people are reading, but the flipside is an increase in the number of readers suggesting I should be less critical of those in charge of the game.
Call me an old-fashioned believer in the ability of journalism to hold powers-that-be to account, but I simply don’t feel like anything changes that way. And the decision to lower finals ticket prices, however small the actual decrease, is a classic case in point.
Now that that’s out of the way, how good will Saturday night’s encounter between Sydney FC and Melbourne Victory be? We want genuine rivalries in the A-League, and we’ve got one in a clash between two of the competition’s oldest foes.
The only question is: can Melbourne Victory cast aside a run of seven straight defeats to Sydney FC and cause a boilover in the grand final qualifier?
Or do the Sky Blues hold a psychological edge, as skipper Alex Brosque suggested during the week, over their bitterest of rivals?
It shouldn’t be forgotten just how close Victory came to knocking off Sydney FC in the grand final last season. And they proved yet again last Sunday that they’re always up for the big occasions.
A couple of blockbuster semi-finals between the top four premiership finishers is just the tonic the A-League needs.
Here’s hoping they’re both memorable encounters that leave us talking about the football come Monday.