NSL,SUCCESS AND FAILURE PART 2 In 1981, four years after the NSL was launched, a man called Rik Booth commissioned some research into how the league could be taken forward and have its commercial opportunities maximised. Booth headed a marketing company that had been hired by the Australian Soccer Federation to find ways to broaden the leagues markets and place it deeper into the Australian conscientiousness. He produced a report that advocated that the league switch its seasons from winter to summer. It was a thick, immaculately presented document, fat with a myriad of arguments for the change, brimming with confidence of what it would do for the league and the game. Within weeks it was shot down in flames and buried without trace. It was met with violent hostility in the media, which then consisted of SBS and a handful of soccer writers in the dailies, some of whom were immigrant journos from Europe. While SBS did support the Booth proposals, the dailies were passionately against it, espousing the view that soccer was a winter sport and anything different was against the laws of nature. Neither were the clubs, most of which were run by European immigrants, were for it for the same reasons. ASF chief Sir Arthur George backed off and relented. Rik Booth walked from the game, never to be seen again. Yet eight years later the NSL changed seasons to summer and reaped rich dividends. Its crowds grew by 30 per cent and thousands of new fans flowed to the league. Booth had been vindicated but by then the opportunity was lost. By that time footballs competitors had galloped ahead in the realm of commercial modernisation. The Sydney Swans were born and Aussie Rules was going national. As was rugby league, with its brilliantly marketed State of Origin series and the birth of franchises in Auckland, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Basketball, too, was lively and ambitious, the professional NBL now established as a growing force. Soccer had left its run too late. The root of the mistake was soccers political makeup. The founders of the NSL, Alex Pongrass and Frank Lowy, both broad-minded businessmen with futuristic, big-picture minds, had retreated from their involvement early because they had no time for petty politics. The men who replaced them were political animals, content to play games of vanity and ego. Progress was stunted. The next disaster came after 1983, when businessman Peter Shehan got involved in football. Shehan, not a soccer man but one who saw enormous potential in it, headed up a company called ASF Marketing Pty Ltd and piled much of his own money into it. He dreamt of a commercially viable national league and boundless market conquests by the Socceroos. He revamped the league, promoted international tournaments involving the likes of Juventus, Manchester United, Red Star Belgrade and Vasco da Gama, and funded world tours by the national team. Within three years Shehans dreams had been kicked into dust and he literally lost his house. He became a victim of political power play. The vanity driven primitives of the NSL saw Shehan as a threat and thwarted his every move. In 1984, when national coach Frank Arok called his squad for a series promoted by Shehan, the NSL heavies pounced on an opportunity to take the game to this upstart outsider. Citing an alleged failed commitment by Shehan to pay the NSL clubs a cut from the events revenue, they directed the clubs not to release their players. The story made back-page news. The NSL clubs were seen as unpatriotic pariahs of the nation, a damning embarrassment to the game. Arok went to Sydneys Camperdown Travelodge hotel and waited in the lobby for the selected players to show. One by one they came, all defying the directives of their clubs and risking their livelihoods. (How does that compare to todays lot who vacillate in their response to a call-up every time their club manager grumbles and raises an eyebrow about their club loyalties?) Shehan won that day but he was not forgiven. His personal investments led to a superbly prepared national team, well honed on a richly financed preparation campaign for the 1986 World Cup. But by the time Australia came within a whisker of qualifying, in a thrilling 0-0 draw with Scotland in Melbourne in late 1985, Shehan was out of the picture. He had been sent broke and the bold entrepreneur had been jettisoned, sent packing from a game fashioned by people who had only a yen for shallow politicking and none for bold measures of progress. Soccer lost and its rivals claimed another sweet victory. The old clich lived: soccer had shot itself in the foot, yet again. The reasons for the failure of the NSL are claimed to be many, the most paramount among them its perceived embrace of sectarian ethnic agendas, a protection of the notion that the league, and the game, was the domain and property of interests ring-fenced and distanced from the mainstream of Australian culture. But that was just part of it. The real reasons were more to do with petty politics, power and ego, sheer incompetence and a reluctance to lower the blinkers. A new era threatened when Nick Tana arrived in the mid-90s and Perth Glory entered a sporting empire that was already in deep decay. His experiment was a ground-breaker, for his club was the first in the long history of the NSL with a corporate rather than a social ? and therefore, political ? agenda. Tana made the best of harnessing what remained of the Lowy and Pongrass dream but he knew from the start that, without profound and broad change, the experiment would fail. He took a risk and got lucky. Crawford came along and triggered the changes Tana had in mind. Without that, the Glory might now be in demise or dead. Suddenly what we now have is real hope for a new mentality and a new national league. One that is rooted in the vision of Lowy and Pongrass of 1977, driven by the latter Tana legacy, and the need to make up lost ground, ground lost when soccer lost its way and squandered its chance to stay ahead of the game. Courtesy LES MURRY SBS WORLD GAME
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 02:22:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015