Time to kill off Gold Coast

The record for the A-League’s lowest ever attendance, on either side of the Tasman, should easily be broken.

Especially so since the 2037 fans who turned up for last weekend’s game at the same venue were subjected to a spectacle as riveting as an Andy Warhol conceptual film from 1964.

My friend, the Brisbane-based football writer Mike Tuckerman, marvellously described the atmosphere in the stands as so remorselessly dull even “the players appeared to be stuck in a permanent state of catatonia”.

The problems of the Gold Coast franchise have been well documented in this column: the jerseys, the owner, the Where’s Wally striker, the lack of community engagement, the crowd-capping, the staggering amount of BS that accompanied its debut and the failure to even remotely live up to it.

We can all talk till we’re blue in the face about what’s wrong with football on the Glitter Strip; the real question is what Football Federation Australia is going to do about it.

In my view the club was doomed from the start: it has never been anything but a monument to Clive Palmer’s ego and vanity.

What it needed to be to survive was a football team owned in the hearts of the people of the Gold Coast. The reality is they couldn’t care less and never will.

FFA was quick to destroy New Zealand Knights when it was clear it was in terminal decline.

It should do the same with Gold Coast and could do a lot worse than start wooing Canberra, an entertainment-starved town that got 5139 people to a midweek match between Perth Glory and Central Coast Mariners in September last year.

That was considered unsatisfactory by FFA, which put the kibosh on the fledgling Canberra A-League bid.

Yet there were 3102 more people than went through the turnstiles at Robina on Saturday – and for a game that didn’t even involve a local team. On reflection, it was a bloody good turnout.

The A-League is fast running out of viable options. It needs friends more than ever.

Newcastle could fold, Sydney Rovers will probably never see the light of day, Adelaide and North Queensland are being kept on life support and the rest are struggling enough as it is.

I’ll make some predictions here and say next season will go back to a 10-team competition, with Sydney FC, Melbourne Victory, Melbourne Heart, Perth Glory, Adelaide United, Central Coast Mariners, Wellington Phoenix and Brisbane Roar all in for another season, and Newcastle Jets and North Queensland Fury being propped up one last time.

Gold Coast will be cut and Rovers won’t ever happen. The very good chance we will miss out on hosting the 2022 World Cup (and the possible exit stage right of Frank Lowy and Ben Buckley should we fail) should hasten the work of FFA’s austerity police.

A period of readjustment won’t hurt the A-League. FFA needs to take stock of where it’s going, who’s running the show and how things can be done better.

Only when all those issues are addressed with real conviction, vigour, courage and some attendant humility should expansion become a priority again.

A 12-team competition in 2012 is realistic. A 12-team competition in 2011 is wilful suicide. If FFA wants to kill the game off, it will press on regardless. I’m hoping common sense prevails over obduracy.

Downsizing isn’t an admission of failure. It’s recognition that not everything works even with the best intentions.

The way Wellington Phoenix revived football in New Zealand after the immolation of the Knights should be an inspiration to everyone at FFA and provide encouragement that a bit of judicious football euthanasia can help rather than hamper the “product”.

The A-League can survive. But only a bit of spring pruning is going to save it.