The problem I have with VAR is that it’s supposed to be for clear and obvious errors. If The ball brushes an arm in the penalty box and the VAR has to spend a full minute trying to find the ‘smoking gun’ shot was it really a clear and obvious miss from the referee in the middle?
I don’t think so.
Not only that, but our game is supposed to be a fluid flowing game (except in Italian 1980s football!) . We’re not stop-start like other sports. VAR as demonstrated this season has fundamentally altered the fabric of the game. its feel, its vibe. For that reason I don’t like it. I’m happy to have mistakes. Where there’s a human in the decision-making loop, mistakes will be made. in football as in life. That’s why our game is such a great metaphor for life, its part of why people get so passionate about it

“Battle of the Bridge”
isn’t that some AFL thing?

It bugs me that the narrative is now”we’re concerned for Willie and his emotional well-being” how about don’t do drugs? Willie is not the victim here. What was he trying to hide?

@Randy 😂 😂 16 years ago the doomsayers yelled at the top of their lungs:
” A-League? 3 years tops!” We’re still here and we’re a lot stronger than we were 10 years ago. The A-League is a success story. fact.

@FiL The G&G Army is great: I traveled to SA2010 with them and even with our style of play under Pim Verbeek – I had a great time! The thing is, they are predominantly MBV fans and I think many of them still haven’t forgiven Arnie for:
A. Being a Sydney FC icon, and
B. the disastrous 2007 Asian Cup Campaign with the Golden Generation still playing.
I thought Arnie was nothing more than a cheapo Club manager option from the FFA and that I would hate Arnie-ball but if he keeps winning with the National Team, then who am I to bitch n moan?

Sounds a lot like the conversation the NHL had a few years ago regarding sun-belt hockey vs the traditional Canadian Heartland. Ultimately by moving Atlanta to Winnipeg they decided that a jam-packed Winnipeg arena- MTS Bell Centre (15,300) was preferable to a half empty Phillips arena in ATL (18,500). I’m sure many footy fans would prefer to see a Statewide following of a Tassie team in the AFL to the indifference of the GWS enterprise’s fans.

soapit besides breaking all sorts of vexillology rules I believe that the fella that designed the Aboriginal flag is dead against that idea. besides..how does that new flag represent me a white guy born here. If the decision is to scrap the Australian National Flag then lets have a proper design comp and vote on it as a nation.

When the Eels are counting their Leagues club Daily entry ‘members’ its as good as a pet membership being counted isn’t it?

The way Sydney FC have handled being ‘homeless’ vs how WSW have handled it would itself provide an interesting article.

John McEnroe if I’m not mistaken

Gotta risk it for the biscuit. Once again my slightly mad friends we climb aboard the socceroos roller coaster for the potential to taste the glory that is World Cup Qualification.

It is not for us to follow a team that automatically qualifies for whatever passes for a ‘World’ cup elsewhere in the sporting universe. Ironically given the relative positions of our sports in the nominal pecking order I think the Socceroos fans have a lot in common with the fans of the Wallabies..they are consantly battling the might of the All Blacks and every Bledisloe their fans pony up expectantly hoping the green and gold will pull a rabbit out of the hat and defeat the big bad ABs. Socceroos fans pony up all over the 4 year WC cycle hoping the Socceroos will find a way to light the fires and against the odds(aka against countries who have football as their be-all and end all) qualify for the World Cup Finals and hopefully make the kind of splash that brings more Australians along for the ride. forza Socceroos!

Yes, semantically a 2nd division sits underneath a first division, but financially it will be the FFA underwriting it. Where’s ‘that’ money going to come from?

It always surprises me the ability of someone to believe in a myth. Santa Claus I get, it’s a part of childhood ‘training’ by parents to produce good behaviour out of children using the delayed reward of gifts from a being who ‘knows’ when the child is being naughty. The Myth that the ills of Australian football will be magically cured by adding a second division to the existing A-League with promotion/relegation because then it will just ‘look like a proper’ league should(as if there is a one-size fits all model that determines what is proper and what isn’t?) is not as easy to explain away for me. I mean if the A-League is doing well (which it is without being spectacularly successful) but there is always the underlying concern that at least one club if not 2 isn’t completely solid in its off-field finances I just can’t for the life of me figure out how adding a structure on top of a foundation that isn’t the most stable isn’t going to be a disaster of epic proportions potentially dragging the whole kit and caboodle of professional domestic football down to the level of unmitigated disaster from which it might not ever recover. Masters was the biggest corporate own-goal in modern Australian business history. I’m not keen on turning football into a sport version of “what not to do” and a second division just smacks of self-interest (of the NPL clubs) being championed over the greater good of the sport(the need for a strong and stable A-League)

Its a pity FFA didn’t boldly seize the opportunity to marry off Melbourne Heart with South Melbourne. Heart were failing and needed a saviour. SMFC want in to the A-League. I think a marriage of South and Heart could have really worked.

Hue Jackson has said Kizer will start wk1 and would need to fall flat on his face to lose the starting gig to Osweiller.

over 540 now, next stop? 600?

No I got it Vincent; I was just having a bit of fun on my lunch break.

you have proof of this?

He’s a classic millennial ribbon for participating era child. so used to having his ass kissed and told how special he is, he has probably never been challenged and shown how to overcome because his path thus far has been smoothed out for him by well meaning parents trying to ‘protect’ him so of course when things get tough he drops his bundle and gives up, no surprise there. Next step in the millennial spectrum is to find a way to blame someone else. In a way it isn’t his fault..he’s a product of the parenting that delivered him as he is…Unable to accept responsibility for his own failings and overcome challenges.

There is no individual glory here. It was a true team effort.

Yes I think football’s administrators would be chuffed with $250-odd mil p.a. pretty much only from Foxtel, the FTAcomponent of the deal is yet to be negotiated. Football fans however expect the FFA to engineer a growth in FTA presence. We have seen by the standard of some productions on FTA TV people will watch whatever the FTA networks serve up to them. For football to continue its growth trajectory, it absolutely must crack the FTA Code and get the A-League and the Socceroos in front of more eyeballs.

One more cheeky single to bring up the 500!
northerner If you look up further on this very epic thread
Martyn50 has written:
“Because soccer is not part of Australian culture.”

He was talking about rural Australia moreso than urban Australia, but despite the game having been played here since 1880, there are definitely people that view the game as un-Australian or at least not as Australian as say another import like Rugby. I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to get through to those types? Unfortunately, some of those types are very vocal in the media 🙁

#499 ( I think)
almost there ; )
Ahh the glory days of Basketball in Australia, when Michael Jordan was reigning supreme in Chicago and All things American had a certain sheen. Don Lane used to host “NFL American football” on the ABC. I lived in the USA as a 5 year old in the 1980s, but Don Lane was kind enough to explain lots of the game to Australian audiences and in many ways helped develop my love for that game.
I’d be interested in reading a book about the NBL: its rise and fall.
At one stage every basketball fan was crowing from the roof tops how the established sports were going to fall beneath the juggernaut of basketball. Sound familiar? Of course football has an incredibly large junior player base and is a sport that you don’t require one specific body type(tall and thin) to play so I doubt that football will follow basketball’s boom n bust cycle.

Okay.I’ll bite 🙂

excuse the length, I’m on my lunch break…
1. No. As with humans you could seem to be healthy to a passing person in the street but dying of some horrible disease on the inside. Health can only be determined by looking at the full scan of the sport.
Youth participation,
strength of the top tier and the foundations supporting that top tier,
total sponsorship of the code,
fan engagement – attendences and memberships,
financial state of the governing body, and
Administration ability and strength.
2. 50-80 years, might as well be never. I think the cultural inertia of the NRL in Sydney and AFL in Melbourne will limit the A-League to being at best #2 in each market.
3.Partial yes but mostly no. There are some in the media who seem to think it their personal crusade to try to stem the growth of football. They might enjoy watching AFL footy but I seriously doubt the AFL as an organisation has an agenda in place to destroy football. I think when you’re in the same room as an elephant, if you aren’t careful about what you’re doing, you’ll get trampled. As a sport we have a few too many hot heads who can’t get it through their juvenile minds that mimicking certain O/S behaviour isn’t “football done proper” and it’s just stupidly giving free kicks to the crusaders. IMO they’re mostly just kids trying to fit in and they are using football as a vehicle for their anti-social behaviour. If you think about it we see motorists breaking the law every day, e.g. squeezing the lemon at traffic lights to get through a yellow light, but in actual fact often they mis-time it and end up running a Red light. But I guarantee the law breaker that ‘stands out’ is the rare occurrence that remains in the brain, the cyclist running a red light. We are hard-wired to notice the different so we can try to determine danger (if it’s different it could be dangerous).

Actual violence at A-League is so rare as to be next to non-existent, but we remember the one time we saw something that looked hairy and amplify it in our brains to better aid memory because it is different to what we think we know. In the vast majority of cases yes football attendees are the sports worst enemy. True fans love the game and those old enough to understand action and reaction in social circumstances understand the way the media works and would never do anything to hurt the game. We are starting to see a critical mass of these types now dobbing in the young punks who don’t think through their actions or don’t care how their actions will be perceived.

It still doesn’t feel like it’s been fully accepted yet. Sometimes I feel that even the National Team isn’t able to generate the sort of patriotic fervour I hoped it would when taking on the world. When everyday people still don’t refer to the Socceroos as ‘us’ yet:( I get the feeling a small amount of ‘us and them’ still exists:(