When the facts change, opinions must change. Maybe.

It's possible that I was wrong about the Australia Cup. When it began, the framing of "reunification" rubbed me up the wrong way; the new dawn had, after all, won the popularity battle by some margin, especially in Melbourne and Sydney. I hated the patronising focus on "ethnic food", as if that was all our clubs had to offer. And the tournament's original scheduling of the tournament favoured the in-season professional A-League outfits over the out-of-season semi-pro teams - the guaranteed semi-final place for non-A-League teams felt tokenistic at best. Looking at things more closely though, it's less that I was wrong about the Australia Cup, and more that both it and Australian soccer have changed to where the original framing of the Cup is not what it was. The A-League's popularity post-COVID has plateaued, while clubs like South and Preston have, on occasion, been able to rustle up crowds well above what one expects of them these days, and in some cases more than what some expansion teams have been able to do. The food truck fetish is now mostly the preserve of chancer influencers, who are easy enough to ignore if you don't live on their favoured social media outlets. But the big change has been in the revised scheduling, which now sees the A-League sides more likely to field youthful and less match-fit lineups in the early rounds than they did in the Cup's early days. When these relatively underprepared squads come up against experienced, battled-hardened, in-season NPL sides - at least the better ones - the expectation is no longer that the semi-pro side will get swept aside. And so it has come to pass, that what are dubbed "cupsets" - an A-League side being eliminated by a state league side - have become increasingly common. Of course by the time the final rolls around, the A-League team remaining (assuming that there is an A-League team remaining) should be too strong, but the gap is not what it was. It also helps that there's been another change which is less talked about than it should be - that state league talent is becoming more and more concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. Of course, Sydney has always had the depth of its own superior playing numbers. But Melbourne has done well in overcoming its demographic deficiencies by bringing in ambitious players from Queensland, useful journeyman Brits, and the occasional Tasmanian or Japanese player. Money talks, but so does the latent support in Victoria for these old clubs, which in general seems to have held up better than in other places; it was an observation made ten years ago to me by Joe Gorman, and while anything that old has surely dated, something about it still resonates. Is that why Victorian sides have done so much better than their counterparts from other states? A chip on their shoulder, a point to prove, and the motivation to outdo each other in all formats? And always at the centre of this ambition, and this week the height of such festivities, there is our club. No club with a bigger chip on its shoulder in this country, no club trying harder to prove a point, no club more motivated to get away from clubs that it seldom considers its peers.