Soccer

For the good of the game, Sydney must win the A-League Grand Final

Now, I’m just putting this out there. I’m just going to run it up the flagpole. The A-League, and football in Australia, needs Sydney FC to defeat Melbourne Victory next week.

This season’s decider is the one the game had to have. They’re the best two teams on the field, the biggest two teams of the field and have a rivalry that inspires feelings of joy, anguish, revulsion and, when applicable, a hefty dollop of schadenfreude.

Continue reading "The A-League needs Sydney FC to win the Grand Final" »

The football club I’ve supported since childhood looks set to be relegated two seasons on the trot – and I’m absolutely delighted.

I couldn’t be happier, simply because the alternative for Portsmouth was much, much worse. Let me explain for anyone not following this utter debacle.

Pompey are roughly $135 million in debt after a few years of living the dream and now face a winding up petition from the UK taxman in the High Court. A hearing due to be held this coming Monday would probably have sealed the club’s fate. Portsmouth Football Club, established 1898, would no longer exist.

Continue reading "Existence has no meaning without a football team" »

There’s two words the British press love above all others. Two little words. One phrase. Love Rat.

Fleet Street hacks – most of who look a bit like the latter and don’t get enough of the former – have been frothing for nearly a fortnight over the England football captain’s affair with a teammate’s partner.

There have been more than 2,000 newspaper stories about the John Terry sex scandal - 500 more than those that mentioned the Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A Google search of John Terry + love rat brings up more than 4,300 results. It would seem like overkill but to be fair to the easily-titillated British public, the story has absolutely had it all.

Continue reading "Postcard from London: everyone loves a love rat" »

Why does football/soccer bring out the hate?

Every time I read a story or a blog about football/soccer on the net, the reader comments always devolve into the bitch fight: it’s the world game, it’s the future or it’s a Euro game for ladyboys that will never overtake our domestic codes.

I write about the A-League on the Punch every week and every time my post goes up there’s always a response guaranteed to include the lines: “Who cares? Soccer’s a boring game for poofs, people who have slightly darker skin than me and posh expats who should go back where it rains a lot and the beer is slightly warmer. How long have you soccer zealots been saying it was going to take over? The A-League is rubbish and will never be more popular than AFL/NRL.”

Continue reading "Oh soccer, why do they hate you so?" »

Can anyone stop Melbourne Victory making it two in a row?

What did we learn from last weekend’s round of A-League games? The top six is all but decided, give or take a few late hopes. Sydney FC seem determined to shoot themselves in the foot. And Melbourne Victory, despite losing to Gold Coast, are still favourites to do the double again.

For those who had better things to do this weekend, the first four finals places are locked in, with Melbourne, Gold Coast, Sydney and Perth all doing enough. Despite tricky away games, Wellington and Newcastle should finish off the six.

Continue reading "Can anyone stop the flying V?" »

For many Australians, John Aloisi will always be fondly remembered for scoring the penalty that put Australia in the 2006 World Cup, a goal voted one of the nation’s greatest sporting moments.

But any visitor to a Sydney FC game would think he was somehow responsible for the Haiti earthquake, the global financial crisis and Barack Obama’s failure to meet expectations on raising the level of public healthcare in the US.

I went to the Sydney-Gold Coast game Sunday afternoon, and was bemused by the scorn poured on Aloisi by his own supporters. Even forgetting the hardcore in the Cove, there were at least three loud voices in the crowd who took every opportunity to abuse the striker and point out the glaring discrepancy in his wages-to-goals ratio.

Continue reading "How Sydney fans turned the heroic Aloisi into a villain" »

“Shine like a big, big star!” This quote may sound like an odd introduction to an article about Australia’s bid for the FIFA World Cup in 2018 or 2022, but it is also the basis for one of the inspirational highlights of the bid team’s work in Cape Town two weeks ago.

All bidding nations were invited to Cape Town by FIFA to participate in a media expo to present our claims.  The media expo was the first of only three formal presentations for bidders to the FIFA Executive, the international football community and international football media.  While it was the ‘set piece’ event for bidding nations during the week, Football Federation Australia (FFA) also planned other activities to ensure we were noticed in a very busy period for world football.

The inspiration came from a visit to a township school outside Cape Town by Federal Minister for Sport Kate Ellis, FFA Chairman Frank Lowy, CEO Ben Buckley, Head Coach Pim Verbeek, and the eight Aussie kids who had won a competition to be Bid emissaries for the week.

Continue reading "World Cup bid: Shine like a big, big star" »

Do you call it “football”? Then you’re an unAustralian zealot sucked in by the game for diving, cheating nancy boy Eurotrash. Or do you call it “soccer”? If so, you’re a small-minded, parochial redneck desperately clinging onto the last vestiges of isolationism.

This week, a punter rang me up to put me straight. He’d bought a copy of Australian Football Weekly and wanted to tell me we’d got the name wrong.
“Football in Australia is AFL,” he said. “You should be called Soccer Weekly or something.”

He’d bought the magazine by mistake. Never mind that the issue was eight months old, had a picture of Kevin Muscat and Travis Dodd on the cover and our masthead has a bloody great football in it. The punter picked it up, somehow thinking he’d found a new AFL publication, only to be left disappointed by the “soccer” content within.

Continue reading "A game by any other name - is it football or soccer?" »

The debate on the World Cup bid has been conducted thus far like some grandmother who’s freaking out after being told 32 soccer teams are arriving on Friday and we’ve nowhere to play, don’t know where to put them up and haven’t done enough grocery shopping. I’m half expecting the next front page on the issue to read: “Australia’s Bathroom Not Clean Enough to Host World Cup, What Will The Guests Think.”

Would it be too much to ask that people step back, take a breath and relax about this thing?

The politics of this seems to be overshadowing the facts for all three codes concerned. The facts being that we’re almost certainly not going to get the 2018 tournament and that if the codes sit down calmly they’d realise there’s plenty time to work out a solution for 2022.

Continue reading "Can everyone just relax about the World Cup bid" »

Watching the World Cup draw early on Saturday morning felt like watching the cast of The Bold and the Beautiful do Hamlet. With Becks & Charlize, there was glamour aplenty- but it had the all drama and class of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Australia’s group for the World Cup drew what I call “the builder”: the sharp intake of breath through gritted teeth accompanied by the worried shake of the head.

On paper, it looks a tough ask for the Socceroos in South Africa – but is it really the group of death?

Continue reading "World Cup draw: actually not a death sentence" »

Last week in Australian Football Weekly, I wrote a couple of disparaging remarks about Central Coast Mariners. Nothing too heavy, but I basically called them a team of grinding, featureless clones cultivated by coach Lawrie McKinna in a secret lab in Gosford.

Then, on Saturday night, they nipped down to Melbourne and duly gave the reigning champions, who had won six of their last seven, a hearty 4-zip spanking in their own backyard.

I’ll put my hands up – it was a great game. McKinna’s men wore Victory into the ground, and they were fast and clever in and around the box. They didn’t just ruin Melbourne’s party; they turned up, drank all the booze, pulled out some classic dance moves and went home with both the best-looking girls.

Continue reading "The Central Coast Mariners: We are the Robots" »

Like many Australians of my generation and background, there was hardly a weekend when my dad wasn’t taking me to a football ground.  In fact, Sunday meant Sunday School and soccer and the opportunity to catch up with all the people who spoke the same sporting language. 

Football clubs were the centrepiece of the social life of many migrant and refugee communities and many clubs became some of the great nurseries of football talent over subsequent years.

Since then, football’s popularity has grown across Australia and has expanded from the weekend ritual of migrant families to become the most popular sport for Aussie boys and, increasingly, girls. Its rising prominence in Australian culture comes at a time when the country is bidding for the FIFA World Cup to come here in either 2018 or 2022.

Continue reading "5.3 billion reasons the World Cup would be good for us" »

The only real winners in round 13 of the A-League were the competition’s two biggest teams to set up the most intriguing battle.

Sydney FC and Melbourne Victory both claimed impressive wins this weekend; Sydney’s dismissive 3-1 victory over Wellington and Melbourne grafting to a 2-1 win away at Perth.

Fans from the other eight clubs might disagree, but a battle for top spot between the two interstate rivals is just what the code needs right now.

Continue reading "Why the A-League needs a two horse race" »

Over the past eight games between Melbourne Victory and Adelaide United, the tally stands Melbourne 8, Adelaide 0. I’d hate to be an Adelaide supporter.

I would literally be tearing my hair out, punching the bed, slamming doors, kicking the cat, and quite probably losing friends and alienating anyone I knew in Melbourne.

I should qualify that I have nothing against Adelaide; I’m actually a fan. They’re an honest team with some good players, they play good football and in Aurelio Vidmar have one of the best young coaches in the country.

Continue reading "Why Adelaide fans love losing to Melbourne" »

The A-League is by no means the best football in the world, but as a competition, it’s better than the EPL.

I spend my week talking and writing about football and my weekends watching it - but I can’t get a single round of the A-League right in my tipping comp.

It’s an ongoing joke in the office that the editor of a weekly football magazine can’t get his tips right. Things are so bad even my art director’s beating me – trumped by a crayon monkey!

Continue reading "The A-League has it all over the English Premier League" »

Remember the good old days of Australian soccer, when a 0-0 draw to the Dutch would spark jubilation in the crowd, shirt swapping on the pitch and a victory speech from the coach?

I can almost picture old Eddie Thompson saying how delighted he was with the result, and what a privilege it was for his boys to mix it with some of Europe’s finest. Eddie, a wonderful servant of the game and one sadly missed, would be delighted with 1-0 losses, such was our standing in the game and the lack of really meaningful matches.

How times have changed. Saturday night’s draw was dire. We should have been beaten comfortably. It exposed a host of deficiencies.  And thanks to the game’s new-found maturity in this country, people are not afraid to admit it.

Continue reading "What the Socceroos have to do before the World Cup" »

Soccer has all the ingredients to capture the imagination of Australia’s sporting public in the same way the AFL and NRL grand finals have done. All the ingredients are there except one: common sense.

The facts are this: football - as it has been rebranded - has the highest registered participation rate of all the football codes in this country.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more kids play football than AFL and NRL combined. So why aren’t the kids and their parents filling the stadiums at A-League games?

Continue reading "Why aren’t these kids growing up A-League fans?" »

Losing is not something we like to talk about much at this time of year.

We’re reminded of the greatest premiership winning teams, the possibility of St. Kilda or Parramatta breaking the drought or Geelong or Melbourne Storm cementing their place as real champion teams.

But given that the team or individual that we follow is more often going to lose the premiership, not win the gold, or fail at the World Cup, our experiences with losing are arguably are more important in defining our support of the team or person than that of winning.

So in the lead up to the two biggest sporting weekends of the year The Punch writers have compiled, in no particular order, the ten teams or people that have let us down or just not performed when it mattered in Australia’s recent sporting history. What are yours?

Continue reading "Our ten biggest sporting losers" »

As an old time supporter of Football (or Soccer, if you feel so inclined – which many Australians do), imbalanced and factually incorrect media reports of riots, violence and hooliganism in my code is nothing new.

The rise of the A-League may have been nothing short of spectacular, but unfortunately the same old boys (usually AFL reporters) that pooh-poohed Soccer in the now defunct NSL era continue to periodically rear their snarling heads and tell us that this foreign sport is full of thugs that are more likely to slit your throat than not.

The formula is just about the same every time, and Tim Hilferty’s Monday article on The Punch ‘The myth that soccer is a family-friendly sport’ was no different.

Continue reading "Bagging out Aussie soccer fans is a hoary old look" »

I was going to take my six-year-old boy to the soccer on Friday night, but I decided not to. After what I witnessed at the Adelaide United - Melbourne Victory game at Hindmarsh Stadium, I doubt we’ll go to a game together this season. And that should be a huge concern for Adelaide United and the A-League.

In the end, I decided to go with a couple of mates, and keep one eye on the match and one eye on the hardcore fans that are a giving the sport I love such a bad name.

I took a seat in the southern grandstand, behind the Adelaide ``ultras’‘. I deliberately chose that spot so I could keep an eye on any trouble, but there were many young families around me who just had the misfortune to be sitting near the idiots.

The first thing that hits you is the swearing. While you still occasionally hear older supporters at footy games telling young hotheads to ``mind your language’‘, that’s not the case at the soccer.

Continue reading "The myth that soccer is a family-friendly sport" »

Arsenal striker Eduardo has been banned for two matches for diving, providing hope at last for all football fans.

A Uefa disciplinary panel ruled he cheated to win a penalty in a Champions League qualifier last week against Celtic.

The punishment far outweighs the yellow card he would have received had the referee spotted his dive, and that could be argued to be unfair.

Continue reading "Aussie soccer will never soar if diving isn’t banned" »

As someone who writes mostly about sport for a living, I’m supposed to be drooling in anticipation of the English Premier league season which kicks off this weekend. I’m not. Here’s why.

1. It only just ended

There were just 81 days between last season’s final game and this season’s impending first encounter. And that’s not to mention the pre-season tours where teams played important “practice matches” (as in, flexed their brand muscles) in such football hotbeds as Bangkok and Surfers Paradise. Enough! I need some breathing space. An on-again/off-again relationship simply doesn’t work when the off is shorter than the on.

Continue reading "I’ve had enough of the English Premier League" »

It seemed like any other international sporting event. Beers flowed, and barbeques sizzled, in the car park pre-match.

Kids mimicked their on-field heroes, with the names of superstars Messi and Henry on the back of their pint sized shirts. In all, 93,137 fans turned up at LA’s Rose Bowl overnight — the most-highly attended match in the United States since the 1994 World Cup.

No matter your colours, most supporters were frothing with anticipation to see one of the world’s biggest football franchises FC Barcelona, who had come to town for an exhibition clash against David Beckham and the LA Galaxy. But on this balmy night, we received proof positive that fans here are fair weather supporters.

Continue reading "For David Beckham, actions speak louder than boos" »

Who’s your favourite Dutch comedian? What’s the funniest Dutch film you’ve ever seen? And no, The Vanishing wasn’t a comedy. It was about a man who buried his wife alive.

The many races of the world have their own distinct characteristics, and while Guss Hiddink did a pretty good line in forming his hand into a punchy little fist and spinning it around when the Socceroo’s scored, he wasn’t known for his comic timing and sparkling repartee. Compared to Pim Verbeek, Guus is Chevy Chase.

And while the Pimster has copped a bath from some for failing to deliver a free-wheeling footballing spectacular this week - and been blamed for the poor attendance of 40,000 - I think there’s an argument that 2-0 was almost decadent and showy on our part.

Continue reading "It was the best nil-all draw that I’ve ever seen" »