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Opinion
The news that next week’s Australia Cup Final must be played in Sydney because there’s no suitable venue available in Brisbane is an indictment on both the A-League and the Queensland government.
Let’s start with some logistics.
Brisbane Roar were never going to agree to play next Saturday’s cup final against Sydney FC at Kayo Stadium in Redcliffe or Cbus Super Stadium on the Gold Coast because they have made returning to Brisbane the central theme of their entire season.
With no foreign signings and little else to hang their marketing around, the Roar were never going to tell supporters they’ve made a triumphant return to Brisbane and then ask them to drive for an hour each way just to attend the cup final.
And there’s no telling what sort of crowd they’d have drawn in Redcliffe or Robina anyway.
You’d like to think they’d draw close to a capacity crowd at Kayo Stadium, but realistically Sydney FC have the potential to draw a much larger crowd at Allianz Stadium in Sydney.
In that regard Football Australia was caught between a rock and a hard place, because supposedly “much-needed” irrigation work at Suncorp Stadium ruled it out as the most logical choice of venue.
(Public domain)
With an international break to follow and the A-League Men competition kicking off the following weekend, Allianz Stadium ended up being the only available choice.
But the fact it has come to this is telling – because there are some deep-seated issues that prevent the Australia Cup from being the sort of bona fide cup competition every other country enjoys.
Starting with the fact that the two tiers that provide most of the combatants in the latter stages of the competition don’t align.
Which means the Australia Cup takes place at the end of the National Premier Leagues seasons, and amounts to what is effectively a pre-season competition for A-League teams.
It’s nothing like England’s FA Cup or the historic Emperor’s Cup in Japan, where knock-out cup football complements their league campaigns.
Whatever happened to the idea of playing the Final on Australia Day? No doubt it has succumbed to the winds of political change – which is not necessarily a bad thing – but a mid-season cup final would have at least given A-League fans something to look forward to.
As it stands, the Australia Cup in its current format is now done before the season even kicks off – at least for top-flight fans – lending the whole thing an air of that old pre-season comp the A-League used to run.
Perhaps that’s why interest in the competition seems to have fallen off a cliff compared to a few years ago when it was still on Fox Sports.
That still doesn’t make the lack of an appropriate venue for the decider any less palatable, and it is here that both A-Leagues clubs themselves and state governments are to blame.
Brisbane Roar held their season launch at Perry Park in inner-city Bowen Hills on Saturday – the same venue they hosted their Australia Cup quarter-final win over Western Sydney Wanderers.
It’s an intimate suburban ground straight out of the National Soccer League era and one there seems to be no political willpower whatsoever to modernise.
Brisbane Roar’s Carlo Armiento celebrates scoring in the Australia Cup. (Photo by Albert Perez/Getty Images)
The majority of fans at that game either sat in the solitary freezing grandstand or on the hard, grassless banks on two sides of the goal – where if they weren’t being bitten by green ants, they were trying to avoid the ancient bottlecaps embedded in the turf from the NSL days.
That seems to be what Queensland politicians think football fans are worth, with the state government’s abysmal treatment of the round-ball game nothing short of a disgrace.
They’ve been happy to pump millions of taxpayer dollars into supporting the National Rugby League and Australian Football League, while the sport with the state’s highest participation rate struggles at both ends of the spectrum.
Almost 20 years after the A-League kicked off, Brisbane Roar still don’t have anywhere suitable to play.
Let’s see if it ends up costing them some silverware next weekend.