Ash Morgan, Ivan Slavich & Eamonn Flanagan -Canberra A-League Bid team.
As a boy from the East End of London, and like most people from that region, I’m a proud football fanatic and West Ham tragic, The playing fields at school backed onto the Hammers training ground, so I grew up watching the likes of Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, Trevor Brooking & Billy Bonds kicking a ball around.
And I still play football. On Sunday mornings during the season I turn out for the Tuggeranong Old Boys, who play in the Masters competition Division 2 or is it 3? No in fact it’s now called the over 43’s would you believe?
Still, not bad for a 48 year old eh? Well I’d like to think so, but not really, I’m one of the younger players in the team. Most of the guys are late fifties, early sixties, and we are dragged around the park every week by 35 year old players who have just retired form the ACT Premier League. It is supposed to be just for fun these days, but in reality we are all still so competitive, and get carried away at times. It can also be humiliating as well as knackering.
Regarding Canberra’s unsuccessful bid to have a team in the Hyuandai A-League, in my opinion the FFA turned us over. We said to them very clearly up front, tell us now if we are just wasting our time.
I do feel they led us up the garden path a tad when they said we had just as good a chance as anyone. Reality was that we didn’t and after devoting over 12 months to the bid, a consortium from Western Sydney came out of left field and won the day.
I don’t think the FFA ever seriously thought that a Canberra consortium could put up a competitive bid to be in the competition. I think they believed that Western Sydney would be the only ones who could possibly tick all the boxes.
It is important for our region to have an A-League team? Apart from being the Capital City of Australia, we cover a large regional area of Southern NSW. Canberra is a major sporting centre with fantastic sporting & training facilities (AIS). We have a great venue in Canberra stadium, (compare that to Wollongong’s WIN Stadium).
We also have, I think it’s around 50,000 participating players in Canberra, and it’s growing. So you have to believe we can drum up enough support.
One day it will happen, maybe 3-4 years from now, but we will get there in the end.
