I attended my first Brisbane Roar away game on the weekend.

"WHAT" I may, hear you exclaim. "You call yourself a fan and you are only just going to your first away game", you may add.

To which I reply "Hey mate, who are you to judge me? I don't even know you, how dare you speak to me like that". I apologise for that outburst. I tend to get belligerent when I have fake arguments with myself via blogs.

I work in a demanding job that doesn't allow the sort of freedom to travel all over the country following my beloved Roar. I have a seven month old daughter which again limits my travel and it's too damn expensive. Those are my reasons and I'm sticking to them. However on the weekend I dropped my daughter off at her grandmothers and we travelled to Skilled Stadium where I hope Roar would turn the tide against their season five tormentors Gold Coast United.

I was keen to see how the stadium compared to Suncorp which I consider the best stadium for football in Australia. So in comparison I would say Skilled looks like Suncorp's baby. It's a nice stadium, and I dare say the atmosphere would be a lot better with more than 6,500 people filling the 27,000 seater stadium. That however is an issue for the Gold Coast team and the Gold Coast bloggers, because of the 6,500 people there on Sunday more than half were wearing Orange and that's a fact.

The game itself left me filled with a sense if vindication. I am the Roar blogger who all preseason was going on about the positives about how Roar are operating, I was writing about the direction that Ange had the boys moving and watching the preseason games you could see what he was trying to do, and the style of play he was going for. Now, by no means am I hailing my team as sure favourites to win the league, and no way am I guaranteeing we will lay waste to all that come before us. I am merely proud of the style of play Brisbane utilised on the weekend. If this season turns out to be hell, I will be happy if my team continues to pass the ball around like that, create and move around the park and give their all to the Orange cause. It would be nice if we win more than we lose and we make the finals, but there are no guarantees in football, so I will take what I can get.

Our play had Mad Miron almost cordial and contrite in his post match interview. Giving us a back handed compliment saying that he thought the teams had swapped jerseys and we were playing like Gold Coast and Gold Coast were playing like last year's Roar side. Mad Miron also compared Roar's play to that of World Champion Spain. Well, Ange shook his head to that comment. Although that kind off rhetoric sounds nice coming out of someone's mouth (even Miron's) the reality is all we were doing was passing quickly, moving the ball fluidly and that looks good when compared to other teams in the league playing all their players behind the ball and counter attacking on occasion.

It was nice sitting close enough to hear some of the travelling Den's chants which included "where's your fans at" to the tune of "where's your head at". I was aware of the irony however and the stone plus glass houses analogy, being that our crowd figures were not to healthy last year, but they were more than 6,500 (well mostly, except when we play the Mariners at home, but no one gets good crowds when the Mariners visit - J)

As for our players running around in their shiny white away jerseys, I was really impressed by Eric Paartalu. He has a big presence in midfield, one we have missed due to our two midget policies. It did make me ponder however, that Matty and Massy should really only count as a combined one player due to their stature. Maybe Massy could stand on Matty's shoulders and we could have the world's most giant football player (Scrubs reference). Overall there wasn't one player representing Roar that I thought put in a bad shift. Even Mitch Nicholls who is often maligned and derided for the past couple of seasons looked very lively and had a noticeably increased effort and workload in the midfield.

I know it's only one game, but there were just too many positives to ignore.