Thread starter
#1
The AFL can keep their 5,000 strong Carrara crowds ....
sign the petition and help give Tasmania its own AFL team
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/tasmania-needs-its-own-afl-team.html
It's time to unleash sports-mad Tasmanians on AFL
Tim Lane
March 6, 2007
PARDON the touch of Tasmanian triumphalism, but this is an opportunity that can't be allowed to pass. The weekend just gone was an unusually good one for the island state. It should cause football administrators, in particular, to sit up and take notice.
Not only did Tassie secure a berth in the final of this season's national cricket competition, but it produced the best crowd for any of the AFL pre-season matches played in three cities around the nation.
With the Western Bulldogs and the Kangaroos either on the rise or fighting for life, a total of only 22,000 attended their two games at Telstra Dome. When the Kangaroos played a strategically fixtured match against Collingwood at Carrara the week before, the crowd was just over 11,000. Fifteen and a half thousand went to Launceston's Aurora Stadium to see the Hawks play the Blues.
Significantly, more of them supported Carlton than Hawthorn. The Hawks, who are trying to identify themselves as the team of Tasmania, "owning" the state, as a couple of their administrators have crassly put it, were roundly booed before the game. Tasmanians have their own AFL teams. Only one team can ever unify the state's football fans, and that's one that genuinely represents them.
Such a team would be supported with frightening passion, for Tasmanians are quite mad about sport. When the state won its first domestic one-day cricket title in 1979, before a frenzied crowd in Hobart, John Inverarity, the losing captain, said at the presentation that he had played cricket all over the world but never in front of "a crowd like you".
Yet, while administrators fall over themselves trying to set up a team on the Gold Coast, where the loyalty of the half-million population is divided between rugby league, rugby union, soccer and the Brisbane Lions, Tasmanian football languishes. It was once like that in cricket, too. Now its cricket team, largely composed of home-grown talent, heads the field.
Look at the contribution Tasmania brings to Australian cricket: the world's best batsman and captain in Ricky Ponting, a recent vice-captain in David Boon, it currently provides two of the four-man national selection panel, and the national fast bowling coach, Troy Cooley. And it sits on top of the Pura Cup table.
In football, though, it continues not to be on the AFL's radar. Those in control are dazzled by the prospect of gold. They have stars and dollar signs in their eyes as they think about the Gold Coast and the western suburbs of Sydney. But there's no guarantee it won't be fools' gold. In southern Queensland, the Kangaroos will struggle to woo 30 per cent of the sports-interested population.
Were they to consider Tasmania, they would see the potential for 100 per cent support from sports fans. Not only that, they would be a short, cheap plane ride from Melbourne and their traditional supporters could stay in touch by enjoying a couple of trips a year to one of the world's most beautiful places. They could be the Tassie Kangaroos, wearing green, primrose and magenta at home, and blue and white when they played in Melbourne. They would have a support base across two states that would make them the envy of many other clubs.
And the AFL would have its truly national competition at last.
Tim Lane
March 6, 2007
PARDON the touch of Tasmanian triumphalism, but this is an opportunity that can't be allowed to pass. The weekend just gone was an unusually good one for the island state. It should cause football administrators, in particular, to sit up and take notice.
Not only did Tassie secure a berth in the final of this season's national cricket competition, but it produced the best crowd for any of the AFL pre-season matches played in three cities around the nation.
With the Western Bulldogs and the Kangaroos either on the rise or fighting for life, a total of only 22,000 attended their two games at Telstra Dome. When the Kangaroos played a strategically fixtured match against Collingwood at Carrara the week before, the crowd was just over 11,000. Fifteen and a half thousand went to Launceston's Aurora Stadium to see the Hawks play the Blues.
Significantly, more of them supported Carlton than Hawthorn. The Hawks, who are trying to identify themselves as the team of Tasmania, "owning" the state, as a couple of their administrators have crassly put it, were roundly booed before the game. Tasmanians have their own AFL teams. Only one team can ever unify the state's football fans, and that's one that genuinely represents them.
Such a team would be supported with frightening passion, for Tasmanians are quite mad about sport. When the state won its first domestic one-day cricket title in 1979, before a frenzied crowd in Hobart, John Inverarity, the losing captain, said at the presentation that he had played cricket all over the world but never in front of "a crowd like you".
Yet, while administrators fall over themselves trying to set up a team on the Gold Coast, where the loyalty of the half-million population is divided between rugby league, rugby union, soccer and the Brisbane Lions, Tasmanian football languishes. It was once like that in cricket, too. Now its cricket team, largely composed of home-grown talent, heads the field.
Look at the contribution Tasmania brings to Australian cricket: the world's best batsman and captain in Ricky Ponting, a recent vice-captain in David Boon, it currently provides two of the four-man national selection panel, and the national fast bowling coach, Troy Cooley. And it sits on top of the Pura Cup table.
In football, though, it continues not to be on the AFL's radar. Those in control are dazzled by the prospect of gold. They have stars and dollar signs in their eyes as they think about the Gold Coast and the western suburbs of Sydney. But there's no guarantee it won't be fools' gold. In southern Queensland, the Kangaroos will struggle to woo 30 per cent of the sports-interested population.
Were they to consider Tasmania, they would see the potential for 100 per cent support from sports fans. Not only that, they would be a short, cheap plane ride from Melbourne and their traditional supporters could stay in touch by enjoying a couple of trips a year to one of the world's most beautiful places. They could be the Tassie Kangaroos, wearing green, primrose and magenta at home, and blue and white when they played in Melbourne. They would have a support base across two states that would make them the envy of many other clubs.
And the AFL would have its truly national competition at last.

