Saturday night’s exciting A-League Melbourne derby between Melbourne Victory and Melbourne City was soured by an incredibly heavy-handed police presence and prejudiced, clickbait-seeking reporting of the game by local media says Rohan Connolly.
The sports writer for The Age attended the game with his 14-year-old son alongside over 40,000 other fans, and says that while the game was another fantastic chapter in a great sporting rivalry, two things left a sour taste in his mouth.
The first of these was overly heavy police presence at Etihad Stadium, especially outside the venue.
“There were police everywhere when we turned up, many dressed in riot gear clustered around the entrances expecting there was some sort of full-scale political protest, not a domestic soccer game in the sporting capital,” Connolly said on SEN’s Sunday SportSENtral.
“This on-going belief of law enforcement in this city that soccer fans are one step away from lawless anarchy never seems to be based on much other than cultural stereotyping and I think it was proved so again.
“Just three arrests and 13 evictions from more than 40,000 people. Was that because of the police presence? Hardly. It was because Melbourne sporting crowds can co-exist despite their rivalries without trouble.
“This was just like any AFL crowd. It was full of families, full of kids, full of women. Why can’t they attend this sport free of decades-old prejudices?”
Connolly then followed this up by calling the reporting most Melbourne-based media had after the game as “easy, lazy, cheap journalism.”
“Flares mar Melbourne derby’ was one headline, it’s still going on now. But they didn’t, there was one flare let off inside the stadium during the game and the most significant thing about that was the reaction of the crowd, which immediately started booing to perpetrator, who was singled out to police by fans and straight away booted right out of the ground,” he said.
“There’s idiots in any crowd of that size, as there are in any AFL game which draws as many people. The difference is that when it happens at AFL games, the incidents aren’t seized upon and made to appear like they represent the sport as a whole because obviously they’re not.
“But this lowest common denominator portrayal of soccer in this town is an anachronism. More cynically than that it’s easy clicks for media organisations who know there is a market in appealing to the sorts of bigoted people who would still be calling the game wog-ball if they could.”
Connolly says that the sport-watching public deserve better, and says that never in his time of attending A-League games has he ever felt threatened or unsafe.
“I reckon we as a sporting public deserve better than that and I reckon the media, who are the shapers of public opinion should know a lot better,” he said.
“I’ve been to plenty of soccer matches in this city and I’ve never once felt threatened, that’s why I take kids. That’s why if you go to any A-League game you’ll see kids and family anywhere.
“The game itself has done everything it possibly can to stamp out crowd misbehaviour. I reckon it is about time that was properly recognised and incidents like one flare are placed in their proper place, a small annoyance rather than being typical of an entire evening of sporting entertainment.”