... and now, the top soccer stories in Tassie newspapers today:

The Examiner - "Launceston may host Harry Kewell".
The Mercury - "FFT investigates brawl".

Just another example of how biased The Mercury is.

Still not convinced?

Of the thirteen top stories in the Mercury soccer section, six are about the "racial abuse" issue (the rest are local club news and match results).  However, in that time period (19 June - 8 July), The Mercury has also published articles about soccer workshops during World Refugee Day ("Kicking off a new life", 26 June) and an update on the Tassie A-League bid ("Tassie A-team in the pipeline", 30 June).  Why aren't these articles included?  Too positive?  Don't they suit The Mercury's point of view?

This isn't unique to the Tasmanian media - it happens all across the country, sometimes it is subtle, often it is patently obvious.  In any case, nothing is going to change if we stay silent!

So not only do we have Hawthorn and North Melbourne playing matches in Tassie - the latter due to a fair bit of effort from Hobart City Council Alderman Marti Zucco - but it seems now he is trying to get Melbourne Storm to play in Hobart.

This seems strange to me - an NRL team, instead of an A-League team, for a few reasons - first, Tasmania is certainly not known as a rugby league stronghold - it would be the #3 or #4 football code in Tassie.  Second, because Marti Zucco is Italian - and although generalisations about a person due to their heritage are not always correct, he is very proud of his roots.


Dear Mr Zucco,

I'm writing to you since you have been in the media recently, due to your actions in trying to attract national club sporting events to the state - not only the AFL games at Bellerive Oval, but also about the announcement last week of a possible NRL pre-season game at North Hobart Oval.

As you may know there has been an A-League pre-season match (featuring Melbourne Victory) each July for the past five years at Aurora Stadium in Launceston, generally drawing 5000-8000 spectators.

It would be fantastic to see a similar event in Hobart.  For the coming A-League season (October 2011-March 2012), Football Federation Australia has marked five matches to be played at a "regional venue - TBC".  I've contacted both Cricket Tasmania and Launceston City Council about the possibility of hosting one of these but have not received a response.  Going by the enthusiasm you have shown in drawing AFL and NRL matches to Hobart, I hope you would have a similar interest in negotiating an A-League match.

It would be great to get to the stage where there are regular matches in Tasmania by Melbourne Storm, Melbourne Victory, Melbourne Heart or even the Melbourne Rebels super rugby team. Such events could hopefully be the precursor to the development or upgrade of a rectangular stadium - such as North Hobart Oval - in the state.

For reference the available match dates are:

• Wed 7 Dec 2011 - Sydney FC v Perth Glory
• Sun 11 Dec 2011 - Gold Coast United v Sydney FC
• Wed 14 Dec 2011 - Wellington Phoenix v Brisbane Roar
• Wed 18 Jan 2012 - Melbourne Heart v Central Coast Mariners
• Wed 25 Jan 2012 - Adelaide United v Newcastle Jets

Full fixture list: http://www.a-league.com.au/site/_content/document/00002236-source.pdf

CC:
Cricket Tasmania (events@crickettas.com.au)
Aurora Stadium (aurorastadium@launceston.tas.gov.au)
Football Federation Australia (feedback@footballaustralia.com.au)
John Boulous, (CEO Football Federation Tasmania) (CEO@footballfedtas.com.au)
Michelle O'Byrne (Minister for Sport) (michelle.obyrne@parliament.tas.gov.au)
Mark Shelton (Shadow Minister for Sport & Rec) (mark.shelton@parliament.tas.gov.au)

A year ago, Australia was the favoured nation to win the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.  Two weeks ago, FIFA's technical reports said England, United States and Australia were the three bids best prepared and capable of hosting a World Cup - Russia and Qatar, the most high risk.  Yet, on Friday morning, Russia and Qatar were declared the winners, while England and Australia were eliminated in the first round of their respective votes.  What went wrong?

Frank Lowy stated that before the vote, they were confident that they had at least four votes in the first round - maybe as many as six - meaning at least three ExCo members had looked him in the eye and lied.  Even afterwards, two members have claimed responsibility for the single vote.  Who can he trust?

Clearly politics and backdoor deals played a role, but it isn't as simple as "whoever donates the most money gets my vote".  The voting pattern is a curious one:

The number of votes for Qatar and Japan actually decreased after the first round - leading to suggestions that some blocs of members planned to vote in pre-arranged ways in particular rounds, targetting individual nations one by one.  USA, Qatar and Australia were the only nations seen as the likely hosts of the event (not to say the other bids weren't good - but too soon after their 2002 hosting).  Australia was probably identified as the easiest of the three to "get rid of" early.

Now for a game of "what-if" ... notice how Japan had an extra vote in their first round as opposed to the second?  What if that vote was originally going to Australia but was "switched" to Japan just to knock Australia out, as it was deemed a bigger threat?  Japan and Australia would be locked 2-2 for last place, leading to a "knock-out" voting round between the two.

A poster on the FourFourTwo Australia forums, girtXc, appears to have some sort of insight into the workings of the FIFA ExCo and has posted an interesting theory.  Apparently when the Tahitian delegate Temurii (I'm going to assume people know all about that!) got suspended it had bigger ramifications than just losing a single vote.  His theory about the Japan vote is that powerful Qatari ExCo delegate (and Asian Football Confederation chief) Mohammad bin Hammam arranged it so that Japan wouldn't go out in the first round, therefore keeping Japan ExCo delegate Oguru's honour (very important in Japanese culture) and thus ensuring Japan's vote went to Qatar after Japan was knocked out.  Talk about swings and roundabouts!

The theories about how it happened can go on forever, and we may not ever know... but what happens from here, for Australia?

The sad thing about losing is that, as well as not hosting, it makes the moronic anti-sockah brigade in this nation think they have the right to spout rubbish about the sport.  Rebecca Wilson is already at it.  I won't go into detail about this one, if you read it, you know about it, and if you don't believe it happens I'm not going to change your mind.

The corruption has hit several major nations hard - the USA and England are even discussing a breakaway governing body to FIFA.  Australia could potentially be a part of this but we don't have the standing to do so - any form of dissent and the AFC - headed by bin Hammam (conflict of interest much?) - will send us back off to Oceania.

When will Australia get another chance?  The disappointing thing is that these opportunities come up so rarely for Australia.  FIFA has had vague continental rotation policies in the past - usually the rules are changed before a full cycle occurs.  With the 2018 and 2022 bid process, the rule was that once a continent hosted, they were not able to bid for the next two.  Although it is possible that this will change in the future, if it continues, then 2026 would likely go to the USA, and 2030 to Europe.  That puts Australia's next chance at 2034 at the earliest.

I will be 56 by then.  Frank Lowy would have well and truly fallen off his perch - he will be 104 if he makes it that far!

... and the big question is - will the government at the time support it?  We were lucky in that we had bipartisan support from Kevin Rudd (a "foreign affairs nerd prime minister") and Malcolm Turnbull.  It may not be that easy for a government to fork out $45m again, depending on the political landscape at the time.

But then again, in 1986, Melbourne unsuccessfully bid for the 1992 Olympics.  11 votes out of 85 in the first round.  Brisbane bid for the 1996 Olympics, 12 out of 86.  Imagine if those two experiences were derided as being "wastes of money" - it may have stopped the AOC supporting Sydney's bid for the 2000 Olympics - 30 votes out of 88 in the first round, defeating Beijing 45-43 in the final round, and going on to host the "Best Olympic Games ever!"

In the meantime, lets support the Socceroos at the 2011 AFC Asian Cup - strangely enough, hosted in Qatar in January - after all, it is the game on the pitch that matters!

"Footy saved from World Cup threat" read the front page of the Herald Sun yesterday.    What an alarming title – you would think FIFA was going to roll their tanks in and destroy the AFL headquarters from a headline like that.

So what has actually happened?  Let’s pick a few key quotes from the article.

The AFL and the “biggest show on earth” will co-exist if Australia hosts the soccer World Cup in 2018 or 2022.  Co-exist is a funny word.  It implies some sort of equality.  For example, the AFL and soccer don't "co-exist" at the moment - for the best part, the AFL totally dominates it in the media.  Does the AFL expect that this will happen during a World Cup hosted in Australia?  It won't even be 50-50 - the World Cup will, dominate.  The AFL's season continuing during the World Cup is not about whether it is legally allowed to - it is whether the AFL wishes to commit financial suicide by attempting to do so.

Skilled Stadium [Kardinia Park in Geelong], Subiaco Oval, Gold Coast Stadium and Adelaide Oval would also be off limits to the AFL during the Cup.  Oh yes, the FFA/Federal Government is taking these venues, modernising them, upgrading their capacity, using them for a couple of months – and then handing the nice shiny new venues back to the AFL to play on year after year.  Not to mention the MCG and Homebush.  Are we supposed to think the AFL is doing it tough?

The government guarantee appears to contravene a FIFA regulation that a major sport can’t run in the host nation during a World Cup.  Actually, the truth is a little simpler than that – the AFL is not a major sport.  The FIFA regulation relates to events such as Wimbledon, or the Ashes series.  Even Major League Baseball continued in the United States in 1994, and MLB is much bigger than AFL.

[Demetriou said] "We’ve always said we would be providing the MCG and Skilled Stadium [Kardinia Park]"  How nice of him to be able to speak for the Victorian State Government and the City of Greater Geelong.  Did the AFL "provide" the MCG for the Commonwealth Games, or was it simply that it isn’t theirs to provide?  

The AFL has also been concerned FIFA would require the MCG for longer, before and after the tournament.  This refers to a proposal to "rectangularise" the MCG temporarily, requiring the ground for longer for conversion, which was announced publicly in December last year.  However, this proposal had already been eliminated by the bid taskforce privately before this time and also again publicly about 6 hours after the news story was published (in the Herald Sun, no surprises there).  For some reason, despite the fact that it is not going to happen, it gets brought up time and time again by the AFL and the Herald Sun, alongside the equally unlikely threat of "cancelling a season and sending clubs broke".

In fine form as usual, the Herald Sun has followed up with another article today, "League compo for cup games".  This is all about the compensation they will receive for ... hang on - what are they being compensated for?  They apparently aren't going to stop their season or reduce the number of games.  They are mathematically perfectly capable of honouring their existing stadium contracts even with some of them being unavailable, so no issues there.  They are going to have to play some games in reduced capacity venues for 10 weeks, certainly - but this is negated by the fact that they are also going to play in increased capacity stadiums for years to come - surely hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government funded infrastructure is enough?  In fact, the United States bid - our closest competitor for the 2022 World Cup - is already taking advantage of the ammo being provided to them to promote their own bid - how much compensation is the AFL going to pay the federal government if it is their antics which causes our bid to fail?

Melbourne's self proclaimed title of the "sports capital of the world" is now a joke - nowhere else would you see the largest newspaper in such a city against the World Cup.

I really feel sorry for the hundreds of thousands of Victorians who support both codes, as well as the hundreds of thousands who have no specific interest in soccer but want the World Cup to come here.  Unfortunately to the rest of the country and the rest of world, their local media is portraying the state as extremely insular and closed minded.

... and to think that if the World Cup comes here, the Herald Sun would be the first to complain when Melbourne only hosted six matches and Sydney hosts twenty!  But why shouldn't Sydney get more?  Not only are they upgrading their largest venue - Stadium Australia - by adding 5000 seats and installing a retractable glass roof, they are also offering their secondary stadium (Sydney Football Stadium) as well as offering to build a new 40,000 capacity venue in Western Sydney!  The New South Wales Government and the people of Sydney obviously want to host World Cup matches, not treat it like some sort of invading threat. 

The AFL can't really be blamed for their actions - their job is to look after their sport - but the Herald Sun is supposed to be a media outlet, not the AFL's PR department.

If I were an international football fan planning the best location to base myself during a World Cup in Australia, I'd be looking at the city with three venues (and within commuting distance to Canberra and Newcastle).  Melbourne wouldn't even be on the radar.  Is the Victorian Government looking after the interests of the state, or the interests of the AFL?

a)      Supporters travelling from the north to the south for matches (or vice versa - the percentage of people who suggested that they would attend a match at the other end of the state hovered around the 8-10% mark).

b)      Supporters attending more than one game

c)       Supporters from rural areas in the north-east, midlands, west coast, east coast, or Huon area

d)      Interstate supporters travelling to Tasmania

Of course as usual, the naysayers are up and about, as I have mentioned in a previous blog post.  One comment on Walter Pless' blog suggested that Tasmania's experience in the NBL and VFL are relevant to the potential for a Tassie A-League team.  He failed to mention our cricket team (which, although crowds are generally low, are comparable with domestic cricket crowds nationwide) and of course the large crowds which attend AFL and A-League matches at York Park.  If we can attract over 6000 people to a practice match between two non-Tasmanian teams in the middle of winter, how many would our own team attract?

If you want to know the answers to that question, TUFC has released a full breakdown of the statistics in a followup post on their site.

• Southern Cross news story - 3 Feb 2010
• ABC News - "Tas A-League pitch gains ground" - 3 Feb 2010
• The Mercury - "Support for soccer bid" - 4 Feb 2010

It's time for my first post on another one of our blogs main topics - balls, specifically of the foot variety!

Yesterday, Tassie A-League bid taskforce Tasmania United FC made a press release announcing the next stage of their bid process - a public sentiment survey.

And of course, the same thing happened that happens everytime.. the naysayers come out of the woodwork.

One anonymous poster on Walter Pless' site posted "We have at least two chances of getting an A league side here in Tasmania. Buckleys and none."  I would like to think that Buckley - FFA CEO Ben Buckley that is - who grew up in Tasmania, would like to see a team here! 

This is on a site specifically about Tasmanian football - you would expect them to be the most supportive.

"Zero chance of an A league team here. All clubs struggling. No money in the game. That is reality.", the anonymous poster continued.

I continued with some actual facts:

* Yes some clubs are struggling. Importantly, some are not. Financially, Melb and Central Coast are in the black. Crowd wise, some are down, but Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Wellington are up.

* The feasibility study includes financial info and a preliminary public interest survey.  It also states that TUFC will be able to break even with crowds as low as 8000 due to the favourable stadium arrangements in place.

* FFA is about to sign a new deal with Fox Sports for $60m/year (current deal is $17m/year).

* Buckley, Frank Lowy and Archie Fraser have all recently stated Canberra and Tasmania are their intentions for future expansion.

I don't understand the mentality of not supporting a team playing your preferred sport, in your own state.  Do people think they are going to get punished for supporting an unsuccessful bid? The general public don't need to worry about the funding or sponsors or business cases or anything like that - if the bid doesn't have them, they won't be accepted. The only question most of us have to answer is "If we get a team, will you support them?" You would expect Tasmanians, being a parochial bunch, to do so!

I think many Tasmanians have a built-in inferiority complex - they have been told that they are not good enough by mainlanders for so long that they start to believe it.

Support makes a huge amount of difference.  Look at Gold Coast United.  Ignoring the crowds they had everything that makes a hugely successful club.  Jason Culina, a World Cup Socceroo playing in Europe, returning in play in Australia in the prime of his career.  A strong squad including leading goalscorer Shane Smeltz.  Clive Palmer, Queenslands richest man, as their owner.  Good results, consistently in the top 3 of the league all season.  Robina Stadium, a 27,000 capacity stadium completed in 2005, to play in.  The only major sport on the Gold Coast over summer (not even cricket to contend with).  But their crowds are terrible, smaller than clubs based in less populated areas such as Central Coast and Townsville. 

They have not promoted themselves or connected with the community, and as a result they have the smallest crowds of any club, and that alone has caused all sorts of problems, on and off the field.

Hopefully as club based in a smaller population area, this will be one of the things that Tasmania United FC will do well.  Time will tell!