NOW listen carefully, because I’m only gonna say this once: “Get your filthy hands off Timmy Cahill!”
In a week when the Socceroos qualified for an unprecedented second World Cup in a row, and on the very day that Australia launched its World Cup bid, it seems the soccer-knockers just couldn't help themselves.
While you and I (and anyone else with any taste or intelligence) cracked open the Jansz, The Forces of Evil were plotting their pathetic attempt to throw mud at the golden boy of Australian football and by association, harm the reputation of football itself.
Just when we thought they had crawled back in their sewers and accepted that football is now a huge part of the Australian sporting landscape, out they come again: spitting poison and green with envy. Leading the way, as always, was the home of the aggressive anti-football brigade, The Daily Telegraph.
Yes, this is the same paper that last year published a laughably ignorant and misinformed attack on Australian football written by a woman who knows as much about the game as Humphrey Bear. Despite the name "Football Federation Australia", they stubbornly continue to refer to "soccer" and take every opportunity to try and uphold the superiority of the "True Blue Aussie" games of NRL and AFL over "wogball".
"Socceroo Cover-Up", screamed the Telegraph's front page on the day of the bid launch, carefully positioned under a family-friendly photo of an NRL player with a young fan. The story made claims about Cahill's behaviour at a Kings Cross nightclub that were allegedly supported by conveniently unnamed witnesses. Yet neither the police nor the club's management had made any complaint.
The FFA had investigated these "allegations" and it took them only a couple of hours to establish that nothing significant took place. To most of us, this would be the end of the story, but to the football-haters this simply proves that the FFA were attempting to hide "the truth".
According to the article, "Cahill's disgrace soured the most important fortnight for the game in Australia." Perhaps that should read "The Telegraph's disgraceful beat-up soured the most important fortnight for the game in Australia".
What really seems to bug them is the idea that Cahill has, as they put it "escaped punishment" because "in contrast to rugby league player treatment, soccer (sic) officials spent only three hours investigating the incident."
Let me spell it out for you guys : unlike rugby league, there's NOTHING to investigate. I'm sure you'd love to uncover a giant "Socceroo Orgy Scandal" but it ain't gonna happen. These are football players, you know : they don't harass women in nightclubs, women harass them. They're personal friends with Georgio Armani not Mr Lowes. They're chosen to model designer underwear, not caught without it.
And there's the rub. Deep down, the soccer-knockers are scared to death right now because football has truly come of age in Australia. Why else would they waste so much time and energy trying to bring us down ?
The attack on Cahill in The Telegraph even included an online vote : "Are league players treated differently than soccer players ?" I was tempted to answer : "Yes, women and children run away when they see them in public".
Then there were the views of the paper's Executive Sports Editor, Phil Rothfield: "If Tim Cahill were an NRL player he'd be fined $10,000. It's a joke. The NRL has shown the way when it comes to dealing with player misbehaviour."
Yeah, because it faces player misbehaviour on a daily basis.
The difference is, you don't see Simon Hill or Andy Harper writing a front page article about it.
Some years before his untimely death, I was lucky enough to meet Johnny Warren at a suburban shopping mall where he was signing copies of his autobiography. We were the only people who had come to meet him.
I asked him why he thought the Australian sporting media gave football such a raw deal. He said that he felt many people associated with other codes were "quaking in their boots" because they knew that some day football would become the ruling game in Australia, as it was all over the world.
In this, as in many things, Johnny was right. Our World Cup bid has bipartisan support from the government and the unstoppable Frank Lowy at its helm. How can it fail ? And best of all, the ad campaign features "ordinary" Australians: that growing group of sports fans who have come to love football in the past few years as much as we "true believers" always have.
No amount of smear campaigns or envious diatribes is ever going to stop that.
