Excitement and anticipation surrounds 2013-2014 A-League season, Tom Smithies writes IT was, by common consent, a record media turnout  a phalanx of journalists, broadcasters, columnists and intrigued others, all gathered for the launch of this seasons A-League. Helped by largely unbroken sunshine over Allianz Stadium in Sydney - and with a similar gathering at Melbourne's AAMI Park - the excitement was something you could almost have bottled. The great irony is that such anticipation comes in a year when the league has done little in the way of eye-catching, headline-grabbing acquisitions. Two years ago Harry Kewell and Brett Emerton suddenly appeared on the eve of the competition thanks to the vision of Melbourne Victory and Sydney FC - and it's easy to forget how that gave the competition a badly needed transfusion and changed the landscape, when optimism about the league had previously been in rather shorter supply. By a freak of scheduling (and some arm twisting of Holger Osieck, to not pick them for the Socceroos the same weekend), Emerton and Kewell went head to head in round one, in front of 40,000+ people. The season was off and running. Last year Sydney went one better - or rather went stratospherically better, with all due respect to Messrs Kewell and Emerton. The dramatic pursuit of Alessandro Del Piero changed everything, not least in sparking Newcastle and Western Sydney into securing Emile Heskey and Shinji Ono. The result was the greatest season ever, as FFA types like to say in suitably breathless tones, and truth be told it was. The memories of some epic games, some marquee genius and Western Sydney's modern-day fairytale still linger. But you see the theme? The 24 months of upward growth, of an exponential rise in interest and of hand-rubbing anticipation were - whisper it - more by accident than design. Kewell could have signed in the Middle East two years ago - instead he went to Melbourne. Marcos Flores and Alessandro Del Piero share a laugh at the A-League launch. Spurned, Sydney went for Emerton. The cards fell into place, and kept falling. A year on Nicky Carle was offered and took a loan move to the Middle East out of nowhere, and suddenly the Sky Blues had a vacancy for a diminutively Italian-shaped marquee... and so on. This year? Well all three marquees have re-signed, but across the league there is little "new" to muster anything like the impact of last year's arrivals. And yet still those dozens and dozens and dozens of interested parties poured into Tuesday's launches of the new season. The purist inside this columnist would love to believe that the rise of quality across the league in terms of the way the teams generally play is at the heart of it, but it's a lot more nuanced than that. Football has one commodity about it now that is just as hard to bottle as excitement - a momentum that ticks over in the off-season and (so far anyway) starts motoring again as the season begins. That's what makes this such an intriguing season. Credit where it's due, over the past 12 months a strategy has been in place, clearly definable, from the game's governing body and which others have built on. First the Socceroos" World Cup qualifiers, astutely marketed by both the players and FFA, and then the visits of Manchester United and Liverpool in July kept the sport on the back pages in the depths of its hibernation. Now a well-received marketing campaign, and the advent of the A-League on free to air TV, mean the other codes" season finishes have been staccato in the extreme. To be fair, the introduction of an October start was the one thing that FFA did above all others in recent times to reinvigorate the A-League. But the very fact that so many expect, rather than just hope for, another season of both quality and drama, rather shows how far we've come. Victory striker Archie Thompson says the disappointment of missing out on Socceroos selection this weekend has been tempered by competing in the Melbourne derby. The pessimist inside this column (born of a lifetime supporting Southampton) wants to caution, yet again, that the A-League's roots remain shallow. But the forecasters say we're in for a hot summer, and so long as you keep watering roots, they can grow surprisingly quickly. Just as every fan secretly dreams that this will be their season, so all those with a love of the game are discreetly crossing fingers that we have more of the same as last year. The cheering thought is that, with or without twisted fingers, we probably will.