Horse 1413 - Football and Print Media's Continued Apathy

In three days the Socceroos put past 17 goals against Guam and Chinese Taipei. Previously they had also beaten Hong Kong and drawn with North Korea, and have thus qualified for the 2013 EAFF East Asian Cup (a competition which they're only in by invite).
In the days when Australia was regularly smacking double digit wins past Pacific Island nations, the media tended to treat Australian football like some sort of poor cousin. In fact this tournament has been relegated to being shown not on SBS's broadcast stations but only streaming online. This however may tell a story which should make the media sit up and notice.
SBS's website frequently failed due to insufficient bandwidth as more users tried to connect. I don't want to suggest that SBS did a bad job, far from it, rather that the matches themselves were more popular than even they anticipated. This was after all only a qualifier for a tournament which is neither a World Cup nor Asian Cup preliminary.

The highest trending hashtags on Twitter were to do with the A-League matches going on and the Soccerroos matches. I had a look at some metrics going on and found that the numbers were as good as an episode of ABC 1's Qanda which regularly tops the world on Twitter, spiking on Monday nights. Even the Big Bash Cricket amidst all the hype and advertising didn't manage to break football's dominance on Twitter. A couple of hours later the Manchester derby in the English Premier League blew everything else to the weeds on Twitter and in terms of tweets per minute was generating figures roughly a thousand times the order of magnitude that the Socceroos match did; which is perfectly understandable considering that this was a top of the table clash being broadcast worldwide. As far as an Australian based Twitter hashtag goes, they were certainly quite active.

The reason why I make mention of this is because the daily newspapers in Sydney at least, you'd expect would be jumping on board but no. You had to turn a full nine pages in the sports section of the Telegraph on Monday before you found any football news and in the Herald it was six pages.
Obviously the Tele being a News Corp paper is pushing the barrow for the wider interests of the group (presumably in its formerly tied investment to Rugby League) but the Herald which has no such connection, merely looks silly. Both of them look out of touch with actual trends and perhaps more generally it is a symptom of print losing touch with relevance to the world.
Newspapers have long since ceased to be the primary method by which people get their news and so anyone who was interested would have already have known the result, well before the newspaper even went to copy; much less to print.
This brings me to what the newspapers actually covered. The Telegraph churned through its usual grist of Rugby League rumour despite being out of season but at least the Herald filled its space with news on cricket and golf, both of which had also occurred at the weekend.

I'll admit that I'm incredibly biased in all of this, not being a Rugby League fan living in a city which 'traditionally' is full of them but it seems to me that one of the hurdles that Football is going to have to jump over if it is ever to become the thing which I'd always hoped that it would, is the apathy of the media in Australia.
To this end I find the announcement that SBS is to cover the match of the week as well as pick up the highlights show in season 2013/14 to be one if the best pieces of news I've heard in a long time. Jokingly, 'soccer' was one of the three things always substituted in its three letter acronym but in the meantime, SBS has developed a reputation for producing more intelligent television than the commercial networks, buys more documentaries and at least in our house gets more viewing time than any other station.

I'm wondering if in season 2013/14, whether the television exposure by SBS of the A-League will be enough to tip ratings figures to the point that even the Telegraph and Herald will take notice. Perhaps in an age where because they know that the audience already knows the results by the time they go to print, we may even see proper analysis of football in the newspaper.
I can only hope so.