DOES anyone else get bored by the A-League occasionally?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the A-League. I follow it closer than anyone I know. It takes up hours of my week, costs me hundreds thousands of dollars a year in travel, and too often manages to steal all of my time over the weekend.

But has it ever got a little boring for you? The same teams... The same dull managers... The same dirty tricks from Muscat... Am I alone in thinking it can sometimes feel a little stale?

I came to a strange realisation on Saturday morning. As I awoke to a weekend devoid of Sydney FC action, I suddenly realised I was more excited about football than I had been for weeks.

Why?

Sydney FC’s all-conquering youth team were playing Perth Glory’s youth team at Seymour Shaw (Sutherland). My entire day was about trekking an hour away from home just to watch the A-League’s new second tier competition, the National Youth League (NYL).

The NYL hasn’t drawn much attention. Were it not for regular updates on official FFA websites, you’d probably not hear about it. Most games are played as curtain-raisers to A-League games, yet still attract very few supporters to the grounds. Youth football has not yet cottoned on in Australia it seems.
But here I was, early on a cloudy Saturday morning, counting down the hours until I would see two teams almost entirely full of teenagers compete at a suburban ground a long way from home.

The game did not disappoint - although it’s probably easy to say that when your team runs out convincing 3-0 winners. The only downside to my day was that it wasn’t the 5 or 6 it probably should’ve been. But sitting at a suburban ground surrounded by a few hundred people I began to think about just what makes the NYL so exciting:

#1) This is the future
On show at Seymour Shaw were at least six players who will have A-League contracts next year. Rhyann Grant, Kofi Danning, Matthew Jurman and Antony Golec are all confirmed to be a part of Sydney FC’s first team. The same can be said of Anthony Skorich and Andrija Jukic of Perth. To catch a glimpse of what lies ahead for your club can be quite exciting. It’s early days, but I can already see Jurman fending off Sasho Petrovski in Sydney’s backline next year, or Danning coming off the bench to run rings around old man Muscat.

#2) Excitement
The quality of the NYL varies from moment-to-moment. Like youth leagues worldwide, you can go from applauding excellent, instinctive play one minute, to witnessing horribly basic mistakes the next. But the beauty of youth football is that there is no holding back. None of these young men was happy to defend, every player was looking to construct a play and find a goal for their side. They may learn to play more conservatively as they get older, and their skills have a long way to improve, but even now the games can be very entertaining.

#3) The X-factor
Not all of the players on show in the NYL will make it. In fact, most won’t. The very nature of youth footballers becoming elite footballers is that numbers thin over the years.

But in several of these players you can see an X-factor that you don’t always see in the A-League. From 17yr old Rhyann Grant’s fantastic touch and will to be involved from right-back, to Ibrahim Haydar’s sheer brutality at centre-half (I’m sure that kid eats glass), to the older Chris Triantis directing traffic around him from the centre circle... Every player has something unique about them and the way they play.

Some of these unique traits can be trained out of players in later years, so it’s great to be able to watch these players play their natural game, despite their deficiencies.

Kofi “The Barista” Danning has all the makings of The Cove’s next cult hero – he’ll easily be fastest player in the A-League next year – and if he somehow loses the swagger in the way he plays amongst the serious world of pro football, I’ll consider myself lucky to have seen it now.

I’m off to Adelaide on Saturday for the crunch match between Sydney FC and the weary Adelaide United. But I get the feeling that whilst most Sydney supporters will be lubricating their vocal chords in the local pub, I’ll be getting to Hindmarsh early in the hope I can again watch The Barista and co tear the opposition apart with a vitality only seen in youth players.

Whether or not the A-League is letting you down from time-to-time, I recommend you make an effort to get out and watch your team’s National Youth League side. You might be surprised at how entertaining the football can be. And who knows? You could be watching the next Alex Brosque, James Holland, or Travis Dodd - before the fame.