I Was There, Part I: Caught in the midst of the Rumble at Suncorp
As two of the A-League’s fiercest competitors squared off, Sydney FC’s then media manager was caught in the middle, writes Tom Smithies, in part I of special new KEEPUP series delving into some of the competition’s most famous – and infamous – moments.
THAT’S the thing about simmering pots – you turn your back for a moment and they boil over.
On a crackling night in Brisbane, the enmity between two snarling A-League competitors climbed in temperature until the final whistle – and suddenly exploded into life.
Besart Berisha v Pascal Bosschaart was the Rumble in Suncorp, Brisbane Roar’s hyperactive centreforward summoning Sydney FC’s Dutch enforcer to settle their differences in the old-fashioned way in January 2012.
In the seconds after that final whistle, with the stadium in bedlam following Brisbane’s two late, late goals to win the game, just about every player and coach seemingly became entangled – and at the heart of it, desperately trying to keep the 183cm Bosschaart away from Berisha, was Sydney FC’s diminutive then media manager David Mason.
“We could see that Berisha had obviously had an interaction with Pascal and then he starts sprinting towards us with his shirt off,” Mason recalled. “As everyone started to run over, I think it was (ex-Brisbane player) James Mayer who grabbed Besart. That’s when we all thought to ourselves, oh, this isn’t normal. This is gonna get interesting.
“To this day, none of us can understand what Besart was actually going to do. It was like he was trying to run into the Sydney dressing room to start something, but that’s not really the place where you want to start a one v one, not in the opposition dressing room.
“Pascal just sort of jogged over. He was an incredibly passionate person, as Besart is, but almost like a gentle giant. They’re both very similar – they’re nice people, you want them on your team. But when they step over the line, they’re incredibly competitive.
“As soon as I could see that they were coming together, and people were running from everywhere, I just thought to myself, I need to make sure that I can grab Pascal and see if I can get him away.
“It was only like 15 seconds of absolute mayhem. And the main thing we were trying to do is to make sure that no one was throwing punches.
“I had a childhood friend of mine at the game who was living up in Brisbane, he was literally three rows behind where I was with Pascal. So I’m sitting there trying to calm Pascal down, and all I can hear in the whole kerfuffle is my friend Nick yelling out, Hit him Maso, hit him!”
Sydney against Brisbane was a particularly incendiary rivalry at the time, every game seeming to create its own flashpoints. A few weeks before, the Sky Blues had ended Brisbane’s 36-game unbeaten run, but Roar were the reigning champions and would go on to defend the title successfully at the end of that season.
Berisha would later allude to comments he said Bosscahaart had made about his family – a claim emphatically denied by the Dutchman. Berisha, who was unpunished at the time, was subsequently hit with a one-match ban as the instigator of the madness, while Bosschaart escaped with the yellow card issued by referee Ryan Shephard.
“It was interesting, I think Pascal was trying to look like he was trying to get involved, but deep down I don’t think he really wanted to get into a punch up,” said Mason
“The best indication I can give you is that when it was sort of finished and it had started to calm down, I remember saying to him, ‘Pascal, can I let you go? Is this okay now?’
“He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘Maso, if I wanted to go to get involved in a fight, I would have just moved you out of the way.’
“To be fair, he probably could have done.”
