From the East Riding of Yorkshire to the MCG
My Australian Rules football story begins like that of many other children of 1980, with Peter Daicos. Sometime later in the decade the Macedonian Marvel was on TV, receiving the ball in the forward pocket, jinking one way, spinning the other out of a tackle, baulking, pivoting and with his ratty mullet sniffing the breeze, kicking a goal from an impossible angle.
Where my Australian Rules football story differs is that I was not watching Daicos in the game’s heartland of suburban Melbourne. Nor was I in one of its major arteries like South Australia or WA. I was in the narrowest capillary of a phantom limb, known as the East Riding of Yorkshire.
With Hull as its primate city the region could reasonably be considered part of rugby league’s bedrock with Humberside supporting two Super League sides and an amateur competition regularly drawing thousands of knuckle-draggers. Nevertheless, it is in this estuarial outlier where I was first introduced to footy and the quicksilver number 35.
The scene was typical for sports mad English kids of the time (the ones who awoke at the crack of dawn on weekends anyway). I would creep into the family living room, sit on the carpet in my He-Man pyjamas and wedge my spine between the ridges of the radiator to absorb as much heat as possible yet retain some view of the teak-veneered television.
In the pre-pay-TV and pre-internet 80s there were four channels to choose from in England. On weekend mornings BBC 1 and ITV would cater for hyperactive children, BBC 2 jammed in some Open University lectures, while Channel 4, the renegade network, opted for hours of sport. The anchor of this segment was Transworld Sport, and this global highlights show was bookended, depending on the season, by spots dedicated to sports undeserving of attention by all but ex-pats and insomniacs. They included Australian Rules, NBA, NFL, and possibly most famously of all, kabaddi.
It was during one of these daybreak encounters with Channel 4 that Daicos appeared and though I understood little of the game he was playing, the combination of skills he displayed were easy to admire.
There was plenty else to stick in my mind too – questions on the incidentals and fundamentals of the game that one takes for granted when they are the norm. Questions like, “why does that man look like a butcher – and why is he waving a flag?” Or, “did that man’s shorts shrink in the wash?” And “what kind of sport needs so many players that one of its best could wear the number 35?”
My flirtation with the game was brief. As my sleep pattern matured so did British broadcasting and niche sports were soon hoovered up by Rupert Murdoch and placed out of reach of all but the devotees.
I kept my hand in during the dark ages, catching the occasional grand final, or when a clip of an all-in brawl made the news. And there was always old faithful Transworld Sport with its weekly updates.
It wasn’t until I made my first visit to Australia, in 2001, that I gave the game the attention it deserved. Originally a resident of Sydney the first penny to drop was that, contrary to most British preconceptions, Australian Rules football is not the pan-Australian pastime Foster’s commercials led us to believe. Despite the colossal Tony Lockett leading a team of perennial finalists it was difficult to discern Swan fever in the Harbour City. Instead it was all about the return of Gladiator’s rabbits and some geriatric named Alf. It wasn’t for me.
An invitation to relocate to Melbourne was not passed up and within days I was at the MCG for round one 2002. My generous host at the time had the misfortune to be a Melbourne member and like a contagious disease he passed on the affliction to me. Appropriately it was April Fool’s Day – the joke remains on us both.
At the start of 2002 the Demons had yet to find the metaphorical cat they were shortly to kick. Back then they were an attractive proposition for an eager recruit. They made the grand final in 2000, they had a recent Brownlow Medallist amongst their number and in David Neitz they had that year’s premier goal kicker. A flag was surely around the corner. How was I to know these would be merely flashes of light in the otherwise impenetrable red and blue hued darkness?
Almost unbeknownst to me at the time Melbourne won that contest. Travis Johnstone, the ghost of Jack Watts past, put in a best on ground performance and the gun Neitz unloaded five times. Unfortunately my untrained eye failed to fully grasp the game’s nuances and my attention was persistently drawn to another Demon, the largely unheralded fullback, Alistair Nicholson. Why? Because viewed from the second tier of the Great Southern Stand he looked like Jesus.
The whole experience of that first game was a bewildering blur – even for a seasoned live sport fanatic. The scale, for a start, seemed so vast that someone brought up viewing games played on rectangular pitches scarcely knew where to look. The players seemed miles away, like Lowry figures incarnate on an enormous green canvas.
I realised that was just as well because there were so many people milling around. The 18 players on each side would have been enough but the numerous umpires, ball-boys, coaches, physios and, most exotically of all, the luminous ‘runners’ made it near impossible to discern any sort of pattern to the activity whatsoever.
And then there was the game itself. One of the great joys of live professional sport is watching experts make the challenging look routine. I left my first game thinking to myself – if these blokes make it look so bloody difficult, and they’re the best going around, how hard must it be for a novice? Just in the warm up Sherrins were rolling in all directions like discarded shotgun shells and once the game got underway it was made abundantly clear how hard it was to propel the ball by foot more than ten metres in a straight line at a catchable trajectory.
It took a while, but eventually I got the hang of it. It helped that there was a champion Brisbane side around to make the game look so simple and it helped that they met Collingwood in that year’s grand final, to expose me to the mania and hatred that attends the Magpies.
In the decade since then the game has transformed almost beyond recognition. It is now a billion dollar industry with it’s own pay-tv channel, purpose built stadia and dictator. But the core of what makes the game so special endures.
The other popular footballs have nothing to rival the exhilaration of a pack mark. There are few braver sporting spectacles than watching a player go back with the flight of the ball. There is nothing so suburbanly Proustian as the smell of a Four n Twenty mingling with the sound of a club song.
It is by no means a perfect game, something I think us outsiders can see clearer than the entrenched disciples. There are too many players, for a start, for that number to have been reached by design. The endless pernickety rule changes betray the game’s endurance and longevity. And it is beyond me how any modern sport can exist without a clear kit clash solution. Over the years I’ve learned to blame Collingwood for all these (and more) ills.
There is a watershed moment in the life of every migrant in which the concept of home changes. For me that moment arrived when football changed its meaning. It was 2008 when football ceased to be soccer, becoming, presumably forever, Australian Rules football. People still look at me with bemusement when they hear my flat northern English vowels pronounce the word “football,” many replying doubtfully, “you mean AFL, right?” I expect such encounters will endure as long as the accent.
I have now fully embraced footy. I scream at the umpires. I irrationally oppose Collingwood. I have an opinion on the value of the number of goals per quarter the wind at Kardinia Park favours. I irrationally oppose Eddie McGuire (even when he’s right). I have won both a workplace tipping competition and a Dream Team league. At the MCG I have stood in silence on ANZAC Day and on others (precious few) belted out “It’s a Grand Old Flag.”
It might have begun as an exotic childhood fascination but I have since been well and truly sucked in. Now when overseas visitors come to town the first place I take them is the MCG and the first thing I explain to them is the footy. I try and educate them about the game, its traditions and rivalries and introduce stories about this bloke Daicos. But they don’t usually get it, and I don’t mind. Besides, they’re too busy asking me about the flags, the hotpants and the runners. We all have to start somewhere…
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