When it comes to inaccurate reporting of football in Australia, I’ve usually engaged my inner Buddha and sailed through the falsehoods and hack journalism in a tranquil state. But the tag team of Rebecca Wilson and Alan Jones are enough to knock even the most enlightened yogi off the stupa.

This week, Wilson revealed details of 198 people supposedly banned from attending A-League matches.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Jones then asked Wilson in a radio interview, “Is this like terrorism in France? The leaders have no guts?”

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In one fell swoop, Jones and Wilson managed to compare A-League fans to terrorists, belittle French authorities dealing with a terrible crisis, and somehow tie support for the A-League in with the troubling events in Europe caused by the conflict in Syria.

In a week when a real journalist – Sarah Ferguson – presented a marvellous, albeit harrowing report on domestic violence against women in Australia, it’s worth remembering that Jones once advocated for our former female prime minister to be thrown into the ocean in a chaff bag.

Both Wilson and Jones are apparatchiks for big media organisations that seem to fear football’s popularity. Wilson draws in crayon for The Daily Telegraph, a News Limited paper, the company that until recently owned the NRL. Jones broadcasts on Macquarie Radio, who have lucrative broadcasting deals with the NRL.

Their anti-football bias, especially Wilson’s, is clearly symptomatic of larger interests, yet it is a mystery as to why there should be a fear or bias in the first place.

Wilson doesn’t like football – not everyone does. But while I’m not a big fan of Olympic dressage, I don’t take potshots at it. Last year, she got stuck into Western Sydney Wanderers fans, especially their active support group the Red and Black Bloc (RBB).

She continued this ill-informed, factually bereft assault just this week, with such lurid quotes as the “savagery of hundreds of A-League fans”. This might have been in response to a highly amusing banner the RBB raised at a Wanderers home game that read, “Rebecca Wilson should worry about RBT not RBB”, a reference to Wilson’s drink-driving conviction. Not the kind of wit you associate with savages.



Ironically, the Wanderers and the RBB remain the best hope for a long-overdue revamp of Parramatta Stadium, including an upgrade and increase in capacity that will not only benefit the Wanderers, but also NRL club the Parramatta Eels.

In fact, with A-League clubs as summer tenants at five other grounds that also host NRL clubs, the increased revenue and use makes expansion and improvements to grounds in Brisbane, Gosford, Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne much more viable. In a way, Wilson’s anti-football rants could damage her beloved rugby league.

In a week where football is still celebrating a decade since the Socceroos’ historic victory over Uruguay and qualification for the 2006 World Cup finals, Wilson and Jones’ attempts to give the sport an ice-bath smack of ignorance and hysteria.

There has been a lot for football to celebrate in the last 10 years. Since the A-League began, attendances have increased by 33 per cent, a growth figure unmatched in any other sport. A crowd of more than 50,000 for a match between Melbourne Victory and Sydney FC in 2007-08 was not only the biggest crowd for a regular-season game, but at the time bigger than all but a couple of English Premier League games.

The A-League grand final has become a showpiece event, as have the league’s two big derbies. In fact the Sydney Derby has sold out the 42,000 capacity Sydney Football Stadium on its last four occasions.

Football is not the number one sport in the country at the elite level, and it doesn’t matter to me if it never becomes number one, but it does not deserve the kind of anti-media that Rebecca Wilson manages to cough up on a regular basis.

She doesn’t like it and is clueless when it comes to the sport, so she would be best advised to ignore it and stick to what she knows.