From Pristina to Parramatta
Albania. It has been home to one of the most brutal and insular communist regimes in Europe, ethnic and territorial disputes, brightly coloured Stalinist buildings and elaborate Ponzi schemes. Such was the frenzy of investment in Ponzi schemes by Albanians – and enormous loss of savings when it all collapsed in 1997 – that the World Bank economist Carlos Elbirt called fraudulent investing a “national sport”. Of course, the real national sport is football, but it can be as confusing as the country itself. Albania is home to the mighty Partizani Tirana, forever immortalised in Attila the Stockbroker’s poem Albanian football - “there’s nothing to put spice into the fight against relegation/ like knowing that the price is instant liquidation.” It is also the spiritual home of FK Shkëndija, an Albanian-backed club that plays in the Macedonian league who have had their Poznan and their colours shamelessly ripped off by the Red and Black Bloc. Albanian is also the heritage of Besart Berisha and Labinot Haliti, the two goalscorers in Friday night’s 1-1 draw between the Western Sydney Wanderers and Brisbane Roar. Both were born in Pristina, both fled civil unrest as children. Berisha grew up on the mean streets of east Berlin, while ‘Labi’ and his family settled in Western Sydney. Was it fate that the two Kosovar Albanians – surely the most obscure nationality in the A-League – would share the spoils?
In the lead-up, it was billed as the biggest match of the season. Indeed Brisbane Roar – the competition’s most successful club – against the Western Sydney Wanderers – the club that invented football – is about as big as it gets in the A-League. In anticipation, SBS were good enough to give the match blanket coverage across SBS1 and SBS2, rather than the usual run the A-League gets on their hipster channel, SBS2. Was it an admission that ratings haven’t been as high as SBS would have liked, or were they simply swept up in the sense of occasion? Perhaps they were just relieved not to be lumped with another Melbourne Heart match? In any event, Friday night was wall-to-wall football on SBS. Just like the old days. As the insomniacs, people with funny last names, ideologically sound white people and World War Two aficionados fiddled with their remotes and mulled over the merits of a Friday night on the couch watching the new opiate of the masses, they were given a little taste of Pristina in Parramatta. Who needs Silvio Rivier and Global Village when you’ve got David Zdrilic and the A-League? Yes, it might have displaced the traditional Friday night Hitler documentary, and there might have been a few complaints to the switchboard by those missing Ninja Warrior, but really, it couldn’t have been a more fitting piece of programming on SBS.
The return of Rogic
Imagine for a moment that you are Tom Rogic. You have taken an 8-Mile-esque path from the Nike Football Academy’s ‘The Chance’ program to an A-League contract. The Socceroos cap wasn’t long in coming. Then came an overseas move to Celtic, where you are named man of the match on debut. Then, inexplicably, you ride the pine, making just a handful of appearances off the bench. With the World Cup just a few months away, what do you do? Glasgow is hardly the most appealing of cities. “The great thing about Glasgow,” Billy Connolly once remarked, “is that if there’s a nuclear attack it’ll look exactly the same afterwards.” So, despite the fact you flew to Glasgow with Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road on repeat on your iPod (”It’s town full of losers/And I’m pulling out of here to win”), home starts to look a little more appealing. Your former coach Graham Arnold wants to invite you to Japan, but that’s taking the nuclear attack joke a bit far. Sydney FC want you to be a Band-Aid for their gaping flesh wounds, while your old club Central Coast Mariners tugs on the heart-strings. Their new coach, Phil Moss, even called you a “Mariners boy” in the press.
Here’s what Rogic did. He signed for Melbourne Victory, overlooking the littlest club in the league in small-town Gosford for the biggest club in inner-city Melbourne. Can you blame him? Everybody leaves Gosford when they’re young, and only comes back to retire. And they make far better cafe lattes in Fitzroy than they do in Budgewoi. All these realities, perhaps, are keenly understood by those on the Central Coast, who were good enough not to boo him too loudly. Indeed, Rogic’s return in Victory colours could have been a bit awkward. In unearthing one of the most exciting players of recent years, the Mariners have a right to feel proud of the young playmaker, and a little sad at the sight of him in rival colours. Looking as sharp as ever, Rogic waltzed around Central Coast Stadium with Gui Finkler, with whom he seems to be forming a formidable partnership. But even though they were on the end of a 3-1 pasting, as Rogic left the field just before full time, the Mariners fans were good enough to drown out the few boos with cheers.
A mutiny in the stands
The drama began before kick off. As the teams came out of the tunnel, The Cove – Sydney FC’s group of active supporters – unfurled two large banners at the home end. One read ‘We Want Farina Gone’, the other said something in Russian. Onlookers scrambled to find meaning in the Cyrillic – was it ‘We Want Farina Gone’ and ‘Also Shorter Beer Queues Please’? Or ‘We Want Farina Gone’ and ‘Workers of Sydney: Lets Collectivise This Place Like It’s 1917’? As public spectacle now demands, out came the iPhones, and the obligatory pictures were snapped. The banner was promptly snatched away by security, but Google Translate was already in overdrive. Like Chinese whispers, it raced around the ground; ‘Fire Barlow and Tony P - Traktovenko’ soon became ‘High or low, Tony P is a tractor vent’, and everyone was left confused. Not as confused, though, as the Sydney FC players, who were thoroughly outclassed by Adelaide on the pitch. For the record, Adelaide won the game 3-0, but in truth, all eyes were on the proceedings in the stands. Not for the first time in A-League history, fans were ejected for an ‘offensive’ Russian banner. The Cove’s ‘capo’ and his wife were booted, and most of the bay followed them in protest, taking their chants of ‘We Want Franky Out’ and ‘Sack the Board’ out the front. Frank Farina’s Sydney FC – usually about as inspiring as spending an afternoon drafting spectator codes of conduct with the bureaucrats at FFA – have suddenly got interesting.
If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the A-League
We Australians are proud of our summer football. It was a long time coming – at times the battle in the 1980s to have the season switched from winter to summer was bitter and personal. There were, of course, many opponents of summer football – primarily from journalists who liked to spend their summers holidays at the beach rather than sweating it out in the press box. Some worried that playing in the summer would also be detrimental to the players health, ignoring the fact that the advocates were pushing for evening and night games in order to avoid the worst of the heat. The switch eventually occurred in 1989, and the football community has never looked back. Somewhat predictably, the FFA now celebrates the “summer of football” as if it was its idea all along.
The heat, however, has become a bit of an issue again this season. In November, Perth Glory’s then coach Alistair Edwards blasted FFA for taking an “out of sight out of mind” approach to player welfare after Perth and Adelaide were forced to play their Round 6 clash in 35C heat. This week, Perth Glory were again on the front foot, with owner Tony Sage accusing FFA of putting lives at risk by scheduling a game in the mid-afternoon in Albury, while many of his players took to Twitter to express their anger. Thankfully, FFA decided to delay the game from 3pm to 5pm, hoping for a cool change from the south. It never arrived, the players needed to stop every 15 minutes for drinks breaks, and the game was played at half-speed. David Williams, once again, was the second half hero, and amazingly Melbourne Heart are hoping for finals football.
Five games, one state
It is a common complaint that the Australian football media and governing body are biased towards New South Wales. In the NSL days, SBS copped the occasional flak for being the ‘Sydney Broadcasting Service.’ Come to think of it, they still do. There are four New South Wales clubs in a 10 team A-league, and most of the game’s financial and political muscle is in Sydney. As Paul Keating once famously quipped - “if you’re not living in Sydney, you’re camping out.” This week, then, was one for the conspiracists. For the first time in NSL or A-League history, from Newcastle to Albury, all five games were played in New South Wales. Albury, of course, was the outlier, and the one which ended up being the most controversial. According to Australian football historian Les Street, it wasn’t the first game played at Lavington Sports Ground. Twenty years ago, almost to the date, Melbourne Knights and West Adelaide played out a 1-1 draw at the 1994 Albury-Wodonga Festival of Sport. Those were the days when Mark Viduka graced the domestic competition and Jeff Kennett was the No1 ticket holder at South Melbourne Hellas.
The trip down memory lane, however, was wasted on Perth Glory owner Tony Sage. Unconcerned with endearing himself to the locals, Sage voiced his displeasure at Melbourne Heart’s temporary home ground, calling it “a stadium in the middle of nowhere.” Of course, Sage’s Perth is one of the most isolated cities in the world. As author Bill Bryson once wrote “why 1.3 million members of a free society would choose to live in such a lonely outpost is always worth considering, but climate explains a lot.” The weather in Perth is “good-natured”, according to Bryson, “the kind that sets the postman to whistling.” No wonder, then, that the boys from Perth were so angsty about playing in 40C heat. Regional games might do a good job in spreading the A-League gospel, but as the Perth Glory bus dodged bushfires raging in rural Victoria on the trip back to Melbourne, the players must have been thinking the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
