WELL, Perth’s feast of football is over. While the general public didn’t see a Glory win, they did see nine goals across three games featuring EPL opposition, and a chance to meet and greet Australian hero Mark Schwarzer and Liverpool legend Robbie Fowler, albeit while also calling them fat bastards- fitting for one and laughed at by the other, I’ll let you pick which.
Despite the goalmouth scramble in the opening minutes which led to the one and only goal of the match, Glory did well to frustrate a more reputable opponent in Wolverhampton Wanderers on Friday night. While only 11,000 people braved the odd shower to watch the first of the three games at MES involving an English Premier League side, the club can take heart from the fact that most didn't go away disappointed.
Mile Sterjovski showed what a class act he can be for Perth, with some brilliant little touches and passes to Eugene Dadi in the first half and a long-range effort that only just missed the target. New boy Andy Todd looked solid and assured in defence, and not at all the slow, lumbering centre back I'd imagined him to be. Young defender Scott Neville demonstrated yet again why Perth fans hold him in high regard, looking not at all overawed by his illustrious opposition. Ex-Romanian league midfielder Jacob Burns got stuck right in to Wolves' midfield - so much so that he (somewhat unluckily) had a role in breaking an opponent's foot.
Adriano Pellegrino again worked tirelessly down the right hand flank, even whilst having to deal with an absolute monster of a left-back. Watching the 5'7" Pellegrino attempt to win headers against a man who didn't even have to jump for them was worth the price of admission alone; as was the laughable refereeing decisions that saw "Pele" penalised for impeding his opponent. Honestly, saying that Adriano was impeding that full back is like saying a pebble could impede a bulldozer; even if in this case it's a bloody tenacious pebble...
Overall, the game was played in good spirit and even Mick McCarthy, Wolverhampton's famously diplomatic coach, had no problem with the broken metatarsal suffered by one of his key strikers, Chris Iwelumo. McCarthy stated in the post-game press conference, "It was just an accident- nothing we could have avoided... It wasn't too physical, it was purely an accident. I think they just clashed." Maybe he's only just seen videos of that miss by Iwelumo while he was playing for Scotland?
Likewise, the Wolves fans I talked to after the game had no issue with the incident, apart from the fact that they'd be a man down come the start of the Premier League season. Happily, some Wolves fans (possibly including those that were justifiable targets of the amusing "Do you live in Joondalup?" chants) were even impressed with Glory's performance, and were thinking about making regular trips to MES in future; the very thing I was hoping for when I wrote last week's article.
It would be tempting to think that after Glory's "thrashing" at the hands of Fulham all the good work mentioned above would be undone, but I'm not so sure that is the case. For a start, any football fan with half a brain who watched Fulham smash five past Glory would immediately recognise that it was more a case of Fulham being fantastic rather than Glory being completely terrible; for the majority of the first half the boys in purple stuck right with their EPL opposition. It was really only once the rain started coming down and Fulham's better technical skills and fresher legs (they changed nearly their entire front half at the break) came into play that the game really ran away from Glory.
5-0 sounds harsh- and it was, Fulham showed no quarter- but let's not forget the team Perth were playing are going to be in the Europa League next year. Anyone who panics, calls for Dave Mitchell's head, or declares Perth to be wooden spooners based upon that result is in desperate need of some Valium, a brain, or a good old-fashioned slap to the head- and that includes those in Perth's own fanbase. An EPL team is like a Formula One car, an A-League team like my brother's V6 Commodore. If you race the two over 30 laps, and the Commodore is race-ready while the F1 car has only just been wheeled out of "cold" storage, chances are you might see an upset. By all means, celebrate. But once that precision piece of engineering gets warmed up, there's only ever going to be one result.
The other reason that I'm not concerned about Wednesday's scaring off the punters is that a 5-0 loss changes nothing. Coming into the match, cynical EPL-only fans (whom I talked about last week) would have thought "The A-League is rubbish, and the EPL is miles better, it's the ultimate". Going away from that match, they'd be thinking "The A-League is rubbish, and the EPL is miles better, it's the ultimate... But you know what, the atmosphere wasn't too bad and not all the players are as shite as I thought they would be... God knows what that Jamie Coyne fellow was doing, though."
We had nothing to lose in that regard- and indeed, Perth might still yet gain fans from those games. Before both games began on Wednesday, a small group of Glory fans were spruiking memberships and competitions to the public as they came in the ground; totally independently of the club, they simply directed people to the membership office if they were interested. Now I'm sure that not everyone is going to be charmed into memberships by these enthusiastic individuals, but it's rewarding when you see stories like this, lifted straight from the Perth fan forum Gloryboys.net;
...In between that there were people who /would/ be members but aren't because of their shift patterns and/or living in places like Bunbury. Also the occasional gem like the grandfather who was there with his two grandsons, is a Geelong AFL supporter, has the 6PR telephone number on his mobile (because he phones on the talkback segments so often), and will be taking out family membership at the Glory so he can take his grandsons to games...
Now I'm sorry; I know Perth aren't going to win everyone over, but when you hear tales like that it makes you think that these "open to the public" games aren't such a bad idea after all. Glory fans are among the most passionate and loyal in the land; if they can put up with years of Ron Smith and FFA ownership, they'll put up with anything. They won't mind that Fulham won 5-0, because they'll be there to see Glory take on the rest of the A-League. It's like TV On The Radio say in the song which shares the title of this blog post; "We got a curse we cannot lift... We're howling forever" (Why don't Wolves fans use that?)
It's the general public that you want to win over, and even if Glory lost on the night, 15,000 people (not a bad effort by the Perth public considering rain was forecast and the stadium isn't covered) saw eight goals across two games in the one evening, and hopefully some of those are members of the AFL-saturated general public thinking "you know, this soccer isn't as bad as it's made out to be". Last week I said I wanted excitement and atmosphere- and we got that, even if Glory copped a belting in the last half.
Finally, a word to local Perth sports reporter and MC Lachie Reid. Mate, you do a good job with your local AFL programs and your work at the Wildcats. But please, please, please make an effort to do some research when MCing Glory games. Or at least apologise to players whose names you cannot pronounce. North Queensland's opponents aren't called "Wolverhampton Wolves Wanderers", either.
The worst that could come out of that game is the players losing confidence; and Dadi, Harnwell, and Mitchell all seem to have put that to bed already. Take a deep breath Perth fans, the season's not over- it hasn't even begun, for crying out loud! Hopefully, I'll see some of you down at Mandurah on Saturday as we get our first look at A-League opposition on "home" soil, and perhaps our first peek at new signings Branko Jelic and Chris Coyne, along with more of the impressive David Williams and Robbie "Penalty God" Fowler.
