Exciting yet invisible, Sydney sell-off leaves grand final flat

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Even the people of Vanuatu enjoyed a superior A-League Men’s grand final experience to those in Australia supporting ‘home’ team Melbourne City. The Vanuatu Football Federation, in its excitement over Brian Kaltak’s involvement, set up a big screen at Port Vila’s 6500-capacity VFF Freshwater Stadium and opened it up to anyone eager to witness the country’s very first professional player represent the Central Coast Mariners.

Some 2600 kilometres away, at Sydney’s Commbank Stadium, a small throng of farcically outnumbered City fans huddled behind City’s goal. The rest, it might reasonably be assumed, stayed south of the border in the knowledge they should have had only to travel across town to AAMI Park and not interstate to watch a team which won hosting rights fair and square.

Melbourne City fans were outnumbered through no fault of their own on Saturday night.Credit: Getty

But these are curious times, involving utterly detested deals with Destination NSW and a ‘week-long extravaganza’ designed to lull fans into forgetting that sport’s traditional form-based hosting criteria had been sacrificed on a soulless money-making death wish.

It appears they have not forgotten. The fury has turned sardonic, almost irrationally so, crucifying a governing body trying to very hard to stay afloat but failing to read the room time and again. The grand final party was a good example: a well-organised, seamlessly run event held in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.

The five-a-side exhibition tournament worked well, but at the Entertainment Quarter attracted far fewer than it would have in, say, Bondi. So, too, the kids’ activities and team appearances and DJ – had actual punters filled the venue. Instead, the smoke machine on a near-empty dance floor invoked Hollywood’s war-movie genre, of survivors emerging from the mist to live another day in an unkind world.

“I know there’s been a lot of drama surrounding the ‘A-League Grand Final Party’,” Australian Professional Leagues chief executive, Danny Townsend, tweeted last week. “Simply put – we did not have enough time or money. This is an impromptu festival, we had 6 months and this goes against everything we’ve said, but we were really banking on a Sydney side making it.”

The clubs have done the best they can under the circumstances. The Mariners hired a heap of buses and drove the Yellow Army from Gosford to Sydney. City, meanwhile, surprised supporters who thought they were about to board a bus for nine hours with charter flights from Melbourne. Still, the active supporter base boycotted. And it showed. The official crowd figure was 26,523. Some of the top bays up the City end were almost empty.

Central Coast’s win is good for the league. It marks the completed renaissance of a community club that’s been through the wringer – Usain Bolt and all – and come out the other side under Nick Montgomery. Jason Cummings scored a hat-trick. Danny Vukovic finished his career on a high. The unused Scott Jamieson finished his on a low. Referee Chris Beath ended his on a penalty controversy. And yet the event in its totality felt coated in a kind of dull gloop, a neutral paint palette not designed to live long in the memory.

City, who topped the table for a third consecutive regular season, have achieved what has never been done before in the ALM and only once in the National Soccer League – by Sydney City in the early 1980s. Their reward is a championship decider far closer to Mariners territory than it is to theirs. After this pummelling, the trip to NSW will feel particularly harrowing.

We should not forget that there have been quite a number of other past indignities under the league’s former overseers, Football Australia. There were serious crises such as the fan boycotts of 2015, and kitsch moments such as the 2017 Star Wars round, with its co-branded merchandise and Storm Troopers pitch appearances.

This time the APL could be Mola Ram, the chanting, horned Indiana Jones villain who rips out a man’s heart and cackles like a maniac as it burst into flames. Australian football is still alive, watching in horror, bereft of the thing which should beat inside. On Saturday night that looked like one of the most engaging grand finals to date being rendered invisible in Australia but for the neighbours who heard the half-time DJ inexplicably segue way directly from the Isuzu jingle Go Your Own Way into Seven Nation Army.

Vanuatu’s prime minister Ishmael Kalsakau flew to Sydney especially to watch Kaltak play 90 minutes in central defence and greet him afterwards. There may yet be a public holiday back home. In Australia, it barely made a blip.

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