By the way - how is football/soccer doing Down Under? I saw you had some decent national teams in the past World Cups, with a significant contingent of second generation immigrants from the Croatia... but when I see highlights from the Aussie league, the stadiums seem pretty empty... so I was wondering - is it taking off or is it mostly hype?
Also, they abolished the Australian "ethnic" teams (Greek, Italian, Croatian) - we are all supposed to be globalists now! - I was curious to understand how did that go down with the fans?
Porthos - There are a lot of things wrong with Australian football - and one may even safely say that not too many things have ever been "right". Instead of moving forward and building on the relative successes of the last decade or so, which were achieved despite the so-called "system", stagnation has set in with its most conspicuous consequence being a painfully visible lack of emerging talent capable of playing at anything even approaching the highest level.
We'll begin with the composition of the FFA (Football Federation Australia), which shall reveal a lot about who moulds the Australian soccer milieu. This will probably not come as much of a surprise, but of the eight people who sit on the FFA board, three are Jews: billionaire chairman Frank Lowy; deputy chairman Brian Schwatrz; and Phillip Wolinski.
The loathsome Frank Lowy - who has his dirty fingers in virtually every Australian pie and whose ubiquitous Lowy Institute "think tank spokespeople" help shape public opinion - is generally hailed as the "saviour" of Australian football and is credited with engineering the Socceroos' qualification for the World Cup finals tournaments of 2006 and 2010. If one was to solely rely on the quite often panegyrical media reports pertaining to his person, one would believe that soccer didn't even exist in Australia prior to Lowy's accession to the FFA top job in 2003.
The much-hyped, Lowy-inspired A-League was launched back in 2005, replacing the old NSL (National Soccer League). This was supposed to herald an all-new era of popularity and prosperity for Australian football, but the results have been far from encouraging and the competition has had drastically deleterious effects on the development of home grown players.
In trademark Jewish style, Lowy and his cronies have encouraged the signing of foreigners and the increasing recruitment of blacks, Muslims and other non-White "minorities" (which Australia is crawling with like fleas on an abo). The standard of play is therefore remarkably low - or, more accurately, even lower than it was about a decade and a half ago, when we were still producing a few young players who possessed the ability to cut the mustard in Europe, albeit not in the most vertiginous of leagues. This is what happens once the emphasis is artificially placed upon fifteenth-rate, quite often veteran foreigners (for who else shall play in Australia?) and the quest to unearth an "African-Australian" or "Muslim-Australian" superstar. One must keep in mind that Australian players of middling-European class were always quite rare, while the "big name" fellows like Harry Kewell, Lucas Neill, Craig Moore and the half-Samoan Tim Cahill had already moved to play abroad as teens or, in the case of Mark Viduka, by the time he was twenty.
Unsurprisingly, A-League attendances are quite weedy. Last season's embarrassing average was just over 8,000, which was something like 1,500 less than the year before. Such pocket-sized crowds congregated in small sections of conspicuously empty stadia don't exactly conjure an electric (or even a steam-powered) atmosphere, yet are hardly unexpected since the general public is more than aware of the league's amateurish standards compared to the European football they can see on Pay-TV. Football fans would rather stump up the money for their cable subscription than purchase tickets to the farcical fare which the A-League ladles out. If we are to be completely honest, the very quality of the top European leagues forever dooms Australian football to remain an obscure sideshow act. Besides, if for some mysterious reason people are inclined to watch our domestic league, their cable subscription allows them to do so from the mess of their own lounge room, where they always have the handy option to switch the channel...
From a marketing point of view, soccer in this country also suffers from having to compete with the fanatically-promoted national religions of Rugby League and Aussie Rules, whose Australian competitions both boast the undoubted cream of the world's talent (not that these sports are actually played in too many parts of the world), in stark contrast to the A-League's "star imports", no-name coaches and Australian "professionals" who are popularly viewed as not being good enough to play in Europe. The latter point, of course, is painfully true. Australians like winners, so if the average punter is going to watch a sport, he wants to watch a world-class competition - which automaticaly rules out the A-League...
As for the compulsory alteration of the old NSL clubs' "ethnic names", well, I reckon that was a good thing. How did that go down with the "ethnic" fans? Well, let me make it very clear that I don't wish to precipitate any controversy but I'll simply say it how it is. As I've mentioned previously, certain White, non-Anglo-Celtic groups don't exactly feel much desire to assimilate with Australians. By that, I don't mean that they cause trouble
a la Arabs - yet the majority exhibit an unfortunate tendency to look down upon "Anglo Australians" and don't particularly socialise with Australians outside the sphere of work. But most significantly, even third-and-fourth generation "ethnics" of particular origins essentially comprise endogamous groups, marrying people of their own background and thus maintaining their "old" identities, which is detrimental to national unity.
Whenever Australia plays, let's say, Croatia or Serbia in any sport, the stadium is always packed full of these second, third, and fourth generation "ethnic" types who, despite being born here, are decked out in another nation's colours and are chanting against Australia.
Australia's match against Croatia in the first round of the 2006 World Cup immediately springs to mind. The game was shown on huge screens around Sydney and Melbourne, and - sure enough - there were hordes of young "Australians" wearing Croatian shirts, waving Croatian scarves, with their faces painted in the red-and-white Croatian chequerboard bellowing "Hrvatska! Hrvatska!"
This begs the question of what the **** they are doing in Australia and, if they love Croatia so much, why the **** don't they return to the paradise their grandfathers and fathers left behind for the proverbial "better life". I cannot emphasise how elated I was when Croatia were eliminated at the end of the game...
I don't mean to offend anyone, but that's how things go in Australia...
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