Why A-League fans should boo Tim Cahill
On Saturday night, Sydney FC and Melbourne City played the best game of the A-League season so far.
Sydney had the run of play before City scored a great goal through Fernando Brandan (or the Rat King, if you prefer), before Sydney equalised late through a Bobo penalty.
By that stage the Brazilian should have been sent off for a shocking challenge on Ivan Franjic, and Sky Blues midfielder Josh Brillante had actually seen his marching orders for standing on Neil Kilkenny’s achilles.
Add to this the furore created by Brandan’s theatrics, a disallowed goal, Matt Simon’s junkyard dog-esque antics and it was a classic A-League encounter.
All this made it all the more frustrating when the narrative shifted — as it so often has this season — to Tim Cahill.
The Socceroos legend played six minutes off the bench towards the end of the match, and found himself the subject of booing from the Sydney faithful when he came on and every time he touched the ball.
Predictably this led to people crying tall poppy syndrome and calls to stop the booing — Seb Hassett at SBS’s The World Game implored people to ‘say what they want’ about Our Timmy, but begged us to ‘never boo him’, while Cahill himself weighed in on the subject the morning after:
Frankly, that tweet alone is reason enough to boo the bloke — suggesting that some light-hearted booing at sporting events will traumatise children is not only risible but also unbearably self-righteous and arguably disingenuous — it’s like Helen Lovejoy screaming “won’t somebody think of the children?”.
Regardless, it should come as no surprise to anyone that’s ever observed any sport in Australia that Cahill would get booed.
Granted, the guy is a legendary Socceroo, but he’s also fanatically obsessed with his own image and legacy — traits which rub Aussie fans up the wrong way in a society that prides itself on iconoclasm.
Opposition fans also remember the way Cahill played the league off against itself over the last four or five years, when he openly courted a move back home but trashed the league’s “vision” and inability to secure big-name players.
The FFA managed to allay Cahill’s concerns by bringing in a new rule whereby clubs could use money from a central slush fund — paid into by the governing body itself — to secure big name marquees, and Melbourne City used a combination of that and its own super-charged funds courtesy of Abu Dhabi to dump a load of petro-Dirhams at his feet.
To the average A-League fan — so used to watching Nigel Boogaard, Andrew Durante and Blake Powell pass sideways and fall over their own feet — it was galling that the FFA would help bring him to the richest club in the league.
So it shouldn’t be a shock to hear the boos rain down when Cahill suits up, and frankly journos and administrators should be thrilled to hear them.
If Aussie football fans are wholeheartedly booing Tim Cahill, a man who has brought them untold happiness over the last decade, it means that finally passions are running high in the A-League.
The jeers and catcalls should be music to the ears of the gatekeepers of a competition that has struggled to capture public attention, and means that (in a roundabout way) the money spent on bringing Cahill here is working.
You want visibility for your league? He’s brought that, even if it has largely come in the form of hand-wringing think pieces about why booing him is morally indefensible (and one unfathomably incredible goal in the first Melbourne derby).
It’s also good for the narrative and history of the competition to have a lightning rod for fan’s ire, it entrenches rivalries and provides for memorable encounters.
Melbourne City fans should also revel in the booing; the anger directed at them is a byproduct of the team finally becoming relevant in the competition and should be a pleasing replacement for the sense of pity that was the overriding emotion towards the club previously.
Rather than being discouraged from booing Tim Cahill, A-League fans should feel emboldened to jeer at him as much as they want.
At 36 Our Timmy should be big enough and ugly enough to deal with the opprobrium directed at him — he did play for Millwall and in Merseyside derbies after all.
Even though he might be thin-skinned enough to let it get to him, this has none of the ugly racist undertones of the lamentable Adam Goodes saga, nor is it damaging the confidence of a fragile young player.
So boo Tim Cahill to your heart’s content.
Boo him because he takes himself too seriously, boo him because he has the most boring fucking Instagram game imaginable, boo him because you hate Melbourne City, boo him because you know he’s going to score against your team and you deep down wish he played for them.
But don’t listen to anyone who says it’s a moral imperative not to have a crack at him.
