Debate is always bubbling on the region's best football ground, finals structures, whether to split leagues into divisions and who is THE team everybody loves to hate.

Can this football survey, pieced together by The Courier's country footy gurus, provide any definitive answers or settle arguments?

Absolutely not.

What this survey can do is offer an indication of general consensus about the region.

*Take the survey here and join the great debate

Too often passionate footy fans make grand sweeping statements without anything to back up the talk.

This is one of the greatest elements of sport.

Anyone and everyone can weigh into the game.

Parochial fans will argue black-and-blue for their club and about their club. These fans will leave you in no doubt about where their armchair-based opinion lies on the big issues from game tactics, players to be cut and broader league problems, in their eyes.

You need not be an expert either.

Watch a game, of any code and any level, and you can easily slip into a water-cooler conversation.

The flip side of this is when grand sweeping statements become an assumed fact.

Earlier this week The Courier's sister metropolitan paper ran a feature story on locals being cold and not sold on a Eureka Stadium make-over to bring it up to AFL home-and-away standard.

While the debate is hardly new - the popularised Eastern Oval versus City Oval talk has been playing out for generations - the journalist wrote that anyone in town would describe the stadium as "windswept" and that "Ballarat people wonder whether AFL fans would turn their noses up at the ground, which sits on an unattractive expanse of land just off the Western Highway".

Ummm, maybe Ballarat people wonder AFL fans would turn up their noses at the venue in its current state (surface excepted) but home-and-away matches will not and are not going to be played at Eureka Stadium in its current state. Unattractive or not.

You need not have been to a match at Eureka Stadium, let alone be a sporting fan at all, to understand a make-over.

Oprah carried out make-overs on her talk-show in human, house and business format for decades. Modern reality television shows on this premise are booming.

Plans are for a boutique stadium. This will entail modern stands and finishing touches like paving to reduce wind and dust. Maybe plant a few trees for aesthetics.

Personal club allegiance aside, long-seeded club prejudice aside and it is hard to ignore the benefits a stadium upgrade, let alone the entire precinct upgrade, could bring Ballarat.

This is about more than football - and that is hard to package into a generalised sweeping statement.

Debate is a useful tool and analysing issues, even if just around the water-cooler, should be encouraged rather than letting popularised critical arguments remain the assumed norm.

For example, do you really think upgrading Eureka Stadium will green-light North Ballarat City for complete Ballarat Football League/world domination?

Pretty sure AFL Goldfields would want to avoid the pitchfork masses that would turn out at Saxon House should that happen.

For this survey to work, and to cut through generalisations, it needs a broad demographic.

Passionate clubmen are almost guaranteed to submit their responses.

This survey relies on people feeling compelled to take a few valuable moments in their day to respond and they will be fired up to make their word heard.

But people follow football in different ways.

Fringe supporters are just as important, like those who keep an eye on country football because they know a player through work or family.

These voices count too.

This survey may, at least, show that public perception on our game is not as clear cut as most thought.

Country football fans are starved of the game right now and, without form to speculate on or mull over, these are the issues our Courier football team deem as the hottest this summer.

Well, most summers really.

Well, these issues and the perpetual speculation and tip-offs this office gets every summer about where Dan Jordan might play next season. Still - even now he is retired from country football.