September 18, 2004
All footballed out
Most people know that Australians are obsessed with sport. But did you know the people of Victoria, the southernmost state on the Australian mainland, are obsessed with football?
Australian Rules Football (AFL) is one of the wildest, fastest and skillful ball sports you're ever likely to witness. It's right up there with the ancient Gaelic sport of hurling. Although its origin is much more modern.
If you live in Victoria you simply cannot avoid football. It dominates the culture. It dominates the media.
If you live in rural Victoria football becomes an even bigger obsession. It often ties communities together. Country life revolves around it. The whole social life of a town can be dominated by it. And it's not just the Saturday afternoon matches. There's training sessions, fund raising events, celebratory dinners and dances and entertainment evenings which are all part and parcel of the local football club.
If you hate football, the winter months are pretty much intolerable. Unless you can find a way of ignoring it.
I never really liked football, despite the fact my father thought all his Christmases had come at once when I just so happened to be born on the same day as legendary AFL player EJ 'Ted' Whitten, his favourite footballer of all time.
In fact I disliked football so much I made a point of refusing to do the football round when I worked on a country newspaper as a rookie reporter. This meant I didn't have to go from football ground to football ground on wet, wintry weekends taking photographs and compiling reports. I had better things to do with my time. This didn't win me many favours, but I couldn't see why my life had to revolve around a sport I didn't like just because everyone else's did.
When I left Australia in 1998, I was relieved to escape the football insanity that characterised life in Victoria. So imagine how I felt when last week I arrived home and found myself caught up in "finals fever" for the first time in six long years.
Every time I turned the telly on there was either a match being played or a news report being filed or a dedicated football show being televised. The evening news was filled with football, football, football. Real news barely got a look in. I'd forgotten the sheer madness of it all.
Since I've been gone, the madness has been elevated to new and frightening levels.
There are 16 clubs in the official AFL league. Each club has its own (appallingly bad) club song. Traditionally when a club wins a match its song is played over the PA system and everyone in the crowd sings along. Now, in today's football-obsessed media, the television cameras follow the winning team into the club rooms. The team, including trainers and the coach, stand in a big circle, arms around each others shoulders and everyone sings the song at FULL VOLUME (and usually horrendously out of tune). I've never heard or seen anything more cringe-worthy in my life.
My father tells me there was a recent match where the team's sing-along wasn't televised. Apparently there was an absolute uproar about it.
It was almost a relief to return to the UK and it's own "mini obessession" with soccer . . .
Posted by kimbofo at September 18, 2004 12:15 PM