Ryan Fraser’s stunning late winner to give the Western Sydney Wanderers a 1-0 win over Perth on Sunday was one of those key moments that happen on the road to redemption.
There are some games that may not seem all that important on the surface but in reality are must-win affairs. You just have to find a way.
And so after a week of turmoil, the Wanderers did. Fraser, in his debut match, delivered a late winner that will remain in the minds of all 5,178 people at CommBank Stadium for years to come.
In truth though it was a brief reprieve for a club that has well and truly lost its way, reflective of a wider competition that has become an also-ran in the Australian sporting landscape.
The A-League is Australia’s forgotten sporting competition. It is extraordinary how quickly it has happened.
A little over a decade ago, I was being told by Wanderers fans, buoyed by the club’s early success, that it was time to pack up our rugby league coverage over at the Western Weekender and accept that football was about to take over the west.
And it was hard to argue with their passion and stance.
Rugby league was struggling in the west, with the Eels, Panthers and Tigers in long-time form slumps and the NRL seemingly just going through the motions.
The Wanderers meanwhile were on the rise. A record-breaking debut season in 2012-13, in which they topped the A-League table, set up a remarkable era that saw the club win the AFC Champions League and play in three A-League Grand Finals in the space of four years.
The Red and Black Bloc, the club’s active supporter group, were almost as entertaining to watch as the game itself. They delivered something to Australian sport that fans simply weren’t used to and hadn’t seen before, and it helped provide an unrivalled atmosphere at A-League matches.
Here at the Weekender, we even published a Wanderers magazine for a time.
It was simply impossible to ignore the huge wave of support and despite my passion for rugby league, I was starting to believe these fans who were belting my inbox with emails about why football was on the rise and rugby league was on the decline.
“A few years,” one persistent emailer said, “and you’ll see. You’ll understand this was an unstoppable force that killed off all before it.”
No idea where that bloke is now.
He was so passionate that he may well have been one of the 5,000 who went to CommBank Stadium on Sunday night, watching other matches via his Paramount+ subscription.
Or like many, he may be long gone.
The fall of the Wanderers, and of football more broadly, is one of the more sadder Australian sporting tales.
With so much popularity at the grassroots level in terms of participation, we should indeed have a flourishing senior competition in Australia.
Instead we have a B-grade league that, for a whole variety of reasons, has fallen off a cliff since those glory days of a decade or so ago.
There is plenty of blame to be shared, no doubt.
Wanderers management has rarely got a coaching decision right since the departure of inaugural coach Tony Popovic in 2017.
The Wanderers have had eight coaches since then. Eight coaches in nine years.
The sacking of Alen Stajcic last week was not a surprise to anyone because this has been the modus operandi of the Wanderers for almost a decade.
At some point you have to stop blaming the coaches and figure out how much deeper the problem is.
But the coaching woes at the Wanderers are simply reflective of the competition itself.
Wayward, uncertain and lost.
For the A-League to have any hope of returning to the boom times, it must find itself a legitimate TV deal that is not with a B-grade streaming platform.
It needs to somehow find its way back to Foxtel and Kayo via DAZN, potentially with a free-to-air partner thrown in, to get back the casual fans who have been lost over the years.
To be honest, the changing nature of the TV landscape means Foxtel probably needs the A-League as much as the other way around. It would be a sensible and fruitful marriage.
It’s also clear better media and community engagement is needed.
The A-League failed to capitalise on its success a decade ago. It failed to build long-term relationships with key media partners, and had little knowledge of what to do with its success.
There is so little marketing about the A-League and from the clubs themselves that you’d struggle to know the competition was even underway.
Given it starts in October with fierce competition from the end of the NRL season, Bathurst and the spring racing carnival, it needs to buy itself some air time.
There are other issues.
Spooked by the sometimes negative media coverage, management of the A-League all but killed off so much of the active support that had been part of the competition’s rise.
I too was critical of some of the behaviour displayed by active support groups, but there needed to be a better meeting in the middle than what was thrown at fans.
And then there was some of the bizarre expansion decisions.
The call to implement a third Sydney team in the shape of Macarthur FC diluted too much of the limited space available in the Sydney market.
If the AFL struggles to maintain two Sydney clubs, and rugby league has dealt with the issue of having too many Sydney clubs for some time, you don’t go and whack a third Sydney team in when you’re already struggling.
Fixing the A-League, and the Wanderers, is a mammoth job. The competition is not dead, but it’s been on life support for too long.
It needs one hell of a surgeon to save it.
A top to bottom clean-out is needed, and a full review of how the competition is structured and marketed.
As for the Wanderers, standing still and going backwards are the only two modes the club knows. It needs someone to find the accelerator and drive the club into the future.
Troy Dodds is Parra News' Managing Editor and Breaking News Reporter. He has more than 20 years experience as a journalist, working with some of Australia’s leading media organisations. In 2023, he was named Editor of the Year at the Mumbrella Publish Awards.