Ever thought of getting up at 3 in the morning to drive 50 miles to a pub to watch the live footy from 14,000 miles away? Our Down Under correspondent gives you the lowdown on the good and the bad of footy in Australia.

Weekend before last saw the Grand Final of the inaugural season of the Hyundai A-league and it’s been a ripper as they say in these parts.

At least that’s the general consensus, as the Grand Final was played in front of a capacity crowd of 42,000 at Aussie Stadium (no, really - Aussie stadium, it’s not a nickname) and Dwight Yorke’s Sydney FC duly justified their billing as pre-season favourites by squeaking past the Central Coast Mariners 1-0. The game itself was like few cup finals I’ve seen – played at a blistering pace in blistering heat with excellent passing and appalling finishing, which, in fact, is how every single game in this league has been played actually.

A little background; soccer in Australia was in a real mess - corrupt officials, bankrupt clubs and ethnic violence which bore a more than passing resemblance to the recent Balkan wars, with Greece thrown in for a bit of variety. Soccer was a game played by Wogs (that means Greek or Italian here in this still very racist society), Sheila’s and Poofters. Indeed, that was the title of the definitive work on Australian soccer by the definitive man of Australian soccer, Johnny Warren. Warren captained Australia to world cup glory in 1974 and then became an administrator and general revolutionary. He died in November 2004 and shortly afterwards soccer became football and everything changed. And that was very much his legacy. It was only a few years ago that team names like Sydney Olympic, Melbourne Croatia, Sydney Croatia and South Melbourne Hellas were commonplace until such overt racial links in a team’s name were outlawed.

The A-League, like the J-League (Japan) and the K-League (South Korea) is very much an artificial construct. 8 franchises have replaced the 18 clubs of the former NSL. 4 of those franchises have a connection to older NSL clubs in an MK Dons sort of way, but essentially the league kicked off in August with 8 new clubs and no pyramid beneath it. Why no pyramid? Because the A-league is played in the Australian Summer (hot Christmases, chuck another prawn on the Barbie and all that) whilst grass roots football, is, sensibly enough, played in winter. Bizarre I agree - it’s bizarre that any sport is played in summer here as even cricket could easily be a winter game – but it seems to have worked.

Big(ish) names included Yorke, who sauntered through midfield trying to slow the game down but usually just lost possession, whilst doing enough to kid almost everyone that he is worth his ‘marquee’ player’s salary. A cap is in force, presumably in a misguided attempt to create a level playing field, and each club can have one ‘marquee’ player to whom they may bestow unlimited riches. For the most part that constitutes a didgeridoo and all the kangaroo steaks they can eat, but for shagger Yorke it’s probably around $250,000p.a or a tenth of what he was on in England, and a quarter of what he was offered in Qatar.

Other luminaries included Steve McMahon who didn’t even last the 21 game season as manager of Perth Glory, and no wonder, given that he chose to employ his talent-free son as midfield dynamo and Brian Deane (age 1000) as his target man.

Pierre Littbarski, a world cup winner no less, is Yorke’s manager at Sydney FC and Kevin Muscat (former Wolves hatchet man) was perpetually suspended for the Melbourne Victory. My local team is the Queensland Roar (you get used to it), and they have nobody of note. I do mean local as well, and not just the only team within 500 miles. Actually they’re both but I am blessed to be domiciled a mere 20 minutes walk from Suncorp Stadium. None of the stadia are owned by the clubs and sponsorship is ubiquitous. Australia recently took on the might of Iran, who were good enough to eliminate them from the ’98 world cup and the game was promoted thus; SBS and Telstra are proud to present, live from Suncorp stadium, the Quantas Soceroos v. Iran in the Powerade challenge sponsored by McDonald’s. Six corporate plugs but the worst thing is that nobody even bats an eyelid at it.

So 8 teams play each other 3 times – I still haven’t sussed out how they work out the home and away thing on that one, and then the 4 top teams (that’s the top half sport) play off but not in a normal 1st v. 4th semi final sort of way. Oh no. First off, the top team is crowned ‘Minor Premierships’ and they will celebrate with a shandy and have a few rape allegations thrown at them. No one gets too excited because someone has just won the league – it happened to be Adelaide United this year. 1st play 2nd in the major semi final and the winner goes onto the Grand Final. The loser goes on to the Preliminary final where they meet the winner of the minor semi-final (i.e 3rd v 4th). The winner of the preliminary final then goes on to play the winner of the major semi final in the Grand Final. So the Grand Final could easily be a repeat of the major semi-final. Draw a diagram – it’s not that daft.

As for the national team, the biggest news is not that they got to the finals but that from now on they will qualify through Asia instead of through Oceania and the dreaded play off against the fifth place South Americans. Australia will qualify more often than not from now on and, finally, football could really take off. Go you Footballroos! Er……

Roobaiter