A League Champions! (Photo credit: Tiger Benji)
About two weeks ago I attended my first ever A-League game, the derby between Adelaide United and Melbourne Victory. It was an exciting game with lots of goals and a buzzing crowd that impressed me as a fan of world football.
However, after the game I still felt like football was far from catching on in Australia. There was something about the atmosphere that felt a bit forced. My biggest concern was the regular use of flares in the stands. Not because I think they are dangerous, but because they were viewed by many fans as the ultimate display of passion for the game. That may be the case in South America and parts of Europe but only because flares have become ingrained in those cultures, after decades of people living and breathing football.
I felt that A-League fans needed to stop relying on cliché ways to support their team and be patient in developing real passion for the league and the game. Australian football needed a unique way to show its love for the Beautiful Game, something genuinely passionate, with genuine, Australian personality. (Read about my first A-League experience here.)
The A-League wasn’t quite there yet and I didn’t think flares were quite going to be the spark that would ignite the country’s love affair with the game.
As it turns out I could be wrong.
After a series of outrageously biased reports by Channel 9 on the Sydney derby last week, which stereotyped fans as flare wielding hooligans, Australian football has decided it has had enough of being pointlessly criticised and belittled in the media.
The hash tag #PassionIsNotACrime has roused a nation of football lovers on Twitter into voicing their support for the game in any way they can. As the campaign builds momentum this weekend’s games, in particular the Melbourne derby, have become crucial to defending the image of the Beautiful Game in Australia.
Dialogue is heating up between football fans and Channel 9 and both parties will be watching each other very closely this Saturday. Channel 9 has been given a chance to re-assess its warped views on football, one that they are unlikely to take. A-League fans have a chance to put down their flares and adopt a new way to show their support, which I hope for the good of the game they are wise enough to take.
The recent controversy created by the media has brought Australian football fans together to support each other, their teams and their sport, in a display of passion more powerful than the flares themselves could ever create. This unique passion is just the kind of character and personality that the A-League needs in order to be viewed, by the rest of Australia, as a league with genuine fans and genuine potential. They need to continue to display their passion in this way.
I hope that this weekend A-League fans will leave their flares at home and embrace the Passion Is Not A Crime mantra that has united them all on social media this week. Chanting and singing the message, displaying it on banners and printing it on the backs of shirts are all displays of support for the entire sport that will be too strong for the rest of the country to ignore, however Channel 9 choose to report it.
I have a, somewhat farfetched, Martin Luther King style, dream of every fan at every game singing ‘Passion Is Not A Crime’ for an entire 90 minutes so, no matter what match highlights sports stations are forced to air, the message can’t be avoided.
The reality is that one flare, lit by one fan at this weekend’s Melbourne derby will be pounced upon by the media. However, it says something about football fans in Australia that less than two weeks after I decided that the sport was far from catching on in the country, it is clear that it already has. Less than two weeks after I questioned the passion of Adelaide United fans at Hindmarsh, a whole nation of football fans has shown they have a genuine and unfaltering passion for their teams, their league and above all their sport.
Related articles
- This Week in World Football: Portrayals of footballing passion (thefansbase.wordpress.com)
- Football has not gone back to the dark ages … the police are better at spotting the cavemen (standard.co.uk)
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