I like talking to the away fans - they're always good for a quote or just to give me a bit of insight into how the other nine tenths live. Anyway, I'd been thinking about the Gold Coast, their low supporter base and other troubles, and it occurred to me that there's a bit of a mystery here.

On the surface, the two Coasts have a lot in common. They're both holiday centres about an hour from a major capital. They're both part of the so-called rugby league heartland, but both regions have far more registered football players than league players. And yet, the Mariners are a strong part of the Central Coast community, while the Gold Coast barely hang on to their A-League status.

An obvious difference is that the Mariners have been around since Season One, and the Gold Coast are still new-ish, but the Mariners were embraced by large (comparatively) numbers before a ball was kicked, so that's not the problem.

It strikes me that a really important difference is the way the two clubs are treated by their local media. The Mariners get many enthusiastic column inches in the Central Coast Express Advocate and their games are called on local radio, whereas the Gold Coast (and their fans) are frequently bagged by supposedly professional media trolls with anti-football agendas. This can hardly be helpful in the bums-on-seats department.

The trolling of football fans is a bit of an old chestnut in this country. Plenty have done it in the past on slow news days in the off-seasons of other codes. Radio talk back shows (especially in Melbourne) have frequently derided 'wogball' and its adherents, but the purpose is not to convince anyone about the validity or otherwise of a particular code. The purpose is simply to get the football fans fired up and passionately defending their game. The trolls just sit back and laugh, occasionally stirring the pot and counting the radio calls or internet hits/responses to present to their bosses when negotiating advertising rates.

So why do we fall for it?

Why do we feel the need to leap to the defence of football when some ignoramus, whose opinion isn't worth a pinch of shit, starts bleating: oval ball good, round ball bad?

We know they only want us to drive up their ratings, so why do we help them out?

Of course, if you do respond (especially to an internet forum) with any kind of effective rebuttal, the likelihood is that your post will not be published. To give an example, there is a 'journalist' on the Gold Coast who recently published an opinion piece on the A-League. It was interesting that, before she started explaining why the A-League was crap, she felt the need to establish her football credentials which amounted to the following: her father had played and had occasionally taken her to see games in England.

As usual, the football fans fired up and started defending their beloved A-League. I also felt moved to post:

"Dear Madam. I note that you claim to understand football because your father played. If instead of being a footballer, your father had been a nun-murdering nazi paedophile, I wonder whether you would have claimed to be an expert on that."

For some bizarre and unfathomable reason, my post was not published, which was a shame because it would have demonstrated just a hint of even-handedness. But the trolls aren't interested in any sort of genuine debate. They're trolls. They just want to see rabid reaction to their pointless posts. They do not want to see (and will not publish) a response which reveals the motive or undermines the credibility of their opinion-du jour.

I say to you beleaguered Gold Coast fans - the best way to deal with the trolls is to deprive them of oxygen. Do not post on their sites. Don't even go near their sites. All they want is your click on their page to help them keep their pointless jobs.

And why on earth would you want to help them do that?

Adrian Deans is the author of Mr Cleansheets - published by Vulgar Press, distributed by Dennis Jones and Associates and available in all good book stores and in ebook form on www.mrcleansheets.com