Sunday, December 20, 2009

Melbourne 0 v Sydney 0: the psychology of booing your own team

A lot happened in this game but a few things stood out.

The match had been promoted as attracting a 32,000 plus crowd. More than all the games last week put together. Melbourne is the strength of the A-League (which it is)... and the glory days are still here. Once again the A-League promoters over-stretched and let themselves down. 27,000 turned up. Great crowd.

Both teams played good technical football. And therefore cancelled each other out. Maybe that isn't as exciting as teams going for it and taking chances.

The assistants did not err on the side of the attacker for offside. And made at least one error - goal scoring opportunity, for each side.

At the end booing was audible on the TV. So why boo? Passionate fans project themselves onto their team when they are winning. And they feel very good about themselves. It was me, I was the 12th man, I got them to play like this. But when the team regularly doesn't perform - in this case Melbourne has rarely won at home this year - some fans - the very passionate ones and some thugs - self defence mechanism kicks in. To distance themselves from the team and/or club they boo. It was them not me.

I thought Melbourne could have done with Ney Fab's hustle and bustle. Something different to the technically good.

2 comments:

Neil said...

I think you'll find that the crowd was booing Sydney and not their own team. As for the crowd I thought there was more than the 27,000 stated.

john said...

Thanks Neil
That's OK then.
You couldn't tell that on the telly.