It was all over Triple-M this morning too, just how good the atmosphere was, how football is taking over and NRL are in trouble...
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HIS NAME is Mark Boreham and he is wild-eyed with excitement. He beats an advertising hoarding with the frenzy of a heavy metal drummer, and he stomps on his plastic seat like the thing's on fire.
A 41-year-old construction worker from the western Sydney suburb of Penrith, Boreham says he used to be "a full-on rugby league fan". Twelve months ago, he barely knew a penalty from a free kick. That was then. Today, Boreham is a mad Western Sydney Wanderers fan.
"Mate I'd never watched the game at all," he says while swaying to the chants of the Wanderers cheer squad, the Red and Black Bloc (RBB). "This is about a feeling, about soul. You feel like you're part of those guys out there."
It's a riot on the terraces for Mark Boreham and his mates, but not the sort of riot the NSW Police Riot Squad is worried about. Source: Supplied
Mark Boreham is one face among tens of thousands, who together represent an unprecedented transformation in Australian sport.
The AFL said the Greater Western Sydney Giants were going to take over Sydney's west. Rugby league said nuh-uh, no way, this is our territory. While the two oval ball codes sniped at each other across the public relations trenches, soccer snuck in and completely outflanked the pair of them with plain old-fashioned people power.
But how and why? Soccer in Australia has had more false dawns than an Antarctic winter. What's different now? To answer that, I went to my first A-League match to find out for myself.
Let me take you there now. It is Saturday night, the Sydney Derby, Sydney FC versus Western Sydney Wanderers. The Sydney Football Stadium is a sell-out.
Some perspective. A few weeks earlier, I attended an NRL final at this same stadium with a crowd of around 30,000. A few weeks before that I attended a regular-season NRL game which would have been lucky to have 5,000 fans - never mind the embarrassed NRL's grossly inflated crowd figure. And now there are 40,000 fans. For soccer.
But numbers don't explain this thing. Only the vibe explains it. So let me tell you about the vibe, about how the minute you get off that train at Central, you see fans everywhere, some marching, some singing, some drinking quietly in pubs.
And that's just a taster. When you climb the hill and approach the ground is when you really start to get this thing. It's the noise. The match hasn't started yet but there's chanting like you've never heard in your life. Revolutions are noisy, and that's what this thing feels like.
Even then, you don't totally get this thing until you sit yourself in one of the few spare seats in the corner where George Gregan once made an impossible tackle in a rugby union Test, and where Andrew Johns threw a famous pass in the 1997 ARL grand final.
The fans show a lot of flair of their own and could probably do without these. Not a criticism, just a fact. Source: Supplied
You take a slug of your beer, have another slug to make sure you haven't gone totally mad, inhale, exhale, then completely open your senses to this thing.
This thing is unlike any other thing in Australian sport. This thing is a party, a carnival, a festival, a concert. This thing is a mass outpouring of passion - not just of sporting passion - but of togetherness, of belonging. The RBB is a place where brickies and brokers, where young and old, where women with blonde hair and women in burqas, come together to feel a part of something.
As Mark Boreham says, "it's a sport we can all get into together, it not just a bunch of yobbos going 'f-k you, ref".
The chants are fabulously inclusive. Some are funny, some are catchy, but my favourite is a simple call-and-response chant where one group of Wanderers fans asks: "Who do we sing for", and the other group replies: "We sing for Wanderers".
This simple call-and-response symbolises the inclusiveness. Like religious hymns, the chants affirm the communal faith. They're not about gloating when they're winning or inciting any sort of ill-feeling. It's about celebrating the common ground they all share.
And in the middle of all this, a soccer match breaks out. A few quick points about that:
Firstly, Sydney FC will run last this year. They are woeful. Secondly, the standard of the game, even accounting for Sydney FC, is better than I'd been led to believe. Passes are slick. A couple of the through-balls show real vision. The game flows. Thirdly, the skills of Wanderers pin-up boy Shinji Ono are truly sublime. But you already knew that, right?
And fourthly, the soccer barely matters.
When the Wanderers score the first goal after 11 minutes, the cheer is no louder than the chants which echo across the terraces the entire match. It's the same at the end of the game. The 2-0 victory over their cross-town rival is a great result for Wanderers fans, but that final whistle is a bit of a letdown, like the "last drinks" call at a rocking pub.
Let me share one other thought from the night, and this one's the biggie.
I've always cringed a little when I heard people call soccer "The Beautiful Game". To me, it's always been like boxing people calling their sport "The Sweet Science" as a way of masking its brutality.
What I know now is, it doesn't mater whether you're viewing an ugly match or a beautiful match. The beauty is a package. The beauty includes what happens on and off the field. It even includes the feeling inside you as you watch this thing.
The Wanderers fans have forged a real sense of community, based partly on love of the game, but partly also on a sense of community. And all of that has been infectious. The Sydney FC fans in The Cove were nearly as loud on Saturday night. They also unfurled a giant banner paying respect to bushfire victims.
These guys were also great. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images) Source: Getty Images
Gestures like this are signs that soccer fans want to be seen as part of the mainstream community, as people working with the community rather than rallying against it. Soccer in Australia used to be about old allegiances and old conflicts. Now it's about inclusiveness. About building friendships. About having a good time, not an angry time.
That's the difference. That's why this thing is finally taking over like they've always told us it would. And that's why kids no longer turn up at junior soccer training in the jersey of their favourite AFL or NRL player. These days they wear A-League jumpers.
