The Twilight Zone

There is a strange period in Tasmanian football that arrives about now every year.

I think of it as the twilight zone.

The NPL league season is over, earlier than usual this year because we only had 18 rounds. The WSL is still going, which in itself feels slightly strange, and the NPL finals are continuing, which means the league is finished but the season apparently isn't.

And then we wait.

We wait to hear what next season will look like. We wait for decisions. We wait for announcements from the chosen ones. Players wonder what 2027 will look like and clubs begin trying to plan for a season that still feels a little hazy.

Where does one season actually end?

Football has always had an off-season, of course, but these days I am not entirely sure where one season ends and the next one begins.

Pre-season becomes season. Season becomes finals. Finals become off-season. Recruitment starts before the season has finished and planning for the following year seems to begin somewhere around the middle of the current one.

After more than 20 years at South Hobart, it all starts to blur.

Golly.

I met Ken in 2007.

In 2008 he took over as Head Coach at South Hobart and that year became the beginning of an extraordinary period for the club.

My memory, as usual, had us winning absolutely everything in 2008.

Almost.

South won the Southern Premiership, State Championship, Statewide Cup and Steve Hudson Cup. The Summer Cup was the one that escaped us.

It was 2010 and 2011 when South really did win all five trophies available.

Those were extraordinary years.

And perhaps that is why I find myself looking at football now and wondering how, after all the talk about growth and pathways and development, we have somehow ended up with less football rather than more.

Go figure.

League champions. Now we wait.

The NPL league season has finished in August.

August.

And because South Hobart won the league, we have qualified for the Australian Championship.

Wonderful.

Except the Championship does not start until October.

So now we sit in a holding pattern.

Train. Wait. Try to stay sharp. Try to keep players engaged. Try to prepare for meaningful football without actually playing much meaningful football.

It immediately makes me think of the A-League and what has often felt like the longest off-season in world football.

And then we wonder how Australian football is supposed to compete.

How can we?

We simply do not play enough football.

That has bothered me for years.

Round 30

Last year, when South won the league and qualified for the Australian Championship, I signed up to the newsletters of some of the clubs we might play.

I wanted to know who they were, what they were doing and what sort of football environment we were walking into.

A couple of days ago one arrived from Marconi.

ROUND 30.

I stared at it.

Round thirty.

Marconi were advertising their Round 30 match against NWS Spirit at the end of August.

Round thirty.

Here we are in Tasmania with our league finished after 18 rounds, sitting in a holding pattern waiting for the Australian Championship to begin in October, while a club we may have to compete against is preparing for its thirtieth league game.

That is 12 more league matches than we play.

Or, put another way, 67 per cent more competitive league football.

If we assume 90-minute matches, their 30-round league gives them about 45 hours of competitive match football.

Our 18 rounds give us 27 hours.

That is 18 extra hours of competitive football before we even begin talking about cup matches, finals, training or anything else.

How the hell are we expected to beat Marconi?

Seriously.

This isn't about making excuses before a ball is kicked.

It is about asking how we expect Tasmanian players to compete with players who are simply playing so much more football.

They are playing.

We are training.

They are playing.

We are waiting.

And then in October we are supposed to meet on equal terms.

Go figure.

It isn't just the top of the pathway

The same problem exists much further down.

I have worked hard to create more football, more tournaments, more opportunities and more reasons for children to get onto a pitch and play.

Sometimes I look at where we are and wonder whether I have failed.

Yes, we have the Hobart Cup.

That gives thousands of children a wonderful weekend of football and I am enormously proud of what it has become.

But step back and look at the normal season from a junior or youth player's perspective.

Sixteen rounds.

That is sixteen games.

Sixteen.

For an entire football season.

Golly.

And sometimes they don't even get sixteen.

The mornings I hate

That is the bit that really gets me.

There are winter mornings when I sit in front of my computer, watching the rain, looking at forecasts, checking grounds and eventually making the call that a round of junior football has to be washed out.

Heartbreak.

With one decision, thousands of kids don't play football that weekend.

Of course it isn't really me making the decision. Mother Nature has a fairly significant say in it. Grounds become unsafe, weather becomes ridiculous and sometimes there simply isn't another responsible choice.

But I am still the person who presses the button.

And I hate it.

Because it completely contradicts everything I believe about football.

I spend so much of my time trying to create more opportunities for kids to play and then, on one miserable Saturday morning, I am the person telling them they can't.

Totally shit, to be fair.

And worse still, in a sixteen-round season you don't have much room to lose football.

Lose one round and you are down to fifteen games.

Lose two and it is fourteen.

Think about that.

A child can train for months, register for an entire winter season and finish having played fourteen competition games.

Then we wonder why I keep banging on about more football.

Players get better by playing

It isn't complicated.

If we want better footballers, they need to play.

If we want children to fall in love with the game, they need to play.

If we want them to stay in the game, they need to play.

We talk endlessly about player development.

We talk about pathways.

We talk about producing technically better players.

We talk about competing nationally and internationally.

But players become better footballers by playing football.

Not by talking about football.

Not by producing another document about football.

Not by sitting in a holding pattern waiting for October.

By playing.

Sixteen games was never very many.

Fourteen certainly isn't enough.

And thirty makes sixteen look rather silly.

Meanwhile, the season is still going

And this is where it gets even stranger.

The WSL is still playing.

The NPL finals are continuing.

The league is finished, but football isn't finished. Except for the players who are waiting for the next bit of football to begin.

I know there will be perfectly sensible explanations for all of this. There always are.

Competition structures, calendars, player workloads, national requirements, ground availability, school holidays and goodness knows what else.

I understand that running football competitions is complicated.

Very complicated.

But sometimes it is worth looking beyond all the explanations and asking the simplest question.

Are we actually giving people enough football?

Because footballers generally want to play football.

Back in the twilight zone

So here we are.

The NPL league is finished after 18 rounds.

The women are still playing.

The finals are continuing.

South Hobart are league champions and waiting for October.

Marconi are playing Round 30.

Players are wondering about next year.

Administrators are planning for competitions that have not yet been announced.

And the rest of us are waiting for the chosen ones to tell us what 2027 will look like.

The twilight zone.

It happens every year.

But the older I get and the longer I spend around football, the more I come back to one very simple thought.

We need to play more football.

Not less.

And somehow, before we have even worked out what happened to this season, the next one will have started.

A small blogging intermission

There probably won't be much blogging from me over the next week or so.

I am disappearing down the rabbit hole that is the Hobart Cup.

There are too many moving parts, too many teams and too many things that need checking, fixing, moving, confirming or finding.

So if you are tired of my writing, good news.

You get a break.

And if you actually like reading these, apologies.

Bit busy at the moment.

I will emerge eventually.

Hopefully after surviving the inevitable roster feedback.

Somebody will tell me they have too many games.

Somebody else will ask why they don't have more.

I just can't win.