Originally Posted by
Jules
The Jacko interview you posted was interesting and very amusing. I forgot how insane that guy is.
You can make that same argument about any professional sport. Rugby League is in the same boat, it's lost its personality in the Super League war. Football in Australia has never had a real personality yet. I regard Viduka as the greatest modern player we have produced and he hardly played in the NSL. You can argue that the A-League is a completely manufactured product. The marquee system has failed so far to hit its mark in attracting real personalities to the game in order to make an impact on and off the field. del Piero was the biggest coup but Sydney FC didn't take full advantage of his Italian charisma. Sydney FC managed the almost impossible. They rubbed all the Italian glitz and glamour off him and made him look like a suburban diving hack. There is only one thing keeping the A-League experiment afloat - the money from FoxSports. The FFA was hoping that Optus would provide some real competition to boost the value of the product, but they didn't come to the table. The foundations for AFL into the future are much, much stronger. They have shown with the development of the women's competition and AFLX that they can take the pioneering ideas that football in this country lead with and basically trump them with their mainstream clout.
Regarding the Aussie Rules specific issues such as flooding. Football has the same issues but to a greater extent. Parking the bus can kill off a game too. Only in football, we consider it smart tactics employed by managers to win a game. We say 0-0 draws can be an exciting contest. In Football, we say that the game goes through an evolution as new tactics are employed, achieve success and are copied. Then a master tactician comes up with a way to counter it, and the process continues. This is the so-called "beauty of the World game". But if this happens in AFL, it has killed the game?
It depends what you define as "real skill". Mark Jackson may define it as the individual ability of a tough Full Forward. But just as the interplay of Barcelona is exciting to watch, the ability of an AFL team to handball their way out of danger is also attractive to watch. I may not be a purist. I have drifted in and out of watching AFL over the years. I've played Aussie Rules and football. Troy Luff was only a couple of years above me at my club when I was playing, so we all took a lot of interest in the Swans at the time. And I followed the Swans quite closely when I lived in Sydney without becoming a hard core fan. There was just too much Newcastle in me to completely follow a Sydney team.
What my argument rests on is the relative positions of the sports in Australia. It is certain that football dominates grassroots. It is almost just as certain that in the last 12 years of trying, it has failed to translate that into mainstream support. And the main reason for this is that the A-League loses its best players overseas way too soon and gets them back way too late. When you see players like Hoole making stupid demands on the basis that if they are not accepted, he will head overseas, it seems like a structural problem. There are three things that AFL has that the A-League doesn't: a captured player market, massive crowds on a regular basis and massive corporate support. I am just starting to see that you need all three in order to dominate as a professional sport.
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