matt.morris
11-10-2006, 02:14 AM
As the A-League, version two, was hitting its height of heights – with the Melbourne Victory needing to move to a bigger house to avoid having to turn fans away – in another world, not too far away, it was hitting rock bottom.
In Auckland, across the Tasman, just 1,632 souls turned up for the match between New Zealand Knights and Central Coast Mariners. It was right down there with the sort of meagre faithful that would mosey up to a Sunshine George Cross-Morwell Falcons game in the saddest of the old NSL days.
It was not a pretty sight and FFA, however hard it may try to bandage the bleed with patience and resilient belief, must know that the Kiwi experiment is not working and its end is nigh.
The truth is that the experiment had never worked, never looked like working and even before the invention of the A-League it had a history of failure. In the NSL the Auckland Kings had already been a dud, attracting poor crowds, achieving less than modest results and playing colourless, dull football.
When the composition of the revolutionary A-League was announced at a press conference in early 2005, John O’Neill was posed a question from the floor about the wisdom of having a team from New Zealand. Frank Lowy leaned across the table to whisper in O’Neill’s ear: ‘Oceania’.
The logic then was to appease the OFC, give it a leg up and bring it in to the great wash that was revolutionising the game in post-Crawford Australia.
It was a noble idea and would have been wonderful had it worked. But it hasn’t, for a number of reasons.
In the first place, soon after this gesture Australia joined ranks with Asia, left Oceania and the need for Australia to look after its little sister abated.
Worse than that, New Zealand, as a sporting country and culture, had and has no hunger to embrace football, at least not yet. It is an obsessed rugby country, living in a cocoon isolated from the sporting world and, unlike Australia, is blissfully content with its lot. It is yet to awaken to the reality that football is a passport to world citizenship.
So the Kiwis go on playing rugby in their merry way and it is only the small, marginalised football community of that little country that offers support to the supposition that football matters and ought to be embraced.
The worst of it is the way football has chosen to conquer. Like the Kings before it, the Knights play a plodding, boring brand of football, with no ambition to excite and entertain, a small colonial rendition of route one, pumping long balls into the box, lottery football with little dividend. With neither entertainment nor results, it is no wonder the turnstiles have slowed to a crawl.
When the Kings were first inducted in to the NSL, the question was asked: ‘What possible value can a New Zealand team add to an Australian league?’ The question was valid then and it is even more valid now.
When that was first asked, in this space and others, it was also suggested that Australia’s instinct to embrace markets beyond its shores should take it north rather than south and that football bent Asia should be the target. That wisdom, thankfully, has since been adopted and Australia is now firmly enmeshed in Asia with all sorts of mouth-watering prospects still begging.
But the taxing New Zealand appendage remains, doing little more than dragging down Australia’s football progress and even less for itself. Crowds of 1,600 are bad PR statistic for the A-League but surely even worse for New Zealand football.
While this condemnation may seem cynical and cruel to a Kiwi, the fact is the fault lies not with Australia but with New Zealand. It was, let’s remember, not New Zealand that courted a place in an Australian league but the other way around. Yet the New Zealand response to the invitation has been poor, inept and lacking imagination.
The FFA cannot be blamed for this. It acted nobly by including the New Zealanders in the A-League even though it must have known at the time that the move was risky and that rich pickings in the short term were less than likely.
The tragedy is not Australia’s but New Zealand’s.
The Knights should have been an avenue to enrich the country’s football, to elevate New Zealand players to a level of international competitiveness and enhance that country’s football growth. But instead what we now have is a team bereft of locally-born playing talent, a collection of mediocre imports, plodding about without style and purpose, clinging on to a lame and futureless existence.
It is time to jettison the New Zealand experiment, if only to do the country a neighbourly favour. It is time, more importantly, for New Zealand football to take a good look at itself and gather a dose of reality. And ambition.
For that it need look no further than across the Tasman for a learning experience.
Something happened to Australia with the Crawford revolution, something so big and so unimaginable that it almost defied gravity.
Football shook off the shackles of its second class status and decided that there was a way it could exist and even prosper in a society where a football culture was supposed to be foreign.
It took government action, government money and sound, imaginative management. The rest just followed and now the previously unthinkable is reality: football is mainstream, it is vibrant, healthy and it is big.
New Zealand is not a lost cause because this, too, can happen in New Zealand. Maybe it won’t be easy, or as quick as it was in Australia. But it can be done.
It should begin with the politicians, as it did here, and with government persuaded that strength in football, the universal game, is good for the country and good for electoral gain. Helen Clark should just ask John Howard. Surely to goodness New Zealanders, a proud people, must be sick and tired of living in a backwater of the world’s most important sport.
If that has not yet dawned on New Zealanders, they might just be shaken in to it with the severe reality lesson of losing their A-League franchise. It was after all not something dissimilar, the dark and dismal failure of the Socceroos in the 2002 Oceania Nations Cup, that sprang the revolution in Australia.
This column, down many years, has argued that Australian football, for its own health, needs strong and healthy football neighbours and that includes New Zealand. Australia gains nothing from living next door to a bunch of Kiwis who are modest easybeats and objects of laughter.
But propping them up, by giving them cheap rental space and artificial subsidy, will not make them stronger. It is wiser that the hatchlings of New Zealand football are sent back to their nest so they may learn to fly, on their own.
http://www.theworldgame.com.au/opinions/index.php?pid=st&cid=75759&ct=22&ct=22
Discuss.
In Auckland, across the Tasman, just 1,632 souls turned up for the match between New Zealand Knights and Central Coast Mariners. It was right down there with the sort of meagre faithful that would mosey up to a Sunshine George Cross-Morwell Falcons game in the saddest of the old NSL days.
It was not a pretty sight and FFA, however hard it may try to bandage the bleed with patience and resilient belief, must know that the Kiwi experiment is not working and its end is nigh.
The truth is that the experiment had never worked, never looked like working and even before the invention of the A-League it had a history of failure. In the NSL the Auckland Kings had already been a dud, attracting poor crowds, achieving less than modest results and playing colourless, dull football.
When the composition of the revolutionary A-League was announced at a press conference in early 2005, John O’Neill was posed a question from the floor about the wisdom of having a team from New Zealand. Frank Lowy leaned across the table to whisper in O’Neill’s ear: ‘Oceania’.
The logic then was to appease the OFC, give it a leg up and bring it in to the great wash that was revolutionising the game in post-Crawford Australia.
It was a noble idea and would have been wonderful had it worked. But it hasn’t, for a number of reasons.
In the first place, soon after this gesture Australia joined ranks with Asia, left Oceania and the need for Australia to look after its little sister abated.
Worse than that, New Zealand, as a sporting country and culture, had and has no hunger to embrace football, at least not yet. It is an obsessed rugby country, living in a cocoon isolated from the sporting world and, unlike Australia, is blissfully content with its lot. It is yet to awaken to the reality that football is a passport to world citizenship.
So the Kiwis go on playing rugby in their merry way and it is only the small, marginalised football community of that little country that offers support to the supposition that football matters and ought to be embraced.
The worst of it is the way football has chosen to conquer. Like the Kings before it, the Knights play a plodding, boring brand of football, with no ambition to excite and entertain, a small colonial rendition of route one, pumping long balls into the box, lottery football with little dividend. With neither entertainment nor results, it is no wonder the turnstiles have slowed to a crawl.
When the Kings were first inducted in to the NSL, the question was asked: ‘What possible value can a New Zealand team add to an Australian league?’ The question was valid then and it is even more valid now.
When that was first asked, in this space and others, it was also suggested that Australia’s instinct to embrace markets beyond its shores should take it north rather than south and that football bent Asia should be the target. That wisdom, thankfully, has since been adopted and Australia is now firmly enmeshed in Asia with all sorts of mouth-watering prospects still begging.
But the taxing New Zealand appendage remains, doing little more than dragging down Australia’s football progress and even less for itself. Crowds of 1,600 are bad PR statistic for the A-League but surely even worse for New Zealand football.
While this condemnation may seem cynical and cruel to a Kiwi, the fact is the fault lies not with Australia but with New Zealand. It was, let’s remember, not New Zealand that courted a place in an Australian league but the other way around. Yet the New Zealand response to the invitation has been poor, inept and lacking imagination.
The FFA cannot be blamed for this. It acted nobly by including the New Zealanders in the A-League even though it must have known at the time that the move was risky and that rich pickings in the short term were less than likely.
The tragedy is not Australia’s but New Zealand’s.
The Knights should have been an avenue to enrich the country’s football, to elevate New Zealand players to a level of international competitiveness and enhance that country’s football growth. But instead what we now have is a team bereft of locally-born playing talent, a collection of mediocre imports, plodding about without style and purpose, clinging on to a lame and futureless existence.
It is time to jettison the New Zealand experiment, if only to do the country a neighbourly favour. It is time, more importantly, for New Zealand football to take a good look at itself and gather a dose of reality. And ambition.
For that it need look no further than across the Tasman for a learning experience.
Something happened to Australia with the Crawford revolution, something so big and so unimaginable that it almost defied gravity.
Football shook off the shackles of its second class status and decided that there was a way it could exist and even prosper in a society where a football culture was supposed to be foreign.
It took government action, government money and sound, imaginative management. The rest just followed and now the previously unthinkable is reality: football is mainstream, it is vibrant, healthy and it is big.
New Zealand is not a lost cause because this, too, can happen in New Zealand. Maybe it won’t be easy, or as quick as it was in Australia. But it can be done.
It should begin with the politicians, as it did here, and with government persuaded that strength in football, the universal game, is good for the country and good for electoral gain. Helen Clark should just ask John Howard. Surely to goodness New Zealanders, a proud people, must be sick and tired of living in a backwater of the world’s most important sport.
If that has not yet dawned on New Zealanders, they might just be shaken in to it with the severe reality lesson of losing their A-League franchise. It was after all not something dissimilar, the dark and dismal failure of the Socceroos in the 2002 Oceania Nations Cup, that sprang the revolution in Australia.
This column, down many years, has argued that Australian football, for its own health, needs strong and healthy football neighbours and that includes New Zealand. Australia gains nothing from living next door to a bunch of Kiwis who are modest easybeats and objects of laughter.
But propping them up, by giving them cheap rental space and artificial subsidy, will not make them stronger. It is wiser that the hatchlings of New Zealand football are sent back to their nest so they may learn to fly, on their own.
http://www.theworldgame.com.au/opinions/index.php?pid=st&cid=75759&ct=22&ct=22
Discuss.