When I attended my first A-League game in the spring of 2010, I was there to support the Wellington Phoenix. As a New Zealander, they were my team by default, and they were playing the Melbourne Heart. It was the Heart’s first season and support was sparse. Yet as the game progressed, I found myself watching them more closely than my home team. They seemed so fresh; this club had no baggage, no reputation and no expectations. They played ambitious football that belied their newcomer status. They were a mix of young and old, but every one of them played like Heart was the club they were born to play for. They’re skills weren’t necessarily superior – the end result was a 2-2 draw – but they impressed me with personality. As Samuel L Jackson once said, ‘personality goes a long way’.
It wasn’t just the team that I fell for that day. It was their active supporters, too. In a small, dense bubble of red and white, they bobbed up and down to the beat of Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot. In a game where the same old chants are rehashed and reused by almost every team, this struck me as wonderfully original. Here was a soccer team that called itself Heart and whose mascot was a ginger boy with a big head called The Ticker adopting the song of a Long Beach rapper who can’t travel here because of his criminal charges. With their happy demeanour and endless enthusiasm, Snoop Dogg was such an absurd choice it was brilliant.
First love is easy, though. Anyone who has been in a relationship – sporting or otherwise – knows that things get harder over time. 2013 has been brutal. The honeymoon stage has come to an end, and those missed opportunities and untimely penalties have resulted in built up frustrations in fans and players alike. After making the finals in 2012, Heart are unlikely to repeat in 2013, and their lack of fight has been particularly ugly at the tail end of the season. Unfortunately, it has resulted in fans taking out their frustration on chairs at Etihad Stadium and on rival teams. Last Saturday was inevitably going to be difficult. The Heart played and lost to the Western Sydney Wanderers, who on their debut season are looking like championship favourites.
But it doesn’t need to be like this. As a fan of the Heart, I was disappointed when a flare was let off on Saturday night. As a fan of A-League, I was disgusted when our active supporters trudged down to the opposite end to heckle the Wanderers’ fans, who in turn gave plenty back. The game was still being played, but the two groups of vocal supporters were only focused on each other. At one stage, the Wanderers turned their backs on the game. One Heart supporter punched a Wanderers fan. Suddenly those bubbly fans I had seen years ago looked like five year olds chucking a tantrum over a loss. It wasn’t what I signed up for, and it didn’t represent the club I have supported ever since that game against the Phoenix.
I do not believe that football, (or soccer, or The Beautiful Game… whatever you prefer) breeds more aggressive fans than any other sport. However, this remains something we have to prove to the general public and the media who insist that what happened on Saturday night was the norm. To help grow the game, we need to attract fans in the same way the Melbourne Heart attracted me three years ago; by being passionate without being aggressive, by cheering for our team without putting others down, and by never, ever booing our own players. I’m confident that A-League is growing in support, and I can only hope that next season I will see my bubbly box of active supporters back. As any sports fan knows but is prone to forget, these lows will only make the highs that much better.
Image credits: Getty Images
