Pre-Season - Silly Season

Football columnist Phill Chadwick calls on the FFA to abandon thoughts of a pre-season tournament next summer and extend the season instead.

The Football Federation Australia (FFA) is reportedly making plans for a pre-season A-League competition for season 2006/07. They should think again.

The pre-season competition for this inaugural season was, in my opinion, a necessary evil. It was required simply to allow the selection of a club to represent Australia at the Club World Championship Oceania play-offs. This competition is not required any more because now we will have proper Champions to send to future competitions, like the CWC and the Asian Champions League.

So, with that requirement out of the way, has anyone asked why on earth we would want such a thing any more? Why not use the time to have another round, making the season a more reasonable 28 matches?

The current three round, 21 match season is too short by any standard. For professional footballers to play just 21 games in a season is ludicrous. Supporters, sponsors and broadcasters are short-changed by this truncated competition. A meaningless pre-season cup that no-one cares about is a poor substitute for an extra round of real matches.

AFL football has a short 22 round regular season with a pretty trivial pre-season competition. But A-league is not AFL and our players are not subjected to the brutally hard physical nature of AFL football and must surely be capable of playing many more competitive matches. The English Premier League is 38 matches long. With Cup and European duties, many European clubs play 50 or more matches in a year.

As well, the current A-League situation cannot be a fair draw because the number of home and away games are not equal. With eight teams playing each other just three times, between each pair of teams there will be two games at home and one game away, or two away and one at home. As well, some teams will get 10 home games, some will get 11.

How can that be fair?

A four round 28 match season is infinitely better than wasting time with another pointless competition.

Let the clubs arrange friendlies in the lead up to the season. Invite some Asian, European or South American clubs for a bit of variety.

Then get on with it. Having other quasi-competitive games only dilutes the significance of the real thing.

I am not suggesting that we should have only one trophy to play for. A proper Cup competition is still required, so let's have a broad-based knockout cup competition that any Australian club can enter. A-League teams would come in after the first few rounds have weeded out the lower divisions.

Just imagine the interest when a lowly local league team came to town to take on one of the mighty A-League clubs. This sort of thing is one of the reasons that the English FA Cup so fascinating.

I don't know and, frankly, I don't care what Rugby League, Union, or the other codes do.

We have already fallen for the Aussie obsession with Finals trivialising the achievement of the "Minor" Premier. Let us go no further along that path.

So my plea to the FFA is to forget about this Pre-Season nonsense, extend the regular season and initiate a proper Cup competition.

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