Austadiums Forum

Hiraldo wrote:Good to see. He was one of the more impressive Oz players at the u17 WC last year and these are the guys we need staying at home for a little while.

Wouldn't be surprised if he's more useful than Petkovic before long, too.

Simmo79 wrote:I wonder who came up with the name the first time around?

Was Negsy on the SA board that season?

Amanda Smith: And that might sound like an English Soccer match, but it’s actually a Perth Glory game. Now while Soccer clubs from the eastern States are struggling for attendances, in the West the crowds are booming. Since coming in to the National Soccer League for the 1996/97 season, the Perth Glory continues to set new attendance records. And has attracted a passionate supporter base, none more so than those who inhabit ‘The Shed’, as one part of their home ground is known. And on Sunday the Glory play in their first Grand Final against the Wollongong Wolves. But why is it that the Perth Glory attracts the largest Soccer crowds in the country? Colin Johnston is one of the Glory faithful.



Colin Johnston: I think it’s a variety of things. There hasn’t been a strong Soccer presence in Perth. All of a sudden we now have a team that not only is representing W.A., because let’s face it, they’re in a one-team town, they’re very much like the Eagles were in the AFL in their early days, a one-horse town, so everyone gets on the bandwagon to support them, there’s no competition like there is now between the Eagles and the Dockers. But it’s a one-team town, there’s no strong ethnic base to this support. There are still teams in Australia that we still tend to link, to some extent, with their old ethnic origins, you know, back in the days when we did have teams with names ending in Macedonia and Croatia etc. Perth Glory, there isn’t really an identification factor, certainly not amongst the people I talk with.



Amanda Smith: Well Perth Glory fans, despite what you said about there being no one particular ethnic base to the team or the club, Perth Glory fans are often typified as being like English soccer fans, is that true?



Colin Johnston: Well I do know up on The Shed, where shall we say the most high profile fans are, there is a very strong English contingent. I know a lot of English migrants who go up there, and I do know one of the early games I went to, I met some English tourists on the train, heading to the grounds, and directed them to the ground, showed them where to go, showed them where the stand was, and their comment was, "It’s just like home". They were up in The Shed and they felt it was the same as going along to their local team back in England. There is certainly a very strong English element up in The Shed, but I sit in the side stands (I personally like to be able to have a seat for most of the game) and I can hear five or six different languages being spoken most weeks. And while there is a strong English element there, in conversations with people, none of us really identify it as the British team or an English team. There’s no sort of overt display of any ethnic background or any nationalism there, it just so happens that there’s a strong contingent of lads who like to sing and cheer, who congregate, and there’s a strong English base to them.



Amanda Smith: Well you mentioned the singing and the chanting. The sound of singing and chanting from the terraces is very much a feature of English Soccer, but it hasn’t really been much of a feature of Australian Soccer that I’ve been aware of.



Colin Johnston: The only singing I’ve ever heard at Soccer in the past in Australia, or in Western Australia anyway, has usually been minor little ditties aimed at offending or taking a rise out of an individual player. And it’s been fairly limited; it might go on for two minutes and that’s the end of it.



Amanda Smith: Give us an example of a Perth Glory song or chant? What sort of things do they sing?



Colin Johnston: Well a lot of them do cross the boundaries of good taste, in fact some of them are downright offensive. They sing all the usual "We’ve got the best fans in the land" type songs, they sing the traditional ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the well-known Soccer song that’s fairly well associated with the Liverpool Football Club, though I have noticed they tend to put their own slant on it as far as timing and rhythm goes. They do sing a couple of fairly offensive songs questioning the parenthood of the referees, and they like to make a point of the fact that opposition teams have no fans; they often sing songs along the lines of "Can you hear Sydney (or Melbourne) sing" - I won’t go into the punchline. But a lot of them are directed at emphasising the point that they’re the only fans there, that the opposition have no fans to support them and they’re on their own. A little bit of intimidation going on.



Amanda Smith: Well just in terms of that crowd on The Shed and the kind of English-ness of that section of the Perth Glory crowd, when Perth Glory was established, the National Soccer League administration was working very hard to loosen the specific ethnic associations of many of the clubs, but why was the English-ness, or that perceived English-ness of the Perth Glory culture seen as OK? Is that because we don’t regard Ethnic ethnicity in the same way as Greek or Croatian or Italian, for example?



Colin Johnston: I think yes, possibly it’s seen as being a safe kind of ethnic gathering. Whether it’s got anything (I’m a little out of my depth here) but whether it’s got anything to do with the fact that the English lately haven’t been in too many wars with people, as opposed to some of the other ethnic communities that we’ve had tied to Soccer, so that a conflict back at home has spilled over into the local communities here, I don’t know.



Amanda Smith: And yet paradoxically in Europe, English Soccer fans are regarded as the scourge of the game.



Colin Johnston: Oh, certainly.



Amanda Smith: Has any of that less attractive culture of English Soccer fandom become part of the Perth Glory?



Colin Johnston: No, I don’t think so. I mean there have been instances where say there’s some bottle throwing. But it’s interesting to note, and I’ve been discussing this in the last day or two with people that go to the Soccer with me, it’s interesting to note that when there are instances such as bottle throwing or things like that, they’re always plastic bottles; it could be argued that that’s the only sort they sell at the ground, but it would seem to suggest that people aren’t coming along with any expectation that they might need a better missile than a plastic bottle, or they need flares or any of the other various things that turn up at grounds where there are troubles. I think you can fairly safely say that there’s no-one, or no organised group anyway, probably no-one at all, coming with the intention of using the game as an opportunity to start some kind of trouble or some kind of violence. As I said before, the hostility that there is there, and there’s certainly a lot of hostility expressed, but it’s very much expressed, there seems to be no likelihood, I’ve never felt, at any game, even some of the ones that got a bit heated, I’ve never felt at any time that there are calls to, you know, "Let’s all have a riot" or "Let’s go bloody mental" etc., which is one of their favourite chants. There’s never been any likelihood or expectation that they’re going to act it out, though it has been pointed out that that’s quite often the call to start something in other parts of the world, amongst English fans.



‘GLORY’ CHANT



Amanda Smith: Singin’ for Glory, the Perth Glory, playing in Sunday’s National Soccer League Grand Final against the Wollongong Wolves. And that was Glory follower, Colin Johnston.