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Favourite teams: Essendon, the Green Bay Packers, the Chicago Cubs. Salus populi suprema lex
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Re ‘double’ or ‘treble’ counting: it is ’caused’ by (or, better, ‘reflects’) the rich variety of life as lived by 20,000,000 of us older than toddlers and younger than the infirm – we are not groupable into, say, separate five or ten subsets in the ways that statisticians would find easier to work with, or into the mutually hostile ‘identities’ that political ideologues and extremists tend to believe in and want us to lose our individuality in.
In the southern states, some kids might play both soccer^ and rules^ (^ = unambiguous names for these two codes of Foot Ball), and in the NE states, might some play both codes of rugby? In country areas, one young player might play in two age levels, or in a club’s seconds and thirds. In cities, there would be ‘double-counting’ of players in both club and school teams.*
It’s like the distinction between ‘persons’ and ‘spectators’.
*One huge difference between us and the US is that serious interschool rivalry is very low here, and 99% absent from state schools, whereas a local public high school derby game in even quite small US towns is a local blockbuster. The reason is that US elementary (aka ‘grade’) schools, and both junior and senior high schools, are administered by 13500 self-governing ‘school districts’ which are quite distinct from the 50 states and 3142 counties – local parents are immensely more involved in their local schools, for good (no moronically ignorant decisions from a bureaucracy 1000 miles away, for example) and bad (scope for moronically ignorant decisions in the boondocks, for instance). It’s decentralisation to the nth! It’d be a nightmare trying to organise a nationwide coup d’etat! The notion of a sports ‘club’ in our sense is almost absent.
What can we learn from the AFL and FFA's participation rates?
Ah, “Thursday.Night.Footbaaaaaall!!!!!” Another instance of CEO McLachlan’s ‘experimenting’ with this work+school day before another work+school day: 5000 to 7000 seats void of responsible parents who put their workplace and school-children’s duties before pleasure. And another one next Round, at the SCG.
(I think I’ve got the each state’s Term I-II break right.)
Will no-one rid our game – ‘our’ as in ‘Populo Ludus Populi’ – of this meddling trendoid?
Geelong has answered their most pressing off-season questions. Now for a premiership
Yes, “a beautiful night in Melbourne”, Peter the Scribe, and “Thursday. Night. Football!!!” – blockbuster matchup of two clubs totalling 176,000+ members, at the MCG’s 95,000 seats, but with 20,000+ left empty. Looks as if ten / twelve / 15 thousand fans rated Friday’s parental duties and / or work responsibilities far higher than being an AFL crowd statistic. ‘Vox glutei’ speaking?
But do the ermenegildo zegnas at AFL HQ give a toss for We the Populi?
Pies bounce back to thrash Tigers
“How many players are chosen for All Star games and pull out for “injury” reasons” looks like that Darwinian evolution phenom called ‘convergent evolution’ where similar conditions in places with no contact with each other influenced the development of similar characteristics in otherwise quite distinctly different species. V-AFL players ‘pulling out’ of State-of-Origin games ‘for injury reasons’ became so rife in the 1990s that these games now look to be extinct; the same to a lesser degree is quite common in the GAA/AFL hybrid series, even though rostered at the end of each other’s premiership season. Priorities rule, OK!
Is the North American sports model the right one for the NRL to pursue?
About “too big a difference between fully professional A-league clubs and some NPL clubs that are little more than shirt sponsors and clubhouses”: here is a much bigger difference in case some posters haven’t noticed – summer v winter. The biggest problem in the structure of our soccer is that the top-tier and the rest play six months apart. Does any of nation have such a seasonal split to deal with? Therefore, is there any sense in reversing the NSL’s 1989/90 decision to surrender winter to the ellipsoidal codes, and return what is (almost) everywhere else a winter sport to . . . winter. Then P/R could be embedded in each state’s premier competition, couldn’t it?
Three reasons why the A-League should adopt promotion and relegation
And, possibly the FFA’s silliest ‘What could possibly go wrong’ wrong move . . .
6) keeping our mini-micro-me Down Under* comp up against the EPL and the top Euro-leagues for eyeballs on screens small, medium and large!
* Didn’t a former PM call our country “the arse end of the universe” (or something like that)?
The A-League has six months to save itself from oblivion
Is it just me, or are Australian sports journos tippy-toeing around the problems raised here, maybe for fear that factual, fair and fearless soccer* commentary would evoke accusations of ‘racism’ or at least wog-bashing^? Other major team sports – RU, RL, AFL, cricket – get barrages of bad press almost weekly. One of the few such negative opinions aimed at the A-League was in a recent ‘Australian’ – but only as an intro column to its main point about some player doing something weird. Were next season’s AFL, NRL and Super crowds to plunge precariously close to four digits, journos from Albany to Cooktown and Darwin to Geelong would be ripping into their admins and CEOs like the mythical lions in Rome’s Flavian amphitheatre.
But soccer’s top dudes seem to be able to do ‘stupid’ round after round and season after season, with rare-approaching-zero notice in the mainstream media – why?
* don’t start frothing, it is used as an unambiguous identifier, just as ‘Aussie Rules’, ‘gridiron’ and ‘field hockey’ can be.
^ there’s a strong case that the biggest wog-bashers in Oz soccer have been the FFA and its apparatchiks
The A-League has six months to save itself from oblivion
Lloyd would likely have reached the big double – 1000 goals and 300 (one-club) games – had the EFC not appointed that Richmond games accumulator as its first post-Sheedy coach. Noteworthy, however, that there seems to be no evidence that Lloyd has used any media time whingeing about it, no ‘Why me’? (To which the answer is always ‘Why not?’)
Can remember Hutchy from my school days – an immortal Great of our Great Game.
AFL top 100: Bill Hutchinson
Wonder what the Day I crowds might’ve been had our cricket HQ worked out that most potential spectators on a Friday would be, like w-o-r-k-i-n-g?
Then wasn’t there some farcical nonsense where the local suits decided that ordinary everyday spectators would not be allowed to sit in the shade?
Five-day Tests are alive and well
Just read that season 2019/20 will have 11 teams, and that 2020/21 will have 12, but the general gist of my points seem OK. Lots of chatter about the Wellington franchise failing to rise from the ashes = Wellington phoenish?
Will Man City get sick of Mel City first, or t’other way round? Can the ex-Heart keep pumping with Victory and Co?
D-Day arrives for A-League expansion clubs
About “O’Rourke made it pretty clear that there’d be two rounds plus additional games”: 12 clubs > 11 opponents with a complete Home + Away for each club each year = 22 games would need five “additional games” for FIFA’s mandated 27.
Could a competition with so many current sub-10000 gameday crowds bear a 33-round season?
More A-League teams for Sydney and Melbourne: Did the FFA get their A-League expansion decision right?
Why should a 12-club competition be a fixturing ‘problem’? Only because of an unrealistic expectation that each club plays all its opponents an equal number of times, that’s why. But is insisting on this an FIFA diktat or an FFA decision?
If it’s FIFA, then the only solution is to pass [12] and go straight to [14] , which would give a roster of 26 H&A games + one ‘special’ round – simples!
There’s an old saying in the AFL, “Too much footy is still not enough!” Fortunately for all concerned, AFL/HQ never contemplated a 26-game season (1987-1990), or a 28-game season (1991-1994), or a 30-game season (1995-2010), or now a 34-game season – too much of a good thing would wear out the most fanatic of fans in any sport, wouldn’t it? (Not forgetting the players, naturally.) The NRL had a 20-club season about 20 years ago, but found it counter-productive.
Wouldn’t a 33-round season mean about six mid-week rounds? With so many sub-10000 crowds these days, would anyone go?
D-Day arrives for A-League expansion clubs
Please, any chance that independent posters could use the traditional / customary / generic / locational names of ‘our’ venues, and drop their corporate branding into a language dumpster?
Sydney is the most embarrassing city in Australia
How about using some of that Canberra $45,000,000 which was gifted to Moneybags Lowy snr for the failed WC bid?
Matildas’ World Cup bid: Politics to hinder success
What’s not to like about a 21st century state government spending billions on schools and hospitals, teachers and nurses? At least, in NSW schools pupils actually have to learn stuff and teachers are really expected to, like, t-e-a-c-h (or at least they were when I taught its HSC Greek & Roman and English a decade or so ago). Anyway, Sydneysiders have so-o-o-o-o much else to do – well, that’s what they reckon – that League, Union and Soccer can’t draw several 80,000s several games per annum year like that other place Down South.
Sydney is the most embarrassing city in Australia
Collingwood’s ‘American Pie’ trumps Richmond’s coal miner’s daughter! Both stories from across the Pacific to the MCG are inspiring and wonderful. And GFF, too.
Ta-ta, Tigers! Collingwood in grand final after flipping flag favourites
“Sunday is another hard matchup, with North hosting the Giants in Hobart” – and cold, played in a riverside park (with a couple of stands) open to freezing winds off the Derwent estuary (which cuts off Bellerive Oval from Hobart’s CBD), and with the sun setting during halftime at latitude 42S.
Who’s responsible for this rostering fiasco?
Note: at the time of posting, bounce down was still three hours distant.
Don’t reckon ALF CEO Gil ‘Preacherman’ McLachlan will be sitting on one of the grassy knolls in the Outer – nor probably anyone else: a record lowest ‘crowd’ (aka gathering) a likely result.
Anyone got a book on the Roos being well north of 42S next season?
The Roar's AFL expert tips and predictions: Round 13