
Issue No 19		25 June 1999

Sport

Terry O'Brien on the Games We Play

A couple of years ago a friend rang her father who was in his eighties and a life long Collingwood supporter. She told him that Norman Schwartzkopf was going to give a motivating address before the game. " Who?" he asked. "General Norman Schwartzkopf" she replied. The response was identical. "Stormin' bloody Norman Schwartzkopf, the general" she responded, somewhat frustrated. "Who did he play for?" he asked. As it turned out the motivation wasn't enough. The 'Woods lost.

Her father spent most of his footy life in an era when goodwill, gate receipts, and chook raffles were enough to sustain a top level football club. The VFL, as it was then, was mostly a parochial suburban Melbourne affair. One of the strengths of Rules in Victoria and the Southern half of the continent was that it was, effectively, the only winter game in town and there fore bridged the religious and socio-economic divides. Today it is no longer the only game in town and other codes, indeed other sports, are looking for their slice of the action.

These days the game has changed and so have the finances required to run it. Corporate sponsorship and professional administration are major ingredients in the make up of football codes. The players, of course, are important but wouldn't be there without the other components of a top level club. Or certainly not as comparatively well paid professionals anyway.

So where is football going in this country? I have dusted off my crystal ball and gazed into it. Those that predict the eventual demise of Aussie Rules often point out that there is no international representation for the code. The hybrid version of Gaelic Football is discounted. Yet in spite this crowd attendances continue to grow and its expansion as a national sport continues to succeed. AFL club memberships continue to grow, while at the other end of the scale junior participation rates, especially in the non-traditional states, increase exponentially.

The Swans success is seen as, at best, ephemeral. It's Sydney's love affair with winners they say. The Northern Kangaroos had fifteen thousand at their last game. Free tickets could only be responsible for that. Yes, there were freebies and I had one. But they still got a crowd on a cold long weekend Monday - not a traditional day out for Sydney sports fans. Other codes have not been slow to hand out tickets to get bums on seats.

So, what of our rivals? Rugby League has survived its corporate wars and the reunified competition is attracting more fans to the games. How much of this is due to the supporters of the endangered species such as South Sydney and Balmain turning up to save their clubs remains to be seen. However, it's the off field antics that continue to plague the code. Drunken exploits and scissors wielding officials have grabbed the headlines all too often. I'm not writing off League but it has a long way to go to recover the ground lost due to the Super League fiasco.

Rugby Union should have been the biggest beneficiary of the Super League affair. Its popularity has gone up with the advent of such things as the introduction of the Super 12's. The newfound honesty in allowing players to be openly professional has removed one of the major slurs on the game. However, in the short term at least, it's the professionalism that may be its biggest problem. The rate of representative football means that the clubs - the grass roots of the game - effectively never see the now elite players. In my opinion, at some stage there won't be enough top quality players to fill the gaps caused by injuries and retirements unless something is done to remedy this.

Soccer. Round ball. Real football, the purists say. A shotgun is not a rifle but both are firearms. The game has the highest participation rate of any code in the country. However, they don't hold the majority of players past seventeen years of age.

Money is the big problem for local soccer. Mostly overseas money. The recent payment of a $75 million transfer fee highlights this. Australia continues to be a nursery for the big leagues and consequently the local game suffers. Even though some sides have a relatively big following and attendances many struggle both in player depth and finances. Many fans refuse to watch the local game on TV let alone go to the grounds.

It's probably an unanswerable question but how much did it cost Australian soccer when they failed to make last years World Cup? Plenty, would be the simple answer but to quantify the loss would be impossible. And subsequent dithering by Soccer Australia over appointing a new coach hasn't helped.

It's an interesting paradox that the strength of overseas soccer is a problem for the local game, the strength of the Australian League could be a long term headache for that code. The highest level competition League is, arguably, the battle between the Cane Toads and the Cockroaches - also known as the State of Origin not, as you might expect, any of the international contests. This could diminish the popularity of that game elsewhere as player look to codes where they have a chance of international success.

There is, clearly, room for all these codes in Australia but the big question is how the market share is divided between them. It is the international nature of three of the codes that is seen as their strength. However that could be also be something of a collective Achilles' Heel. It may be that the comparatively insular nature of Australian Football could well be its saviour. It allows the administrators to enforce such things as salary caps and player lists and thereby keep the spiralling cost under some sort of control

As the dust settles on my crystal ball I see the game surviving well beyond my lifetime.

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  Issue 19 contents

Interview: Moore for the Battlers
NCOSS director Garry Moore gives the community sector's response to this week's State Budget

Unions: AWU's Bush Blitz
"This is AWU Country". That's the slogan for the Australian Workers Union as it launches its campaign to address the specific needs of workers throughout regional and rural Australia.

Indigenous: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide
A United Nations committee slams Australia on indigenous native title rights.

International: Unions Post-War Stand
The world labour group demands KFOR track war-crimes authors and says social dimension central to Balkan reconstruction.

History: How Swede It Was
Swedish seafarers play an important role in South Australia's maritime history.

Review: If He Had Only Listened To Me ...
If Michael Thompson had listened to me the current debate raging in the nationďż˝s opinion pages about his book may not have been as hysterical.

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