That's how many turned up to see the Jets play the Mariners on Sunday. The Jets are setting the example for community engagement in the A-League and are a great model for bringing crowds back.

Certain Sydney based fan forums might like to look at Newcastle's new modus operandi. There were more people at the game on Sunday than were there to watch Sydney vs Melbourne, a grand final rematch, which I notice other pundits are saying was a good crowd.

Compare the relative size of Sydney and Newcastle and it's apparent that Sydney really need to do something about bringing the crowds in. They should be aiming for 30,000. Why couldn't they pull double Newcastle's crowd?

Sure, every team can't have a magnanimous owner like Newcastle have, who does all the right things and lowers the ticket prices using his own money. But other clubs can look at the examples set by people like Tinkler and see how it engages the community, gets more people to the games, and (hopefully) rolls on like a snowball, picking up momentum as it goes.

The Jets are struggling to stay in the top six at the moment, yet their turn out of 13,000 fans is a testament to the work being done by the Jets these days to engage fans. It's a stark change from only a few months ago.

Are other clubs doing the same sort of things? If so, which ones and are they profitable? Adelaide have a great fan base and routinely have good sized crowds to home games. Fury, despite their position on the table and uncertain future are still pulling half decent crowds for what's essentially a big country town. Sydney need to do something. Gold Coast seems to be a no-win situation despite the team performing well and sitting comfortably in among the top teams. Brisbane seem to be getting people back in and Victory constantly set the standard.

Unfortunately, there is a dark side to the new community engagement approach and that is the over-policing of the active supporters. Whilst parents might be concerned that their children might hear some foul language at a football match, as long as that's as far as it goes, it's probably not such a bad thing.

I am a parent and take my two children to the games. I can tell you that it's not just the Squadron that uses foul language. So what are security going to do about all the loud mouths in the rest of the stadium who swear? Eject them as well? Eject me when I let one out after a missed goal opportunity?

So it begs the question, why pick on the active support? FFA, isn't passionate support what you want? It's the sons and daughters of current active supporter groups who will be building up the crowds in 20 years time once the present crop of youngies become old fogies and sit in the stands like me.

Is it worth telling the FFA that the A-League isn't the EPL? The EPL can afford to come down hard on hooliganism. There is a 100 year old tradition of supporters and supporter groups there, so pursuing the 'family friendly' model isn't going to destroy those groups.

But if you bring the hammer down hard on the fledgling supporter base in Australia because they use a few foul mouthed chants, you'll kill the passion of the games. You might as well shut down football in front of live crowds. Or ban fans, like Gold Coast...

If supporters start to get violent, that's when security should get involved and that's when people should be banned from matches.

Now, about the game against the Mariners, I don't want to talk about it. I don't know what happened to the Jets, but even the players on the field couldn't make it happen.

I'm not going to chirp on about how the players "didn't put in" as I've seen written by lots of posters on other websites. Saying that the players who played didn't put in, after 90 minutes running around busting their guts in the heat is just plain wrong.

Of course they put in, things just went wrong, or things just didn't go right. The Mariners were very structured. They passed well, they kept possession better, they played so much better in tight spaces. The Jets lacked creativity in the middle of the park.

But the game was set even early on when Topor-Stanley made a terrible error and the irritating Matt Simon finished properly. Something that Labi had a chance to do later and didn't. Wehrman came off, compounding the loss of regular players out injured. It was always going to be an uphill battle and those two things made it that much harder.

It's now a really big question if the Jets can hang on until the finals. Let's count who is out or gone... Rooney went out ages ago, Ljubo is gone, Werhman's out, Abbas is out, but coming back in, Kantarovski's injured, Mooy's out, Bridges is out and may never re-appear. Jeffers, who ignited the Jets front third, is gone. D'Apuzzo is out. One by one, it adds up.

It doesn't just make the squad harder to pick but it limits where you can move players around if you want to. Brockie's back but might take a match or two to warm up. And recent news is that Ruben Zadkovich, a real engine room in the Jets midfield, has a knee ligament injury and I hear that Petrovski has a possible hamstring injury.

There are some really serious questions to ask Jets management about why this injury list is growing and growing. They can't all be "a bit of bad luck". There has to be something about their strength and conditioning that isn't quite right.

It's a tough run in for the Jets to the end of the regular season so it's lucky we had those two games against Fury. There's Gold Coast, Wellington, Victory and Central Coast away games and Sydney and Perth at home. Winning a good majority of those and keeping the other top six contenders below us out is going to require a minor miracle. Good luck lads.