SMH - Football Article of the Year

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Martin Tyler
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SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by Martin Tyler »

AFL is a dead-end sport that hinders us on global stage STEPHEN SAMUELSON
June 27, 2010

Australia's most talented athletes are wasted in a code that the world ignores.


Timezones are not friendly to Australian sports fans. Waking up at 3am in the middle of winter is hardly fun, but we do it because there is a thrill and pride in watching Australians compete in the world's biggest sporting events, where the result matters to not only us, but to millions of others around the world, too.

Yes, even watching Germany thrash the Socceroos was exciting for the first nine minutes.

If you love this, then you must wish that the AFL's grand ambitions to dominate the Australian sporting landscape are thwarted.

It's a zero-sum game. The more AFL succeeds, the smaller the talent pool of the athletes available for international competition.

Deliberately obstructing Australia's bids for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup may have been good business for the AFL, but it's bad news for Australian sport.

Who wouldn't want to see the world's greatest sporting event on these shores? The 16 clubs of the AFL, that's who. Let's be frank. If AFL expansion clubs Greater Western Sydney and Gold Coast were to succeed in growing the code - a phrase that's interchangeable with generating record TV revenue - then the big winners are the AFL clubs, 10 of which are Victorian.

AFL expansion is simply the subsidising of Victorian parochialism and the code's CEO, Andrew Demetriou, is prepared to go to great lengths to achieve it, including the multimillion-dollar signing of NRL star Israel Folau - a man as familiar with AFL as Pim Verbeek is to 4-4-2 football.

It may just be a one-off publicity stunt, but the AFL has said it is prepared to chase other elite athletes for cross-code switches.

Demetriou is the merry Pied Piper of Australian sport. If the Folau signing is a blueprint for future AFL plans, then Demetriou wants to roadblock Australian sport, pick off the cream of the talent and lead them down a cul-de-sac the size of Ramsay Street.

In this sporting dead-end, the AFL tells players which house they live in, via the draft, and uses a salary cap to limit how much they earn. Apart from the odd punter who escapes over the back fence to pursue a speculative career in the NFL, there's nowhere to go for athletes once they are in the system.

Where will Folau go at the end of his four-year deal? At best, the same way he came in.

If Folau stayed in the NRL, he could go to rugby and play for the Wallabies or for clubs in Japan, France and the United Kingdom. Even if he stayed in league, Folau could superannuate his career in northern England.

In other words, as an individual he has options whereas a dedicated AFL athlete's future is tied to the collective.

The NFL is the only other sporting competition in the world that does not suffer much player leakage to rival competition or codes despite having a genuine salary cap and a draft. But whereas Super Bowl Sunday is one of the world's great sporting events, the significance of the last Saturday in September barely causes a ripple north of the Murray River.

The AFL's approach is understandable. It wants to maximise its chances of survival in the sporting landscape, but such self-interest is not necessarily a good thing. Just look at the spread of the cane toad.

There is realistic, long-term growth in other sports. Tennis, cricket, baseball, basketball, golf, football and the rugby codes offer international outlets. What's the pinnacle in the AFL? A grand final appearance with Collingwood?

Spruiking AFL expansion is a black-and-white argument.

Stephen Samuelson is the sports editor of smh.com.au
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Re: SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by Kosta Utd »

brilliant article
H _ S T _ K _ buy a vowel?
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Re: SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by ozzie owl »

What about the full page of anti-football in saturdays advertiser?

Cornesy and Wilson both a disgrace.
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Re: SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by Kosta Utd »

ozzie owl wrote:What about the full page of anti-football in saturdays advertiser?

Cornesy and Wilson both a disgrace.
i dont buy that rubbish.. can u give us a quick account of what those ass wipes said?
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Re: SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by ozzie owl »

Kosta Utd wrote:
ozzie owl wrote:What about the full page of anti-football in saturdays advertiser?

Cornesy and Wilson both a disgrace.
i dont buy that rubbish.. can u give us a quick account of what those ass wipes said?

I'd love to but so much crap posted by both.
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Re: SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by winzor »

Wilson said soccer is boring, and we don't need the World Cup in Australia.

Cornsey said Verbeek was a fraud and we need an Aussie coach....
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Re: SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by Martin Tyler »

And both articles make good toilet paper.... :clown: :clown:
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Re: SMH - Football Article of the Year

Post by Martin Tyler »

Another good one by Les on SBS site:




Football has little to worry about
27 Jun 2010 | 00:00



I see the anti-soccer mob back home has found a fresh horse to ride on – Australia’s failure to advance to the second phase of the World Cup.

Boy, they are loving this.

Whew, it was close though. A few less goals conceded to Germany or Wilkshire converting his sitter against Ghana and our boys would have been in the last 16 and may now be preparing to face Uruguay in the quarter-finals.

That’s where Ghana is now, the team which till it met the USA managed to score just two goals, two lousy and lucky penalties, in its three group games. And which played two of those three games largely against 10 men.

Yet, against the steely Americans, they scored two wonderful goals and looked all the part of worthy quarter-finalists and noble torchbearers of the African cause.

That’s the fine line between success and failure in a football World Cup, the wondrous fickleness of the game that these miserable Neanderthals do not understand, or refuse to see.

It’s the theatre of it which makes the World Cup so appealing, even in Australia where so far nine million people have watched it and where it brings tens of thousands out into city squares to watch and celebrate in the dead of winter.

And the pointy end is still to come.

The anti-soccer resistance movement continues to shrink and has become totally irrelevant, its members cutting lonely figures stumbling about in the dark.

They huddle in desperate fear that Australia will get to host the World Cup in 12 years time. What that might do to demonstrate how important football is to Australians terrifies them.

Most of them are so old they’ll hopefully be smelling violets from underneath by the time that happens.

The few younger ones will of course jump on the bandwagon and cash in as cheap media tarts. Some of them are here in South Africa doing it now.

Of course they could be right in their argument that ‘the round ball game’ is less than entertaining.

To quote a colleague with us here in Cape Town: ‘The other codes are never dull. Salary cap rorts. Defecating in hotel corridors. Pack rape. Drugs. Racism. That's what football needs. More meatheads. Spice it up a bit.’

Football and its broad appeal in Australia has gone so far in the past 30 years that I have long ago ceased to be concerned by these cave dwellers.

But I do wish they’d shut up.
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