It has not been a good Asian Cup for football fans in Western Australia, apart from being completely ignored in terms of participation in the tournament on any level, many fans sat down on Friday evening to watch the opening game, Australia v Kuwait on the ABC, only to find that the game was being shown two hours after kick off. This is in spite of the fact that the ABC had been running advertisements stating that they were showing all of Australia’s games live.
As one irate fan wrote on social media why have the FFA not ensured that the games are indeed shown Live across the country? Surely if you enter a broadcast agreement with a media outlet you make sure that despite a major world event that all games are shown live?
There have been many fans who have been upset that Perth was not one of the host cities, claiming that NIB Stadium is without doubt one of the best venues in the country following the refurbishment.
The problem is once again the job was not done properly. The Western Australian government invested $95million to create a wonderful venue for watching sport. The two new stands are just what the ground and fans needed. However they did not allocate any funds to upgrade the referees or away changing rooms to meet the standards required to host international football matches.
A call to Venueswest, the Government department now running the stadium confirmed that the away changing room still only had one wash basin, one urinal, one toilet and two showers. Well below what is required to host international sporting teams.
Perth’s sporting fans can moan about the Government not investing in bringing the Socceroos or the Matildas to Perth, or even the likes of Manchester United, Real Madrid and Juventus, and that is a another debate as to whether tax payer money should be spent on such ventures. The question is why did the Government not invest it upgrading the changing rooms so that we actually had a stadium that met the required criteria? Who was overseeing this investment? Why were they not aware of the International standards and why did they not make sure that ground refurbishment met all of those requirements?
Let us hope they get such issues right in the new multimillion dollar all purpose stadium which is supposedly going to keep all sports happy!
