---- History of the BSSA ----

Cyber Seeds

In January 1999, a Brisbane football fanzine called The Farr Post published an article by a university student called Cameron Atfield. Atfield’s article was written to advertise his new webzine, titled The Delicate Sound of Thunder, which he described as "a place where Strikers fans can come together and network on the internet away from the spectre of officialdom". 

While the website’s primary purpose was initially to post news updates about the Brisbane Strikers, Atfield explained in his article that "the wheels are in motion for a Brisbane Strikers mailing list to enable fans to converse about Andy Harper’s latest hat-trick or the rumoured signing of Ronaldo".

Neither the hat-trick or the signing happened - although fans may still hold hopes over Ronaldo! But the mailing list did happen - and less than a year later it was thriving with the contributions of local football enthusiasts, most of whom barely knew each other. Atfield could not have known it, but his Delicate Sound of Thunder mailing list had laid the foundations for the Brisbane Strikers Supporters’ Association. 

Some of the visitors to Atfield’s mailing list were also visitors to a small drinking establishment on Caxton Street which was keen to attract fans of the Brisbane Strikers to enjoy an ale or two before and after their team’s home fixtures at Lang Park. O’Leary’s Bar and Restaurant, as it began calling itself in late ‘99, was also
to become a centre of football activism during a time of desperate need for Brisbane’s NSL team.

The supporters who gathered there, although still a small group, began walking to the stadium together and working up a repertoire of football chants and songs. They made the majority of what little atmosphere there was back then inside the stadium between goals and near misses, against a backdrop of declining attendances. Someone coined a name for the group - the Banana Army. Separately, however, another small group of supporters had begun congregating in the far southern end of the stadium, away from the "family" types, to make some noise which was most definitely not always of the "Jolly Good Shot, Sir" type. Their language and behaviour was, occasionally, a little on the colourful side. They called themselves, appropriately enough, the Southern Enders, and they were also to soon play a part in the formation of the BSSA.  

Petty concerns

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By mid-1999, the Brisbane Strikers had fallen on what are euphemistically called "hard times". Two years after giving the NSL its proudest moment to date, when 40,000 turned up to watch the Strikers win the 1997 Grand Final over Sydney United, the club was reported to be almost broke. So desperate was the club’s financial situation, and so apparently in disarray was its board, that a recently-arrived millionaire from England, Tony Petty, was voted on to the board when he agreed to part with the $70,000 or so that would cover the club’s affiliation and insurance fees and secure its participation in the 1999/2000 season. Petty apparently believed that this paltry investment (by world football standards) had bought him a majority shareholding in the club - and the power to determine its future.

At first, the supporters perceived Petty to be the saviour of the club. Disappointed with the management that had seen the Strikers take a promising position in 1997 and turn it into what looked like manure by ‘99, they welcomed Petty’s investment and saw his cockney charm and openness as a breath of fresh air and, perhaps,
football authenticity and credibility. Their team, by now composed mostly of bargain-basement local players, began the season surprisingly well and sweetness and light seemed to be the order of the day. 

But by December ‘99 some dark undercurrents were emerging. Petty began bemoaning poor attendances at home games and saying the club could not make ends meet. The media began floating "speculation" that the new owner was thinking of moving the club to Carrara, on the Gold Coast. On the DSOT mailing list, one or two voices were heard wondering whether this could be for real. By mid-December one supporter, only recently-subscribed to the DSOT mailing list, took it upon himself to ring the Strikers office to enquire as to the truth of the Carrara rumours.

To his amazement, he was given Petty’s mobile phone number and encouraged to speak to him directly. When he did so he found himself speaking to a man who, ironically, had just driven away from the Strikers’ Perry Park office and was heading down the Pacific Highway to the Gold Coast. Petty told the supporter he was deadly
serious about moving the club to Carrara and insisted he was only doing it out of his concern for "the future of the club". When the supporter told him he was associated with the Banana Army and could locate the group on the DSOT website, Petty asked him to sound them out as to whether they would follow him to Carrara.

The supporter did so, and soon the murmurs of concern on the DSOT mailing list became a chorus of disapproval as some of the Brisbane Strikers’ most loyal supporters realised they were facing the removal from Brisbane of their cherished football team. The Banana Army began making its displeasure known with loud
protestations on match days at Lang Park, but there was no immediate change to Petty’s plan. A mood of grim determination set in. The mailing list and O’Leary’s became places where organised opposition to Petty’s Carrara campaign (which was by now actively resisted by other members of his Board), took place. 

Anti-Carrara fliers were produced and handed out to patrons on game days, radio interviews with concerned fans were arranged, Banana Army ‘media releases’ sent out to print, radio and television outlets. More loud protests punctured the otherwise silent air inside Lang Park as the Brisbane Strikers team, unsettled by all the uncertainties, began to unravel on the park. 

Things reached a crescendo for the visit of Marconi one stinking-hot evening in late January, 2000. Many on the DSOT mailing list expected this fixture to be their team’s last in Brisbane, as Petty had informed the media that he was considering moving the club as early as February. The supporters had paid for an advertisement to be placed on the back page of the city’s daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, urging fans to turn up in a show of support to convince Petty to stay put. They had also been successful in capturing the interest of national television broadcaster SBS, which had chosen this week to visit Brisbane and film an "expose" of the troubles
at the Strikers. 

An hour before the game, O’Leary’s was packed with fans preparing to make their "last stand" when Petty, accompanied by his wife, walked in and produced an anti-climax when he announced that the move was off - for the time being. But, he said, if home gates did not improve by the end of the season (four months away) he
would have no choice but to take the club to the Gold Coast in the 2000/2001 season. He invited the fans to contribute ideas to the Strikers’ marketing staff (all two of them) on how to improve attendances at the team’s home games.

Virtual becomes reality

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The DSOT mailing list breathed a collective sigh of relief, and most of those who were on it went back to doing what supporters do everywhere - discussing the merits of players, coaches, supporters’ songs, witticisms and so on. A few hardheads, though, began turning their minds to Petty’s challenge to put more bums on seats, believing that their hard-won victory over Petty’s Carrara ambitions would eventually amount to nothing if more supporters were not found.

It wasn’t long before the limitations of an electronic mailing list for organising a long campaign of concerted action became apparent. Ideas would be posted to the mailing list - then nobody would take them up. Many of the supporters on the mailing list still barely knew each other or how to find each other except on match days. The hardheads realised that better organisation was required. Then, one supporter who had perhaps the hardest head of all, a RAAF officer by the name of John Wainwright, proposed that a meeting be held at Perry Park to create a formal supporters’ organisation. Wainwright was originally from England, and was a Brighton and Hove Albion fan. As such, he was a "veteran" of a bitterly fought supporters’ campaign to prevent cynical and manipulative forces from destroying a football club for their own purposes.

Slowly but surely, Wainwright won other listees over to the concept of starting an independent supporters club around the Brisbane Strikers - a supporters’ club with a formal structure and membership, objectives, and arms and legs with which to achieve them. This was no mean feat in itself for, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, no independent NSL supporters’ club had ever existed in Brisbane before.

A meeting was scheduled to be held at Perry Park on 4 February, 2000 to gauge the level of interest in a supporters’ association. When twenty-six turned up the supporters’ association was declared "a goer", and the BSSA was formed with an interim Chairman/Secretary, a Treasurer, a Liason Officer to talk to the Strikers, and
representatives to talk to the print and electronic media.  

A sense of purpose

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The BSSA’s immediate aim was to keep the Brisbane Strikers in Brisbane by improving their home gates. So, in the weeks and months after its creation it concentrated heavily on feeding promotional ideas to the Brisbane Strikers while beginning a membership drive of its own and conducting a campaign encouraging patrons to petition media outlets for better coverage of the Brisbane Strikers so as to raise awareness of their team. 

Meanwhile, painfully aware that media, and particularly newspaper coverage of the Brisbane Strikers had become both negligible and negative, (and believing that the club’s official match day publication had become rather ordinary) the BSSA began its own publication. It called that publication the "Free Kick", and focused it on
providing news of the Brisbane Strikers and the NSL, handing it out free of charge to patrons on match days. The thinking was that by giving the punters a better knowledge about the events, personalities and circumstances within and surrounding their club, they might encourage better return custom and also encourage membership of the BSSA. The Free Kick endures to this day.

By the end of the season, attendances had not improved but it mattered little because Petty had at that stage relinquished his claim to control of the club in an out-of-court settlement with the other Board members. With the immediate spectre of relocation of the Brisbane Strikers to the Gold Coast now removed, the BSSA held its first AGM, elected a committee and agreed on the following objectives:

- to improve attendances at BS matches

- to improve the atmosphere at BS home matches

- to increase membership of the BSSA; and

- to raise the profile of the Brisbane Strikers and local football.

It continued conducting activities with these aims in mind. Contacts were made with many of Brisbane’s suburban football clubs and the junior associations, an interstate "away trip" to support the team was arranged, a "player of the season" trophy to be voted on by fans on match day at the stadium was organised, a
fundraising committee was set up, and a "home games" sub-committee was established to generate ideas for adding more noise and colour to match days. By the middle of the 2000/2001 season the BSSA had also obtained the co-operation of the football club in establishing a Junior Mascots program under which, at each
home game, a team from a local juniors club formed a guard of honour as the Brisbane Strikers ran on to the pitch and stood with them for the national anthem.

The junior mascots scheme was devised with a twofold aim - to encourage better support for the Strikers through linking them with local clubs, their juniors and families, and to provide the juniors with a memorable experience which might encourage them to pursue careers in the sport, perhaps with the Brisbane Strikers one day. The idea must have appealed, because to this day the BSSA is never short of interest from junior teams. 

2001 - A football oddity

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Throughout the 2000/2001 season the BSSA continued trying to help the Strikers put more bums on seats - with next to no success! Part of the reason for this lack of success might have been the absolutely poisonous environment created by Soccer Australia’s much-touted "reform" process which was underway with the apparent objective of reducing the number of teams in the NSL from 16 to 12. But as if this didn’t create enough bad publicity for the Strikers, there was also the worsening relationship between the club and the Queensland Soccer Federation which was now headed by Tony Petty.

It was the season from hell. While the team played attractive football it struggled to produce winning results, and the climate of cynicism and instability surrounding the club and the game affected everyone - from the players to the most loyal supporters and, most probably, those supporters who might have been more inclined to attend
games if it weren’t for the continual stream of negative stories appearing in the media. It is probably fair to say that, as the season drew to a close, there was more focus on which clubs were in Soccer Australia’s cross-hairs than on what was actually happening on the field of play.

Even though the process to determine the unlucky clubs was supposed to be based on rational and primarily financial criteria, rumours abounded that dirty politics were going to be the real determining factor. The atmosphere surrounding the Brisbane Strikers got worse when they were listed by Soccer Australia as the third
worst club in the NSL on financial grounds (which was simply amazing, considering that some other clubs had recently been in the hands of administrators or were reported to be on death’s door). Meanwhile, relations with the QSF at Perry Park had reached an all-time low.

Things looked grim. In fact, they were grim. On 4 June, 2001 Soccer Australia announced that it had decided to remove the Brisbane Strikers and Canberra Cosmos from the NSL, which meant that they joined Carlton and Eastern Pride (who had failed to complete the season) on the scrap heap. It was then that the Brisbane Strikers had most cause to reflect on the true value of having an independent supporters’ association.

The BSSA called a meeting at Perry Park two days after the fateful announcement, and invited the media. At the meeting, there were suitable displays of outrage, uproar and pandemonium, all recorded by television cameras and radio microphones, over the insult that had just been dealt to Queensland’s NSL team. A plan of action was hatched to fight the expulsion. In the days and weeks ahead, BSSA members worked feverishly to petition Soccer Australia board members and officers, the media, politicians, the football community and the public to demand of Soccer Australia the reinstatement of the Strikers to the NSL.

Whether the actions of the BSSA in leading the charge, or actions from some other quarters, were responsible for what happened next might never be known, but Soccer Australia soon found itself so besieged by email messages, telephone calls and angry faxes that it phoned the Brisbane Strikers to ask them to call off the dogs. The dogs continued to bark defiantly. By informed accounts, the concurrent campaign to reinstate the Cosmos, though being actively fought, was simply swamped by the strength of the reaction from Queensland.  

The Brisbane Strikers’ management were also playing their part very strongly, enlisting the support of the other NSL clubs and arguing their case within the corridors of power vigorously and with integrity on both legal and moral grounds. The players, too, stood their ground, pledging their loyalty to the club at considerable risk to their continued careers and financial livelihoods.

Eventually, Soccer Australia cracked. On 4 July, precisely one month after axing the Strikers and Cosmos, Soccer Australia announced their reinstatement.

2001/02 - confirming the faith

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With their team again having received a reprieve from the men in suits, the members of the BSSA settled in to a program of activities in pursuit of its objectives, but now with perhaps more emphasis on adding to the match day experience for punters. The Free Kick continued and, by season’s end, was becoming a sought-after
publication with the punters rather than something which had to be shoved into their hands. The junior mascots program also continued and was soon booked out for the season. 

A BSSA sub-committee was set up to work with Brisbane Strikers staff on entertainment themes to assist with marketing home games. A well-attended away trip to watch the team play Northern Spirit in Sydney was held, and a program of social events was also conducted, while a network of fans willing to attend games from regional areas outside of Brisbane was begun.

Perhaps most memorable of all, though, was the success in getting a sizeable increase in the number of voices prepared to sing with those members of the BSSA at home games. The number of singing fans began to swell, and soon the atmosphere at Strikers’ home games was being remarked upon by TV commentators as something a little bit special in the NSL. And by April, 2002, those voices and everyone else who attended Ballymore finally had something to sing about. The agonies of the past four seasons were put aside as their
team qualified for the NSL playoffs for the first time since Frank Farina’s team lifted the NSL trophy in 1997.

After the season ended the BSSA held its third AGM. It was now that a changing of the guard took place. John Wainwright resigned from the post of President, after presiding over the birth pangs of the BSSA and leading it through two-and-a-half mainly tempestuous years when few believed that either the Brisbane Strikers or their independent supporters’ association would endure.

The BSSA then set sail into its third year under the Presidency of Jim Christie, who had been a member since the very early days of 2000.

2002/03 - Life wasn’t meant to be easy?

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The BSSA set sail into its third year under the Presidency of Jim Christie, who had been a member since the very early days of 2000. The new President, and most of the membership, were entitled to be optimistic (and were) that the third year might offer opportunities to focus on the football and grow the membership of the Association, because the instability that surrounded the football club had receded into the distance.  However, they were soon to find a few dark clouds blotting out the Brisbane sunshine.

Most fans expected the Strikers to build on the impetus provided by their first finals placing in five years, and produce a team and a season in which they seriously challenged for honours. Good times were felt to be just around the corner. But as had been the case after the runaway success of the 1997 Grand Final, the Strikers gave the appearance of resting on their laurels. As the new season approached, there was no obvious sign that the club was going to enthusiastically chase more on-field success and build support by that method. Instead, the squad was kept much the same, with just a couple of low-key signings to supplement a collection of players reckoned by many to have over-achieved in 2001/02. 

Further, to the dismay of many within the BSSA who looked beyond what happened on game day, and who believed the club should strengthen its off-field operations, the Strikers cut back their administration to the absolute minimum and parted company with major sponsors Parmalat. Rather than planning to go from strength to strength, the club appeared to be bunkering down for a new period of austerity.

The pre-season portents, then, looked bad. Concerned and disenchanted with this, some BSSA members (and, it must be said, other fans) indulged in some stinging criticism of the club’s administration. This led to a sudden chill in the relationship between the football club and its supporters’ association, as the club reacted with anger and resentment. Behind the scenes, Christie and a few of the more active members of the BSSA did what they could to repair the damaged communication lines with the club, and gradually a degree of harmony was restored. This initiative-destroying process, however, was played out over several months while the team began the season with a wretched run of results that drove some supporters away. 

The upshot of the discord and dismal results was that the BSSA found itself with fewer members overall, and with a shrinking core of active volunteers with which to keep its activities going. Getting new activities underway became harder still. Worse still for some, the solid core of game-day enthusiasts who had gathered together to create an atmosphere of vocal support that most NSL clubs would have been proud of, shrunk and eventually splintered due to the combined spoiling factors of the team’s ordinary results and what might be diplomatically called "internal divisions". 

Despite the problems, though, familiar "core" activities such as the Free Kick, Junior Mascots, the Player of the Season vote, and the essential administration of the association, continued (the latter albeit with some difficulty). Three new activities also emerged. Firstly, the BSSA began sponsoring a Player of the Match award for the Brisbane Strikers player judged to have performed the best (by a rotating panel of five BSSA members). Secondly, the website you are now reading was activated. Although the website had been created during the previous season, the lack of volunteers dedicated to updating it meant that it had barely functioned. 

Last, but not least, there was a significant "once-off" activity accomplished when the BSSA prepared a submission to the independent review into the governance and administration of Australian soccer. The review eventually produced the Crawford Report. More mature supporters of the ‘beautiful game’ know that it has suffered many false dawns in Australia, but the Crawford Report, focusing as it does on the need to dismantle the dysfunctional administrative structures of the game, represents the best chance ever to bring about a sea change and create a
better environment for NSL clubs like the Brisbane Strikers to operate in. The BSSA’s submission, which focused primarily on its members’ conviction that the NSL needs to be run separately from Soccer Australia, was quoted in the Crawford Report which proposed exactly that.

Overall though, despite the early optimism, 2002/03 might be remembered by both the BSSA and the football club it supports, to have been a season of missed opportunities. The football team, after a mid-season revival which briefly raised hopes of another finals campaign, faded again towards the end of the season and missed out. The BSSA recovered some lost ground, but the mood of the season was probably summed up by Christie in his report to the association’s third Annual General Meeting, when he observed "During the past year both the Brisbane Strikers and the Supporters’ Association have had their successes and their failures....we had a number of schemes which either did not get off the ground or when they did they were not as successful as maybe we thought they would be. However, ‘that’s life’".

2003/04  Onwards and Upwards, or so it seemed

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The 2003/04 season got underway amid a feeling of rebirth for both the Brisbane Strikers and the BSSA.  Founding BSSA president John Wainwright was re-elected to the post and, fired partly by developments within the club, the BSSA tackled the season with renewed energy and optimism.

Brisbane Strikers Chairman, Clem Jones, had obtained a long-term lease for the club over Perry Park, its former home ground and training facility, which it had left in 1995 to play home games at Suncorp-Metway Stadium and Ballymore.  The supporters knew that the neglected and rather dilapidated old stadium had plenty of shortcomings as a venue at which to stage top-flight football, but buoyed by the actions of the club in making urgent upgrades to its playing surface and catering facilities, giving the grandstand a make-over and erecting a temporary stand on the eastern side of the pitch, they felt a sense of homecoming.  After years of worshipping their football Gods in the hallowed churches of Rugby League and Rugby Union, they felt that their club was coming home to a place where it could build a more secure and prosperous future. 

Over the off-season there had also been significant developments within the Strikers’ coaching and administrative staff, with Stuart McLaren, who had been club captain for several seasons, being appointed player-coach assisted by Luciano Trani.  In addition, former Soccer Queensland CEO Steve Wilson was appointed to oversee the negotiations with the players McLaren and Trani wished to recruit, and to co-ordinate the refurbishments of Perry Park that were necessary to bring it up to the standards required by Soccer Australia.

All three men were willing and excellent communicators with the supporters and, although the appointment of the youthful and inexperienced McLaren was at first met with incredulity, supporters soon felt that a breath of fresh air was blowing within the club.  Where previously ideas and initiatives of the BSSA often perished through lack of interest from the club, now the supporters received encouragement and assistance.  An early example of this was McLaren’s ready embrace of the supporters’ suggestion of a pre-season breakfast with his squad.  The occasion doubled as an opportunity to present McLaren’s new squad with their travelling kit, and McLaren made it a squad duty to turn up.  The result was a well-attended social get-together at which the players mingled freely with the supporters, in time to begin the season with their hearty good wishes ringing in their ears.

There were plenty of other examples, but it suffices merely to say that McLaren, Trani and Wilson appeared to understand the value of embracing supporters, particularly those who wished to help the club.  Their combined effect was to fire the supporters with optimism that not only was a new era dawning at the club, but that the supporters would at last gain the ready and rapid cooperation of the club in their efforts to add value to it.

The BSSA responded by continuing its established activities with renewed vigour, and adding a few new ones to boot.  The ‘Free Kick’, which had suffered the previous season from having fewer contributors, expanded again with some new writers coming on board.  This allowed the BSSA to bring other supporters news not only of the senior squad’s players and exploits, but also of the club’s inaugural National Youth League team.  A sponsor (the Roman Empire Bar Restaurant) was found for the BSSA’s Man of the Match Award, and voting procedures for the Player of the Season award were revamped and linked to the Man of the Match voting to ensure more rigour in the selection of the team’s most consistent player.

In its efforts to lift awareness and profile of the Strikers players, who were almost exclusively drawn by McLaren and Trani from the ranks of the under-appreciated local Brisbane league, the BSSA produced its own collector’s cards and even coffee mugs featuring photographs and profiles of the players, and linked the production of these (which were sold at home games only) with feature interviews in the ‘Free Kick’.

The BSSA also backed a project by one of its members, Vitor Sobral, to film and produce for sale a documentary based on the simple concept of portraying a week in the life of the Brisbane Strikers leading up to the home fixture against Sydney United on 24 January, 2004.  The football club gave its consent for the documentary to be shot, with access to its players and coaching staff. 

The documentary was duly filmed, with footage of the Strikers at training and during the game, interspersed with interviews with McLaren, Trani and various Brisbane Strikers players.  As luck would have it, the match ended in bizarre controversy when, with the Strikers ahead, a ferocious tropical storm caused the abandonment of the game amid scenes of game-day debris floating across a submerged Perry Park.  This provided the bonus - an opportunity to film the re-scheduled match some ten days later when the Strikers grabbed the points (and kept them this time).  The finished product, beautifully filmed, was eventually produced on DVD and VHS format and made available for sale through the BSSA.

All things considered, the BSSA probably had its most productive and satisfying season in support of the club, with the efforts of its members ranging across a broad spectrum of activities from those outlined above, to a submission to the NSL taskforce looking into how the new national league should be constructed and run, to helping prepare the Perry Park surface in the pre-season, and assisting on game days with catering and even mucking out the public toilets.     

Not all was sweetness and light, though.  There were disagreements between the BSSA and some elements within the football club’s administration who seemed either less than helpful or not to understand the aspirations of the supporters at all.  The root cause of the supporters’ restlessness was the perceived lack of promotional efforts from the club.  In this area of its business, the supporters felt the football club simply did not get out of neutral gear. 

The supporters were driven by insecurity, yet again, over the club’s continued national league existence now that a new board had been elected to control Soccer Australia with a mandate to overhaul the nation’s ailing National Soccer League.  Clubs that were not achieving what might be considered to be their potential drawing power were felt to be under threat of the axe, and the Strikers supporters felt the football club was most definitely under-achieving in this area, despite the admirable efforts of McLaren’s team which spent the entire season in the top six. The feeling was that the Strikers’ perennial cross-town rivals and national league wannabes, the Queensland Lions, had merely to talk to the powers-that-be about the crowds they could draw to a new national competition, while the Strikers had to prove it with bums on seats in the NSL, which was now on death row.  Talk was seen as a far easier and cheaper option, and not necessarily less effective.

When disagreements over arrangements to assist the club with selling merchandise on game days were added to the simmering frustrations over promotion, and with certain club administrators refusing to have dialogue with the BSSA on these issues, a certain amount of ‘unproductive tension’ ensued.  Eventually, though, wise heads prevailed and relations between the club and the BSSA were kept on an even keel while Soccer Australia’s reform process for the national league began to take shape.

But it took shape with almost glacial slowness, which at least allowed the supporters of the Brisbane Strikers to enjoy focus on the football and enjoy the rest of the season.   Fortunately, McLaren’s team of unsung heroes performed valiantly on the pitch and produced an entertaining brand of football that propelled them into the finals.  Once there, a disastrous away leg to Adelaide United produced a situation in which the Strikers needed to win by four clear goals to win through to the next phase.  The final match of the season saw the team, hampered by injuries and suspensions to key players, produce a performance which earned a standing ovation as they triumphed 4-1 but went out on the away goals rule.

Looking ahead with uncertainty, though, some fans commented that if that were to be the last game they saw the Strikers play in the national league, at least it had been a beauty.  At the end of the BSSA’s year, the AGM was held with Soccer Australia’s reform process having blown out the start of the next national league season to at least fifteen months hence.