Soccer sucks

In my surfings of the world wide net, I came across this great blog on the Guardian site, cataloguing the attitudes of various American soccerphobes to our beautiful game (the article is over a month old now but, meh, I have yoghurt older than that in my fridge). Many of those viewpoints are instantly recognizable in an Australian context - it's especially interesting to see that fans in the US face the same problems with an entrenched anti-soccer sports media that we face here. If anything, I would imagine that it's even more ingrained over there.

Anyway, that blog links to a website that's too good not to share: http://www.soccersucks.net, whose aim is to save the world from the perversions and depravities of the round ball game. It's clearly a pisstake but it's very, very funny.

The immovable brick wall of stupidity

Gustave Flaubert once said: "Stupidity is something immovable; you can't try to attack it without being broken by it." This is sound advice. This week, Rebecca Wilson came out with yet another anti-football article, this time bleating about the $45-odd million the Federal Government has pumped into the World Cup bid. There are, of course, plenty of sensible arguments against spending such a large amount of money on a sporting event. The problem with Wilson's article is that her arguments demonstrate a (deliberate?) ignorance of the issues at play, and stem instead from an emotional reaction informed by her own obvious dislike of football, the "terrible A-League", and its "fanatical fans".

Thus, I will not get angry - I will yield like a reed in a rapidly-flowing stream, recognising the immovable stupidity of trying to compare a bid for the World Cup with sports like swimming and Rugby League. The difference, of course, is that the World Cup cash promise is not just 'sports funding' - it's a well-thought-out political move to bring the biggest event in the world to Australia. It's our country flexing its muscles in the same way that it did when bidding for the 2000 Olympics. It's an exercise designed to increase Australia's international soft power standings, whether successful or not, and the economy will receive a huge boost if we actually host it. It's a win for the FFA and a considered gamble by the Federal Government. In all likelihood, if this $45 million was not going towards the World Cup bid, it probably wouldn't be spent on sport at all. It's not an either/or proposition.

I'm not angered by the fact that she is complaining about football's relative gains when other sports are missing out on the gravy train. Why? Because, to put it simply, it's an idiotic argument. Football is the most popular participation sport in Australia, by far, and is played by males and females of all ages and backgrounds. For years it has been the ugly sister, missing out while millions have been ploughed into the more fashionable cricket, Aussie Rules, and the Rugbies, as well as Olympic sports like swimming and rowing. Now it's time for a bit of equity, bitches. Why shouldn't football get more than other sports?

I can sense some righteous outrage building in my liver at the moment so I will move onto another point: her decrying of the fact that money will be spent on schmoozing FIFA bosses and other football bigwigs. Well, how else are we going to get the frigging thing? As if Australia didn't do exactly the same thing when bidding for the Sydney Games (and in fact a lot more than that: the words 'Olympics', 'Sydney', 'IOC' and 'corruption' make for an interesting Google search). Does Wilson complain about money being spent on the Olympics? Of course not. Would she rather see the World Cup bid money be put into Rugby League, a sport that is more or less unknown outside NSW and Queensland, the bulk of whose income is sourced from the wallets of pensioners and single mothers through poker machines, and whose 'World Cup' final failed to attract enough interest to fill Suncorp Stadium? Obviously, yes. Maybe I'm being unfair to Rugby League, though: its 'Rapists of Tomorrow' program for juniors has clearly been a successful initiative.

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At this point I feel like I'm angrily beating my head against the immovable brick wall of stupidity, so I'll stop talking about Rebecca Wilson. Let's turn our attention to Geoff Roach's column in yesterday's Advertiser, shall we:

What the hell has Australian soccer done to deserve a $45 million handout from
Santa Rudd's Federal Government?

That one's easy, we've covered that: a) it's decided to bid for the world's biggest sporting event; and b) it's the most popular participant sport in Australia, bar none. Next.

voluminous stomachs of the conga line of lobbyists and power brokers

zzzzzz. Once again, show me another way to get anything done anywhere without anyone powerful getting a free lunch out of it. C'est impossible.

How does the AFL, the SANFL and the other Australian football codes feel about
such booty being thrown to foreigners, marketers, PR companies and other
assorted leeches rather than Australian kids playing the unique Australian game?

Well, if Mr Roach is representative of their opinions, pretty bitchy and borderline xenophobic, I'd say. An interesting exercise would be to count how many times Roach uses the word 'Australian' in the article. A cynical person might think that the use of the term is a deliberate device to paint football as an immoral foreign pastime indulged in by shady foreigners (probably black ones, too!) as opposed to our pure Australian game played by Australian kids. In Australia. Not that I'm accusing Roach of this: he's just a proud Aussie worried about Pies v Hawks having to be played elsewhere when the MCG's playing surface is invaded by a bunch of diving longhaired pansies and the stands are filled with hooligans that would stab you with a sharpened boat flare as soon as look at you.

It's fair to say that I got a bit angry reading Geoff Roach's article, as well. But there are little touches of stupidity in there alongside the fearmongering and implied racism. Calling the Football Federation of Australia 'FA', for example. It's FFA. FFS. If you're going to write something nasty about an organisation, and it's going to get published in a major newspaper, at least do the minimum amount of research to make sure you don't come off looking like an ignorant fool (like, you know, finding out the name of the organisation in question).

I'm not angry about what these people write. They're biased and ignorant, and they're clutching at straws in an effort to undo all the progress that our sport has made. I'm angry that so many people will get to read their stupid articles. And now I'm angry at myself for having spent the past two hours writing about those stupid assholes. Time for a cup of tea I think.

Rebecca Wilson Bites Back

Here is today's column in the Daily Telegraph, in which she refers to (almost) universally-respected commentator and pundit Simon Hill as a 'feral soccer fan', and questions his abilities as a journalist. I'm not quite sure why she singles out Hill, though, because her column has been pretty much derided from most corners of the sports media.

To be fair to Wilson, she has copped a huge amount of abuse over the past week in responses posted on mainstream news sites and football fan forums, ranging from people taking a dig at her journalistic credentials to inexcusably misogynistic and degrading comments about her gender and physical appearance. Even SBS's own Godfather of Football, Les Murray, wrote a scathing blog on The World Game site in which he made reference to Wilson's 'leathery skin' and 'ironed-on hair'. The offending paragraph now has been amended, but it was stupid and juvenile for Uncle Laszlo (who, to be quite honest, has been slipping for a while now) to stoop to such a personal level. I don't want to know the sort of personal hate mail that Wilson's email inbox would have been flooded with.

Rebecca Wilson stands by her original article. Which is fair enough: she meant what she wrote. Although, funnily enough, she makes absolutely no effort to back up her wild claims in light of all the eminently sensible counter arguments that have been flung her way. All I can say is that rumours of Australian football's death have been greatly exaggerated - of course, we'll have to wait and see whether her confident predictions of the ignoble demise of football in this country actually comes to pass. Somehow, I doubt it.

EDIT:
Here is a fantastic response to Wilson's article, by Kevin Airs on the FourFourTwo site: http://au.fourfourtwo.com/blogs.aspx?CIaBID=21

Rebecca Wilson v Football

Last Saturday, following Adelaide United's midweek loss to Gamba Osaka in the Asian Champions League final, Daily Telegraph columnist Rebecca Wilson delivered an article that can only be described as a hatchet job on Australian football. According to Wilson, Adelaide's "embarrassing performance" shows that there are deep cracks emerging in soccer's "carefully constructed masquerade".

She goes on to claim that the Australian game is stodgy and slow in comparison to the fast, skilful style played everywhere else, and paints a dismal picture of Australia as a third-rate football backwater, with ignorant fans oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world is decades ahead in terms of youth development, style, and technique.

Of course, she has a point, to a certain extent: the quality of play in the A-League and lower levels of domestic football is not as good as it is in many parts of the world, and Australia doesn't exactly churn out players like Argentina or Spain. As though we're not already aware of the difference between Lionel Messi and Ruben Zadkovic (hairstyle, for starters).

What's missing in her article is any sort of context. She makes direct comparisons between Australia and the Netherlands, a European footballing power that has been at the very forefront of tactical and technical development for four decades, without acknowledging the fact that Australian football has made huge strides forward in the past five years or so. She complains about the standard of the A-League, which has been in existence since 2005, compared to the Japanese J.League, which was formed in the early 1990s and is composed of clubs with huge financial resources to spend on players, coaches and youth development. In short, she takes a big swing at Australian football without bothering to look at the bigger picture.

At best, Rebecca Wilson's article is clumsy journalism; at worst it's a thinly disguised ambush on the round ball game, a swift and opportunistic kick in the guts following the code's 'slip-up' in failing to conquer Asia at the last hurdle. Nothing new, of course - Australian football fans are used to articles of this type appearing every now and then (see the excellent Das Libero for other examples of 'soccerphobia'). It keeps us on our toes, ever vigilant to the fact that although we have pushed our way into the sporting mainstream there are still some who find our presence unwelcome.