I landed in Australia four weeks ago but only truly arrived this Saturday.
The first weekend I was
here it was suggested that I go see a game of ‘footy’ at the Melbourne Cricket
Ground (MCG). The game I was meant to see was the season opener between
Richmond and Carlton but it fell through for one reason or another. I would
have to wait another 3 weeks before I finally got my first taste.
So on Saturday the 21st of April I was going to see Carlton,
who I was told had made a blistering start to the season and were expected to
challenge for the title, play Essendon: a mid-table team who would be lucky to
escape without suffering an embarrassing defeat. This as you can imagine meant
nothing to me because since missing that first game a few weeks earlier I
hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to the AFL, the game was nothing but
a curiosity to me and if I’m honest I just wanted to see inside the MCG.
As a kid my only memories
of ‘footy’ were seeing a bit of Aussie Rules on Channel 4’s Trans
World Sport early on
a Saturday morning before Going Live came on the other channel. This weird
game played out on a gigantic, circular pitch befuddled me. Why were they
allowed to use their hands? Why were there no nets in the goals? Why did they
not have sleeves?

Almost everything that
came up in our discussions leading up to the game was related back to the Premier
League in some way, partly to make the alien subject matter clearer to me and
partly to manage my expectations of the game. ‘It’s not like in the Premier
League’ was quickly established as the phrase of the day.
“How many can we expect
there to be in the MCG today then?” I asked.
“There’ll be a big crowd,
maybe 80,000, but the atmosphere won’t be anything like in the Premier League,”
he said.
“It’s a big pitch for the
players to cover, is the game all stop-start like rugby?” I asked.
“Oh no the game is quick,
but it’s not like what you’re used to in the Premier League.”

I’ve been to some giant
stadia before: the old Wembley in London, Cardiff's Millennium Stadium
and of course Old Trafford in Manchester but I have to say that the Melbourne
Cricket Ground is the biggest, grandest, most dramatic stadium I have ever seen.
The sounds were equally impressive, both sets of fans (seated together) were
getting warmed up and in terrific voice creating not so much a wall of sound
but thanks to the stadium’s bowl shape, more of an enormous ball of sound that
seemed to swell and linger on the pitch and could find no means of escape.
Never mind ‘not like the
Premier League’, this was better.
Immediately I knew that
this game, this strange hybrid of football and rugby, would compel me. And I
was right.

Anyone who knows me knows
I’m not a huge fan of rugby. I've been to a few Premiership games
before, but the game just never grabbed me. I find the reliance on brute
strength and physical attributes disheartening and prefer my winners to be the
ones who were more wily, more creative on the day, not just simply faster,
stronger or fitter (hence why I prefer the technique of a Federer to prevail
over the brawn of a Nadal, the guile of a Barcelona to the dull, if determined,
discipline of a Chelsea). I appreciate there are nuances to the game, that in my
ignorance I do not understand and intricacies in skill that I just cannot see,
but I will never be a fan.

What I actually found was
that ‘footy’ is almost the exact half-way point between rugby and football. It
is required for the players to be on the whole tall, muscular, quick on their
feet and tough, but at the same time I can not imagine, having seen this game
first hand, a player succeeding at the top level without being able to marry
these attributes to nimble hands and an exceedingly quick mind. It can appear
at times as if they are merely playing hot potato but when you take a look at
the wider picture and see the intricately set out patterns of the players and
the almost telepathic knowledge of where their teammates should be positioned,
it’s pretty obvious that there’s more to it than that.
Even the referees are
athletic in this game. They need to be. The way they throw the ball back into
the pitch when it has gone out of touch is amazing. They stand on the touchline
with their back to the pitch, swing the ball low between their legs and fling
it as hard and high as they can over their head, a sort of backwards tossing
the caber motion. Most of the refs in the Premier League would put their backs
out trying it.

I expected the game, due
to the size of the pitch (2.8 times the size of a regulation association
football pitch), to be played out at a relatively sedate pace. It was not. It
was fast, intense, frenzied action for each of the four 30 minute quarters.
Towards the end of the last quarter, some of the players were visibly tiring
but only indulged in putting their hands on their knees or behind their heads
during breaks in play. It was astounding stuff really. The fitness levels of
these players is nothing short of freakish. Carlos Tevez would have needed more
than a few run outs with the reserves to get up to speed in this game.

The game finished in a
sound defeat for Carlton. Essendon’s supporters were delirious. The stadium
rocked with noise. I was hooked.
This game, which began
largely as a regional passion for Victorians, quickly outgrew it’s native state
to encompass the whole of Australia, evolving from the Victorian Football
League (VFL) into it’s current guise as the Australian Football League (AFL) in
1990. With the right backing, perhaps similar to that which saw the Football
League morph into the behemoth that became the Premier League in 1992, who is
to say that this hugely entertaining game couldn’t one day prove every bit as popular?
I’ve already asked my
friend for tickets to the next Carlton match.
Written by Andrew Hatch
Sorry but Aussie Rules pales in comparison to Rugby Union. GO WARATAS
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