Watching your team lose for the third week running can be depressing, to say the least.
As I listened to the Bluetongue Bagpiper (you are a legend) play Waltzing Matilda and Advance Australia Fair in a valiant attempt to raise our spirits, I tried to focus on the feast of football that awaits us in the months ahead.
Suddenly my daydreams were rudely interrupted by the sight of a guy in a Man U shirt, something that's guaranteed to raise my blood-pressure to dangerous levels. Now it's not because I'm a rabid Man U hater or Pom-basher : I would've felt the same if the guy had been wearing a shirt from Arsenal, AC Milan or PSV Eindhoven.
Wearing shirts from European leagues to A-League matches is a bit like those old cars with stickers that say "My other car's a BMW", only not so amusing. People who feel inclined to do this seem to be suffering a massive cultural cringe about the A- League, their shirts loudly proclaiming - "I know this is an inferior level of football, but I've just come along to hang out with my mates".
Here is my Australia Day message to anyone who wears EPL shirts to the A-League and / or Socceroos matches : stay home and watch TV. Your lack of pride in the football achievements of your country is, frankly, un-Australian and embarrassing. Stop cringing and start supporting an A-League team and encourage your children, friends and relatives to join you.
I'm not saying you can't support more than one team - many football fans in Australia do just that. But let's be mature enough to realise that Australian football has made giant leaps in the past four years - achievements we should all be proud of and celebrate. The success of the Youth League and W-League, for example, is something we have been eagerly awaiting for a long time and really deserves more appreciation, as well as mass exposure.
Australians are notorious for under-rating their own achievements. In the fields of music, acting, sport and literature we often cringingly refer to our high achievers as "World Class". Well - why shouldn't they be ?
Regardless of the individual highs and lows experienced by our teams this season, all the signs that the quality of the A-League is on the ascent are plainly in view. Jason Culina wants to play in the A-League at the height of his career, Shannon Cole features in an international list of up and coming young talents and this week we watched the first ever A-League Socceroos squad.
Then there's the Mariners' amazing initiative in forming links with the Sheffield Utd global network and their construction of a massive centre of excellence on the Central Coast. This is surely one of the biggest things to ever happen to an Australian sporting club and deserves far more recognition.
Even our beloved FourFourTwo doesn't believe any Aussies rate in the 100 Best Players in the World. You cannot be serious ! The only reason Scott McDonald and Tim Cahill (at the very least) aren't in there is because let's face it, the Poms can't bear to admit we produce "World Class" footballers.
But the greatest exponent of the footballing cultural cringe is, sadly, our own football legend, Craig Foster. No matter how brightly the sun shines, every week this 'sovereign of sighs and groans' seems to find something critical to say about the state of Australian football and how superior things are in the rest of the world.
This week he called for Kossie to be sacked and replaced by a 'marquee coach' from overseas. He claimed that all A-League coaches were 'effectively amateur' and fundamentally inadequate - imported coaches were the only way forward.
Now don't get me wrong : criticism of the A-League is necessary and healthy but so is giving credit where it's due. If A-League coaches are so poor, how did 'amateur' Viddy manage to triumph in Asia, for example ?
In footballing terms we are just a tiny country at 'the arse end of the world' - perhaps it's no wonder that we compare ourselves unfavourably with bigger leagues. But instead of running around like Wayne and Garth in Man U baseball caps constantly crying "we're not worthy !", let's also take time to celebrate just how far we've come.
Trying to distract myself from the fact we just scraped into the top four....
