Micsoda második félidő! A kis Melbourne 2:0-ról áll fel, de ugyanúgy, mint májusban, hármat szerezve a nagy Melbourne győzedelmeskedik. Ismét gól szerzett Berisha és Barbarouses, továbbá Ben Khalfallah.
A message from the FIFA President Monday, 20 August 2007
Dear friends,
It is a great pleasure for me to greet you all on this very special occasion – the inaugural league match of the newly-formed Wellington Phoenix, the sole New Zealand representative in the Hyundai A-League!
It will truly be a historic night for everyone on hand as they will witness the birth of a new tradition. A tradition, one can safely say, that without a doubt would not have been possible without the generous support the dynamic Terry Serepisos, whose savvy decision to bring in FIFA World Cup veteran and current New Zealand head coach Ricki Herbert will no doubt pay dividends on the pitch.
I am happy about this development in Wellington because as you know, sport – and especially soccer – has the unique ability to use its unifying power as a platform to combat social ills and act as a universal “school of life”. It brings people together regardless of any differences of background, teaches us many important lessons and helps to promote the positive values associated with the game – sportsmanship, friendship, hope, emotion, solidarity and more. This is the true power of soccer, the embodiment of the spirit of Fair Play and the foundation of FIFA’s mission to “develop the Game, touch the world and build a better future”.
Thus, it is professional clubs such as the Wellington Phoenix – their players, coaches and supporters – that truly breathe life into the national character of the beautiful game in any given country. But it is far more than just structure, organisation and administration – it is built on the passion, effort and labour of every single person involved, from volunteers to marketing sponsors, team administration to fantastic supporter groups such as the Phoenix’s “Yellow Fever”.
Although I am unable to join you personally at this match, on behalf of FIFA and the entire worldwide soccer community, I would like to extend my very best regards to everyone in the stadium tonight – indeed to all fans of the beautiful game in New Zealand – and wish the Wellington Phoenix the best of luck in their inaugural season.
Have an enjoyable evening full of all the thrills, skills, emotion and excitement that only soccer can provide!
18 játékos már megvan. Köztük pl a barzil Daniel Cortez aki 2oo3 a Vidiben is játszott :)))))))))
Ricki Herbert aki egyben az All Whites kapitánya lehet összeránt egy jó szezont... NZ barátságos meccsen kb C válogatottal egy hete 2-2 játszott idegenben a Bellamis, Giggses Walesiekkel :O
Phoenix akár a top 5 ben is lehet idén, megalakulásának évében
A Wellington Phoenix, Ricki Herbert (aki egyben az All Whites kapitnya is) eddig 17 jatekost szedett ossze joreszt hazaik, meg egy ket Brazil csatar :O
Ferenc Szusza died the other day, aged 84. Not many of today’s generation would have heard of him but by all accounts he was an awesome player, one of the greatest in Hungarian and world football.
I never saw him play but older Hungarian friends tell me he was something special: a tall centre-forward with glorious technique, packing a powerful shot with either foot and on his day better than Puskás, Hidegkúti or Kocsis (the front-three that kept Szusza out of the Magyar ‘golden team’ of the 1950s). He was a prolific scorer with the overhead bicycle kick and affectionate fans even have him mastering the bent free kick long before the Brazilians started exporting the ‘dry leaf’.
He scored 18 goals for Hungary in just 24 appearances, an exceptional strike rate even in football’s most attacking tactical era.
What makes this pertinent now, and makes Szusza’s death crudely timed, is that it reminds one of where Hungarian football once was and where it now isn’t. A couple of weeks ago, while I was in Budapest visiting the land of my childhood, Ujpest – Szusza’s former club – copped a 4-0 hiding at home from Vaduz, a tiny club team from amateur Liechtenstein, in a UEFA Cup qualifier.
The television commentator was driven to remark: ‘Well, we have lived long enough to even see this’. The very sight of it surely hastened Szusza’s death.
The shame that now masquerades as football in Hungary will depress even those foreign to this once envied football country. If you thought Australian football governance in the pre-Crawford era was as bad as it gets, think again. This is worse.
Which makes one seriously suggest that a Crawford-style shake-up is the only thing left that might revive the game in Hungary.
The twice World Cup runner-up is ranked 84th in the world. It has not qualified for the World Cup since 1982 and, barring some miracle, is unlikely to do so again, given its low pedigree which has it seeded in the qualifying draw on par with Moldova and Kazakhstan.
The season opening Supercup match between league champion Debrecen and Cup winner Szekesfehérvár drew 2000 fans. An editorial piece in the national sports daily, Nemzeti Sport, sighed: ‘Hungarian football now only exists in mementoes and on film’.
What makes it worse for Hungarians is that these are not symptoms of some regional malady where the small countries of the former communist bloc, where football had been long supported by the state under their dictatorships, might all be in a similar plight.
The Czech Republic remains one of the world’s elite football nations. Poland, Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia and Ukraine all qualified for the World Cup. They all produce quality players for export while the Hungarian conveyor belt, once the producer of some of the world’s best talent, sits idle, covered in rust and abandoned.
Neither is it the case that Hungary as a sporting nation in general has lost its way. It continues to excel in many other sports and, for its mere 10 million population, remains ninth on the all time Olympic medal list.
I had dinner in Budapest with some old friends, among them former Australia coach Frank Arok, repatriated former Sydney football writer Peter Scott and long time St George-Budapest president Les Bordacs.
Scott is now a sports agent, doing well, managing from his Budapest headquarters mostly women basketball players. He wouldn’t touch footballers with a barge pole.
Arok, who lives in Novi Sad in neighbouring Serbia, not long ago knocked back an offer to direct an elite Hungarian youth academy bankrolled by one of the country’s richest men. More’s the pity. The country could use his talent.
Bordacs, who too returned permanently to the land of his birth some years ago, remarked: ‘If you told me even ten years ago that Australian domestic football matches would attract eight or ten times more than that which go to games in Hungary I would have laughed you out of the room’.
That is how much times have changed.
There are many theories on what reasons lie behind the dark and steep demise of Hungarian football, corruption being the most plausible and probably the principle.
According to Hungarian chroniclers, who wrote books on the subject, the 1980s was the decade of sleaze, which led to it all, when match fixing was so ripe it was considered the norm, to a degree where players punched out team-mates who declined to go along.
In the era of ‘goulash communism’, when money sloshed about un-policed and grew like weed, generous cash given by the state to football was stolen as club officials and even those of the game’s governing body manoeuvred to attain and keep positions in order to fatten wallets. The broad interests of football sat on the back burner.
When regime change came and things had to become more transparent, match-fixing became less acceptable and fashionable but the culture of theft remained. Even today the Hungarian government gives more money to football in comparative terms than the $15 million Frank Lowy squeezed out of the Australian government in the advent of Crawford.
Yet the cash disappears, down a mysterious black hole as Hungarian football continues to lurch backward in international humiliation. The game’s credibility has hit zero and there are now more fans attending basketball, handball and kayaking in Hungary than there are those who occasionally mosey up to a football match on the off-chance that there is nothing better going on.
This in the country, which was once a global power in football and produced Puskás.
What makes all this interesting to an Australian reader is that there may be a way out of this mess for the Hungarians: the Australian way, or precisely the Crawford-Lowy-O’Neill way.
In other words it’s time for the government to step in, as the Howard government did when it launched the Crawford Inquiry. The Hungarian government did step in a few years ago but it was badly bungled. The then sports minister, the youthful Dr Tamás Deutsch, tried to bully the Hungarian FA into some changes only to earn the wrath of FIFA which doesn’t take kindly to political interference. Deutsch backed off.
What the government should do is what the Howard government did: set up an independent inquiry whose findings will determine whether the government continues to subsidise the sport or not.
The Howard government did not compel the old Soccer Australia board to resign. They did that themselves under enormous public pressure brought by the Crawford recommendations, which included that a man as respected as Lowy should take over the game’s governance.
Governments generally tend to do only things that there are votes in and that is where Howard got smart when agreeing to an inquiry into football. During the World Cup euphoria the Prime Minister must have been grinning from ear to ear, and rightly so because, like him or not, his government did play a role in what led to that euphoria by triggering the Crawford Inquiry.
That is the lesson for the Hungarians. And they can start their much needed football revolution by sending a study group to Australia to find out how it was done. After all, football in Australia pre-Crawford was also in a hopeless mess from which there seemed to be no way out.
There is one small pocket in Hungarian football that is doing something right. The Sándor Károly Football Academy, a private concern, is drawing accolades from international observers for the job it is doing with the cream of the country’s young talent.
Backed by the MTK club, the academy is on a country estate where 44 high-school age footballers reside full time, combining their football development with their schooling and are being fashioned for careers with the richer western European clubs.
This is the academy for which Frank Arok was once courted.
(Visit http://hvg.hu/english/20060704footballeng.aspx for more on the academy.)
The project is the brainchild of Gábor Várszegi, one of Hungary’s richest businessmen and the former owner of MTK. More recently Várszegi, or rather his lucrative retail chain, was the owner of Ferencváros, Hungary’s most popular club, but quit after being showered by anti-semitic insults when the club lost a key match in the 2002-03 season.
Now Ferencváros, broke and buried in debt, has been banished to the second division, for the first time in its history, after the FA found it did not have the financial resources to run a team in the top division.
Perhaps Gábor Várszegi is the man to do for Hungary what Frank Lowy did for Australia. That’s if the Hungarian government has the gumption to install him.
Nagy nehezen kitudja hany het vacakolas utan, egy wellingtoni gorog miliomos kikohogott 1.1 mil dollart es igy kb 5 evig varhatoan lesz FC Wellinton az Ausztral Hunday A ligaban.
a nevrol most szavaztatjak a nepet :) Centurion, Phonix, Thunder, Wasp
a 2007-8 szezon masodik feletol fog jatszani kb 8 meccset otthon zsinorban (addig idegenbe)
The A-League has been rated the 18th largest football league in the world and its success has been there for everyone to see.
Various Australian rugby league officials have already publicly expressed their concerns that the A-League could be the next big thing in Australian sport.
Ja nagy mecs lesz ha kikap a Sydney akkor vege es a Queensland megy a dontokbe, viszont ha nyer akkor minden ok... Sajnos nem tudom nezni a mecset amugy se de holnap meg utazzom igy halgatni se tudom.
Sajnos Pekingben elek most es nem sok meccset lattam. Viszont a Central Coast-on tegnap voltak a legtobben eddigi torteneteben ami nagyon. Viszont sajnalnam ha Sydney nem jut be mert az fontos lenne.
Ilyen lendulete nem volt meg a futballnak AU-ban ez nagyban koszonheto a VB szereplesnek. Te NZ-en vagy? Ha igen ott van hatasa a Knights-nak?
En nezem! Ausztral-Magyar vagyok, es sokat tanulhatnank az Ausztraloktol. Amugy az Ausztral FFA (LSZ) igazgatoja a masodik legazdagab Ausztral aki Magyar szarmazasu (felvideki). Ott is valsagban volt a futball hosszu evekig, mert ott csak 4. rangu sportnak szamitott es nagyon elvolt nyomva. Na enyyit a haterrol. Tobb mint 50 Ausztral jatszik Europaban elso osztalyban, Angliaban van jo par, pl. Cahill-Everton, Kewell-Liverpool, Schwarzer Middlesb. Neil-Blackburn, es meg rengeteg mas.
Az A-League-ben jatszik a Dwight Yorke Sydney-ben, es az Archie Thompson-t a Melburne Victory jatekosat most vittek el a PSV-Eindhovenbe.