Here She Goes Again
3.30am, A Cup of Tea and the Same Old Feeling
I woke up grumpy.
That usually means something is bothering me.
I have a habit.
Cup of tea.
Check if there are any games on somewhere in the world.
I am up between 3 and 4 most mornings. Habits are hard to break.
Football never really sleeps. Somewhere, someone is playing.
Then I read the Mercury.
And I get grumpier.
Department of State Growth scrapped.
New entity.
Major infrastructure.
Economic priorities.
And sitting underneath it all, obvious without being shouted, is the AFL stadium.
Again.
It isn’t the headline itself.
It is the feeling underneath it.
Sometimes it is hard to shake off being ignored.
The Season Starts. We Promote Ourselves. Again.
The NPL season starts this weekend.
Football Tasmania is promoting it.
Clubs are posting graphics.
Volunteers are preparing home grounds.
Team managers are getting kits ready.
Because if we do not promote ourselves, it is like we do not exist.
Licence fees.
Registrations.
Nomination fees.
Referee fees.
Football largely funds its own visibility.
If Football Tasmania did not push the NPL this week, would it be mentioned anywhere else?
In the South at least, probably not.
We are big in participation.
But small in narrative.
Unless we build the microphone ourselves.
“Here She Goes Again”
Here she goes again.
Whining.
Complaining.
Banging the drum for football.
I can almost hear it.
This is not about attacking AFL.
It never has been.
It is about priority.
It is about narrative.
It is about who is central when governments reshape themselves and who sits at the edge of the conversation.
AFL has one code.
One pathway story.
One centralised brand.
One clear political lever.
Football has hundreds of clubs.
Multiple competitions.
Thousands of volunteers.
Regional differences.
Layers of governance.
We have scale.
But we do not have a single, unified microphone.
So we keep promoting ourselves.
Funding ourselves.
Advocating for ourselves.
And when we stop, the silence is noticeable.
Twenty Years of Quiet Work
Over the past two decades I have been involved football in Tasmania has grown.
Women’s participation has surged.
Junior competitions have expanded.
Coaching standards have lifted.
Club licensing has tightened governance.
National competitions have been hosted from suburban grounds.
Local matches are live streamed across the country.
Most of it volunteer driven.
Much of it under-resourced.
All of it hard earned.
For those of us who have been inside it for twenty years or more, you feel the weight of that effort.
The meetings.
The compliance.
The grant applications.
The facility battles.
The endless advocacy.
You know the scale of what is being run every weekend.
And yet when government departments are reshaped and major priorities are announced, football rarely feels central to the story.
Not attacked.
Just peripheral.
There is a difference.
But invisibility is still invisibility.
The Pattern
The pattern is what sits heavy at 3.30am.
Every reshuffle.
Every infrastructure announcement.
Every grand economic vision.
Football feels slightly outside the tent.
Not because it lacks participation.
Not because it lacks global reach.
Not because it lacks community impact.
But because it lacks political centrality.
That is structural.
And structural things do not change by accident.
The Question We Don’t Ask
Invisibility might be football’s realm.
But fuck me, should we put up with it?
At what point does quiet competence stop being enough?
At what point does the largest participation sport in the state stop acting grateful for scraps of attention?
We are good at surviving.
We are good at running competitions.
We are good at complying.
We are less coordinated at demanding narrative space.
Maybe that is the real work ahead.
Not louder anger.
Clearer unity.
Because if we do not shape our own story, we should not be surprised when someone else writes it without us.
And that is probably what was bothering me before the sun came up.