UPON entering EnergyAustralia Stadium several hours before kick-off for the recent A-League season-opener between Newcastle Jets and Central Coast Mariners, my first thoughts were not for a cold drink or a hot pie, but for the grass. It was disappointing, but I've seen worse.
Patchy and bumpy in some places, discoloured where the advertising logos had been painted over. In the six-yard box - the area right in front of the goals - were two small squares of new turf, where the rugby league posts had been replaced.
Over the previous month, NRL games had been played at the stadium. It's been a similar story in recent weeks at Suncorp Stadium, Sydney Football Stadium, Wellington's Westpac Stadium and Members Equity Stadium in Perth. All A-League venues, but all shared heavily by the rugby codes.
And no matter how much the spin doctors insist multi-use venues are viable, there is no getting around the one inalienable truth - 120-kilogram aluminium-sprigged rugby league forwards are the sporting equivalent of letting an elephant loose in your backyard.
Ever since football became semi-professional in 1977, and fully-professional since the advent of the A-League, the game has had to deal with the repercussions of having a herd of elephants tromping through its backyard. In both codes of rugby, the pitch is something you land on. In football, it is what you play on. I've lost count of the number of times big football matches have been ruined, as a spectacle, by the state of the surface.
The best solution, of course, is for football to have its own stadiums. But in this country that seems to be an impossible dream.
Only once have politicians put proper money into bricks and mortar for football. Hindmarsh Stadium in Adelaide remains the only ground in the country built with football in mind. The stadium was upgraded for the 2000 Olympic Games, one of seven venues to be used for the football tournament.
Ultimately, football attracted well over a million paying spectators, making it the second-most popular sport at those Olympics behind track and field in terms of gate receipts.
But what did the game get in return for providing the windfall? A 15,000-seat Hindmarsh Stadium, and that's all.
In a classic, sadly predictable, scenario, the infrastructure program for the football tournament was hijacked by other sports, and at the time football's own administration was too weak to do anything about it. The other venues chosen - the Gabba, Bruce Stadium, the MCG and the SFS - all enjoyed millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded improvements, but to the benefit of the rugby codes and the AFL. Football was left scraps.
Finally, though, the worm is starting to turn. Football's bid to host the 2018 World Cup has shifted the balance of power in stadium usage dramatically. While football is unlikely to ever own its own stadiums, it can start to control some of them.
That means being treated, at worst, as a joint tenant with the other codes, which means getting the same rights and privileges. Most important among them, a playing surface fit for football.
For ground staff inculcated in the rugby codes or AFL, it will come as a rude shock. But in this new sporting landscape, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
The Federal Government has made it crystal clear that for the short to medium term its largesse will be focused on those stadiums that are potential World Cup venues. We saw that with the recent announcement of an upgrade for EnergyAustralia Stadium, and we saw it again last week in Wollongong, where NSW Premier Morris Iemma has linked funding for a new grandstand to the city getting an A-League team, and possibly World Cup games in the future.
Sports that share these venues will have to accept the new reality. This time, football's administration is tough enough, smart enough, and determined enough to make sure it uses the whip hand.