Soccer gets back in touch with its grassroots with FFA Cup Turbo: Bentleigh Greens and Perth Glory at Kingston Heath. A decade ago Frank Lowy, the chairman of the newly established Football Federation Australia, made an impassioned plea to the followers of "old soccer" before the first ever A-League round not to desert the game at its hour of greatest need. The game's governing body had swept away the old Soccer Australia in the wake of the Crawford report and, with Lowy as figurehead and former Australian rugby supremo John O'Neill as a barnstorming chief executive, the sport was intent on creating a new image, establishing a fresh brand and finding new fans for what was dubbed by the marketing men "new football." New regimes, of course, indulge in all sorts of sloganeering and re-engineering of words and concepts: it's part of the mythmaking that goes on when something new is being fashioned from something that already exists in an attempt to recreate and persuade people that things are really different. Belatedly, Lowy seemed to realise that day at the inaugural A-League season launch that maybe the urgers, PR pushers and brand awareness creators had forgotten about the game's core constituency after all. New football, not old soccer, might be a clever catch phrase, but while the game needed time to convert the masses to what it was hoped new football might become, the realisation dawned it might not be a bad idea to keep those who had made it what it was, interested in the sport. For some that appeal was too little, too late. Many supporters of the traditional clubs who were left behind by the revolution felt disenfranchised and alienated by the shiny new competition with its one-team, one-city structure. The old game, with its tribal and geographical loyalties, its clubs established on suburban or ethnic lines, might have been outside the mainstream, but for its devotees it was comfortable and on a human scale. The new game, with its glossy franchises, its gigantism - one club for the whole of Sydney or Melbourne - seemed, for those comfortable in more intimate environments, just too big and characterless. Those dissenters who didn't want to come to the party stayed away. Many watched for those first two or three seasons but eventually clambered on board, their love of the game trumping their initial hostility as the sport grew. Thankfully, many more have returned as the league has expanded and developed a character of its own. A decade down the track, the clubs have begun to assume their own identities, tribal loyalties have been forged and it all looks and feels like "real football," with chanting crowds, burgeoning rivalries and arguments over the relative merits of coaches, players and clubs becoming part of mainstream sporting discourse. And thankfully the FFA, which for so long appeared to be so hostile to the culture of the sport and little prepared to acknowledge the efforts of the mainly migrant communities and clubs that had built up the sport, have also got on board and no longer seem embarrassed to be associated with the grassroots of the game. Its chief engine of reconnection has been the FFA Cup, which began this year and has, through the exploits of one of those old-fashioned old soccer clubs in Bentleigh Greens, turbo-charged that process. The Greens, from the National Premier League Victoria, exited the competition this week at the semi-final stage, losing 3-0 to A-League leader Perth Glory in a match at their distinctly suburban Kingston Heath ground. Bentleigh have never had so much publicity than they have in the past month. Sure, some of the coverage might have bordered on the patronising - the copious references to the quality of the club's souvlakis certainly began to pall after a while - and their characterisation as a battling, plucky outsider was a ready template for those of us developing the "upsets abound in the cup" narrative. The FFA Cup has provided a route back to the mainstream game for those dissidents who have remained outside, and a reminder - or perhaps a first-time lesson for those who have only followed soccer this past decade - of where the game came from, how it developed and where, outside of the elite of the A-League, most of it is still played. Bentleigh coach John Anastasiadis believes his team's romantic run to the last four will inspire other second- and third-tier sides to spend up on players and make a serious tilt at the cup next year. If that happens, the quality will improve, and hopefully a few more A-League clubs will have their noses bloodied. And, with any luck, some of the aficionados of new football will have had their eyes opened to the relative quality on offer in the second tier and the different, less synthetic match-day experience of life outside the A-League in what used to be old soccer.