New horizons: This season, more Australians have been exposed to "football culture". Photo: Sebastian Costanzo
It is a damp Saturday evening in Melbourne and I am sitting behind the goal at the northern end of AAMI Park with my 14-year-old Main Son. The first half has been tense, if not electrifying. The Wanderers score, the Heart respond. But the atmosphere has been sedate. The Heart are still trying to carve a niche in a city dominated by the Victory, while the Wanderers have brought a small proportion of their usual throng.
After 60 minutes, the Wanderers take the lead – as is their habit – prompting the Heart supporter group to migrate from its Yarra-end habitat to the opposite goal. It's just below where we are sitting, and adjacent to the Wanderers fans in the north-east corner.
Presumably, the Heart supporters have moved to the end their team is attacking in the hope of inspiring a revival. Although, given a small handful of gung-ho teenagers move towards the Wanderers fans – who are separated by police and security – making insulting gestures, you wonder if a few intend to provoke the visitors.
Either way, it is a moment that demonstrates the problem the game has ensuring one of its greatest assets – passionate fans – does not become a PR nightmare. It can also make the game an easy target for those who wilfully misrepresent the extent of "crowd violence" at A-League games.
This season, thanks largely to the exceptional Wanderers fans, more Australians have been exposed to "football culture". The vibrant support that can be as much a part of the game's appeal as what takes place on the pitch. This relationship between player and fan might even be considered symbiotic given the success of the Wanderers has been in direct relation to the support they have received. It is something Sydney FC will confront at Parramatta Stadium on Saturday night in one of the most eagerly anticipated club games in local soccer history.
The atmosphere is elevated by bellicose chants that celebrate one team and vilify the other. For most, this is part of an elaborate pantomime. When an opposition player stays on the ground and the fans chant "Dig a hole", no one expects the referee to produce a shovel.
But what is amusing at long range can be, at close quarters, incendiary. As it was on Saturday evening. Silly kids taunting the Wanderers fans. A couple of Western Sydney supporters trying to evade security to get at them – one forcibly removed from the side of the pitch. None of it threatening in our seats. But it was unnecessarily volatile, and also the backdrop against which a Wanderers fan was viciously assaulted as he watched the game. Emotions had been stirred and, in a single case, boiled over.
Fox Sports commentator Simon Hill recently wrote a passionate and well-argued defence of fan behaviour at A-League games. Hill compared the way soccer violence is portrayed by the media with far less provocative and damning accounts of violence at other Australian sports. As Hill might rightly state, the type of attack that took place at the Heart-Wanderers game could – and has – happened at NRL, AFL or cricket matches. It could be argued the segregation of A-League fans, with good policing and self-regulation, makes such incidents less likely.
Yet it is foolish to ignore the sometimes delicate dynamic of the soccer crowd that, very occasionally, creates confrontation en masse. It is foolish to pretend the potential for the mob mentality to take hold is no greater at soccer than sports where fans are most often in smaller groups, and where taunting is not a part of the show. Just as it is negligent to ignore the drunkenness that is the major cause of expulsion – and, potentially, violence – at cricket games.
I've attended several packed, emotion-charged A-League games this season. Three Melbourne derbies, a tense Victory-Sydney FC encounter, Alessandro Del Piero's first game. At one, some seats were vandalised giving the critics a free kick. But the Heart-Wanderers game was the first at which there has been a hint of menace.
Still, it is misguided to dismiss the potential danger that two large groups of highly charged fans can create; or to suggest every journalist who notes this is an agenda-driven "Anglo" doing the dirty work of a rival code. Misrepresentation and ridicule has meant the amount of crowd misbehaviour at A-League games has been exaggerated. Not that it does not exist.
Twitter @rdhinds
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