Flares

Yeah, I’ve been quiet for a while even though we see the FFA continue their fine form of public relationship disasters.

The reality is they are all just revisiting subjects we’ve already seen.  Youth development disasters, comedic transfer rules and front page grist for the AFL and NRL media mill.  It gets tiring covering the same subjects over and over again. 

Flares 
I’ve been loath to get into this subject as the blog is primarily a chance to vent on the idiocy of the people charged with running our game but the time has come to call out some idiots for the idiots they are.

The rights and wrongs of pyro can be debated long and hard but the simple fact is they are banned in this league and to continue to use them is ignorant and provocative.

Already we are seeing the same defences from the leaders of the active supporter groups involved ‘it’s a small minority’, ‘we can’t control everyone’, ‘it wasn’t us’ but the whole small minority thing is a complete myth. Flares and detonators aren't frowned upon in these organisations, the perpetrators aren't ostracized.  Those who don't set them off give widespread tacit endorsement, cheer and chant and laugh and generally find the whole thing very cool and amusing and nver mind the fact that the capo and other key members can be seen front and centre sitting on the fence with fingers up in the air. They love the attention it garners, and love even more about how victimized they are if anyone calls them on it.

Since the primary clubs involved and their crowds suddenly came about it seemed like an awkward dynamic to begin with. You don't suddenly have all that passion and colour for a club that's just been created out of nowhere (a plastic club) if it's really just about the club and football. The attraction for some went beyond just thinking the Wanderers are great and love how connected they felt to a club closer to them than the state league clubs or other A-League clubs in their Cities.

Rather, they seized on the chance to go into full on ultra-mimicry mode and have a bout of self-congratulation about it as the media and club itself loved suddenly seeing big loud crowds in general and overlooked the bad potential side.  A lot of those in the media and at the FFA who are now trashing people involved didn't think twice about earlier praising these groups to the hilt and thinking they were simply the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The timing of course has been absolutely catastrophic.  After the work Mark Bosnich and others put into the December meeting to get active support back into the grounds and to improve the transparency of the banning process these groups have spat on those efforts.

The commitment out of that meeting was to have a new process in place this week.  There is a meeting today to discuss where the FFA have got to with this and these groups have undermined the position of the united fan groups.  Their self-indulgent behaviour and rule-breaking will undermine the position of the collective.  If there is a contention with the FFA the media are far less likely to offer an opinion in support of the fans when certain groups have put the game on the front page of the papers and given the old school tie media a chance to put the boot in.

If the active support decide to walk out the story will no longer be about the lack of due process around the bans but that the fans are walking out because they are not allowed to use flares.

The sad reality here is that the people involved think they are more important than the club they ‘support’.  They look forward to being ostracized and the club losing points would just amp up their persecution complex.  They don’t care about the club, they don’t care about the other 12000 fans that turn up each week, they care that they look hard.

There is no denying the FFA caused this mess by not clamping down on this behaviour when they ran one of these clubs or when it occurred earlier in the A-Leagues history but the self-indulgent idiocy from those who continue it is almost a bigger threat to this league than the incompetent people running it. 

Anything you can do:

Also a late shout out to our friends across the Tasman.  New Zealand Football do try hard to keep up with our own administrators and credit to them for their efforts.  Their latest bungle on the back of getting themselves disqualified from the Olympic Games is likely to cost the A-League a chance to see a promising young talent out of England.

The organisation that famously got Glenn Moss banned from a World Cup because a fax fell down the back of a filing cabinet managed to fail to approve an international transfer for Alex Jones to allow him to play for the Phoenix.  The Phoenix raised the transfer request, it was approved by Birmingham City, the English FA and the Football Federation of Australia but New Zealand football it would appear had all gone to the beach and decided they didn’t need to click the approve button.

This leaves Jones in Wellington but relying on an exemption from FIFA that they have never shown any inclination to give in other cases.

Well done NZ Football.  I look forward to your CEO taking over at the FFA sometime in the near future, he must be ticking all the relevant fields in his linkedin profile.