The Football World Cup is one of the biggest sporting tournaments in the world, and Australia was certainly swept up in it for a while, but it is reassuring to know that things are returning to normal in Australian soccer.
That last word being the first point – soccer.
After conducting a poll just before Australia’s big knockout game with eventual winners Argentina, we found that 75% of respondents were happily calling the World Cup action by its traditional international name of “football”. Yet in the aftermath of yesterday’s dramatic final we ran another poll where just 6% of respondents revealed they would continue calling the game football. Over 70% said they would revert to calling it soccer, and the remainder asked how we got their number and politely told us to f— off.
Our Australian soccer poll also included some of the following:
- 85% of respondents could only recall one player again – Lionel Messi.
- 99% of respondents though that Griezmann was a product advertised on morning television informercials.
- The average number of Moroccan players that respondents could name dropped from 0.04 to 0.01.
- 85% of respondents changed their answer when challenged on Luka Modric from “Yeah, sort of heard of him” to “Who the F— is that”.
- 80% of respondents said they had no interest in going to future A League games, the other 20% asked what an A League was, which certainly returns Australian soccer back to normal.
Talking a A League, that brings us to the other major reason why Australian soccer looks to have returned to normal. A League, for the record is the Australian National Football/Soccer competition.
After nearly a month of watching quality international football, the A League resumed attention in a blaze of glory.
First of all, taking a leaf from their international cousins FIFA, the governing body of Australian soccer decided to piss their fans off for money by announcing that the next three grand finals would be held in Sydney, regardless of the teams in it. This infuriated Australian soccer fans who rightly believe the final should stay with the first qualified team.
A League (the Australian National Football/Soccer competition) fans decided that protests should be held, and walks out after 20 minutes were planned across the weekend.
Of course the only game where the A League A (the Australian National Football/Soccer competition) and police were worried about was the Melbourne derby, as a 20 minute walkout of fans in other games wouldn’t be much of an impact. But the police had a right to be worried about the Melbourne derby as it turned out……
So instead of the planned 20 minute walk out in the Melbourne derby, they chose flares, pitch invasion and injuring players, returning Australian soccer back to the glory days where the matches had the racial tension of Pauline Hanson appearing on Q and A on the ABC.
The sight of flares being thrown onto the field and hitting the poor broadcasting staff, who are suffering enough by being forced to produce a broadcast for a channel which will have less views than Channel 10, brought an almost nostalgic feeling. Not in a good way, more like the time you got your mouth washed out with soap as a child for calling the neighbour turd of a kid a fat ugly pig after a relentless day of bullying.
Our Everyday News team managed to catch up with a few of the “fans” that were involved in the mess to get their viewpoint.
One man, who wanted remain nameless, and was wearing a scarf around his face and strangely a Melbourne Storm cape, elaborated on why they were rioting.
“We were all so pissed that the bosses had taken the Grand Final from us the fans that we wanted to show them just how pissed we were, but we just got kind of worked up and the natural, underlying animal of being a football, sorry soccer fan in Australia took over. Maybe it was the smell of those Flares, or the chemicals. We heard that the local flare maker has actually manage to work in a way of the smoke containing something that makes fans angry.”
We couldn’t help ourselves at this stage, we had to ask about the Melbourne Storm cape. So the question of why was asked.
“The cape? Geez I’m not sure. I found it in a junk shop and thought it would be a good thing to wear. you know, storming into the Melbourne derby, storming onto the pitch, just a little JAnuary 6 if you know what I mean. Much like the folk in Cronulla did when they ruined the Australian flag for a lot of people. Someone did say to me why are you wearing that rugby thing, but I thought he was talking about my comfortable loafers I was wearing without socks, or why my collar was up”.
We caught up with another fan, who was going whiter than the cast from Home and Away, but they were so worried about being caught in another violent pitch invasion after being paroled that week they ran off before we could get into anything meaningful.
One person who couldn’t be happier is Stan Jeffries from Flare If You Dare, whose business we discussed in the World Cup Headlines as enjoying record business on the back of the Socceroos golden run.
We got back in touch with Stan to ask him about how business was going.
“Yeah, we thought after the Socceroos got knocked out we’d have a bit of quiet time, but thankfully a Moroccan family lives just around the corner and their semi final run was great for business. But not like this Melbourne derby” Stan Jeffries explained as he rubbed his hands together in delight.
“No offense, but crowd violence is great for business, and now especially after that bucket to extinguish the flares was used in the pitch invasion I’ve had dozens of calls to our shop asking for personalised ones for fans to take to games.”
Just then a minor explosion came from the back of the shop as nephew Jeff explained with a muffled sound and in between coughing that he had been experimenting with an A League (the Australian National Football/Soccer competition) special. Which somehow halfway through the burn phase of the flare somehow controls the smoke into a giant middle figure salute. Which is a nice touch.
Stan explained “The A League (the Australian National Football/Soccer competition) is good when people hate something, which was the recipe for Australian soccer for so long, so the football, sorry soccer bosses did well to get everyone back hating again so quick after the World Cup. Well, great for me anyway.”
Great for Stan indeed.
Everyday News is a brand new general news/parody section of The Gurgler, and definitely not a lame rip-off of The Betoota Advocate. We swear.
