The Asian Champions League deserves more from Melbourne

In Yesterday’s Age Micheal Lynch wrote a brilliant and much needed piece questioning the Australian attitude toward the Asian Champions League. Not so much from a club perspective, or even from the perspective of die hard football fans in this country, but more so concerning the general public, and to an extent the media, both responsible for the crowd of less than 8,000 people who turned out for Melbourne Victory’s ACL home opener last Tuesday night. The smallest crowd in fact the Melbourne Victory as ever played in front of in more than five years of competition.

Lynch wondered whether the midweek time slot was something not fully yet understood or appreciated by the Australian public, a shame seeing as Australians and Melbournians are said to be sports obsessed. More embarrassing seeing as no such gimmick factor exists in either the U.S, Europe or Latin America regarding elite midweek sports.

Most importantly however it’s Lynch’s own paper which should take a large degree of responsibility for the deplorable crowd last Tuesday night. The Age, and the Herald Sun for that matter, have done very little to promote the Asian Champions League, far and away the largest club competition in the region. In fact prior to the commencement of the tournament neither paper provided any sort of preview for the prestigious and lucrative competition while scores for any of the other games played over the most recent two match days, (with the exception of games involving teams from Australian groups) were nowhere to be found.

I’m willing to accept that it may well take some time for the Asian Champions League to take off in Australia. After all, we waited basically an eternity for the A-League to arrive, while we’re only now starting to witness, to a degree, the kind of coverage our own and ever improving domestic league warrants. So it may well take another five years for the ACL to enter into the everyday vocabulary of Australian sports fans. In the meantime we really do need our own mainstream news sources along with our own apparent sports obsessive city to support it. For after all without the Asian Champions League, the A-League can never really be considered as anything more than a spruced up NSL.