Grand Final

One city's obsession with Aussie Rules Football

Australian rules football is the game that Melbourne gave the world, and if most of the rest of the world didn’t take any notice, then stuff ‘em.  The game may now be played professionally throughout Australia, but if you speak to any Melburnian on Grand Final weekend, you can’t escape the sense of proud ownership that they feel about the game that captivates them above all else.

A night game at the MCG (courtesy blog.travelpod.com)

The Grand Final is the last match of the season in the elite Australian Football League  (AFL) and the winners are crowned champions for the year.  Wherever the finalists are from, it’s always played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, arguably the most hallowed turf in Australia, and in the week beforehand it’s difficult to find anyone in town who professes no interest in the outcome. 

Any new arrival in Melbourne will have had the experience of being mobbed at social events with concerned questions about which football team they intend to support.  If you even hint that you’re undecided, the questioner will switch to an evangelical promotion of the merits of his or her own team, complete with a vague assurance that God has chosen them to do His work on earth, and dire warnings that certain other teams are most definitely in league with the dark side.

You know that you’re in the midst of sporting obsession when you turn on the car radio and discover that the second item in the news is a story about one of the top players (Chris Judd of Carlton, since you’re asking), and his plans for the conception of his next child (as soon as possible, please).

What’s it all about?  Well, “footy” is played with an oval ball, on an enormous  oval pitch, by two teams of eighteen lung-bustingly fit and spectacularly athletic specimens of Australian manhood.  The aim is to kick the ball through your opponent’s goal posts as often as possible, which gets you six points each time.  In order to do this, players can kick or handle the ball, but generally will try to catch the kicked ball before it bounces.  This is called a “mark” and entitles you to a free kick, which they can either use to try and set one of their own side up for another mark or to score a goal.  Australians aren’t known for their sympathy for losers, but in the case of “footy” they make an exception:  if you miss the goal by only a little bit, your team is awarded a single consolation point. 

West Coast's Sampi takes a spectacular aerial mark

(Photo T Collens published at www.smh.com.au)

That, really, is all you need to know in order to attend your first game, where you will find tens of thousands of people who are far more knowledgeable than me to explain the finer details.

Football has, since its inception, had a reputation for the extreme levels of violence that its practitioners can inflict on each other.  You can still hear old-timers telling you, with misty eyes, of the occasion when so-and-so ran fifty yards for the sole purpose of punching them whilst their back was turned.  The advent of television has dulled this somewhat, but it's still not a game for the faint hearted - the players have learned to inflict injury with a variety of shoulder charges and flailing arms or elbows which stand a better chance of being deemed accidental.  Violence is certainly more likely to pay in football than in other sports:  it is unheard of for a player to be sent off, no matter what depth of skulduggery he has indulged in.  The downside, for the aggressor, is that his villainy is likely to have been recorded on television, and games in the AFL tend to be followed by a series of disciplinary tribunals at which malefactors are paraded and justice is meted out.

It’s also probably worth mentioning that some footballers share the same regard for personal abstinence, political correctness and women’s rights for which players of the various football codes are known throughout the English-speaking world.  And now I have mentioned it, I will move quickly on.

2011’s Grand Final was contested yesterday between Collingwood and Geelong.  Collingwood is as close to being the Manchester United or New York Yankees of its sport as AFL gets.  It’s the richest club, with the most supporters, and is historically one of the most successful; its status as the outfit most likely to be identified by supporters of other teams as being in league with Satan is probably not coincidental.  Geelong is the most successful side of the past five years.

As for the game, well, what do you want to know?  It was something of a classic, which Geelong won 119-81 in the final quarter after what had been a very even game.  A great deal of beer was drunk, we all picked a side and had a shout.  And Melbourne is now counting the days until the start of the next season…