AFL grand final: Melbourne a battered city but footy still brings hope
Two of Melbourne’s oldest clubs will face off in the grand final today in a city far from home, while ordinary Melburnians ponder breaking the law just to watch the footy with a mate.
Victoria
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Public holiday or not, it was just another Melbourne day on Friday.
Of empty streets. And few gatherings, notwithstanding the menace of bogans in high-vis.
At the Whitten Oval, a family of cyclists takes happy snaps under the fluttering scarf of Ted Whitten’s statue.
Down Barkly St, where poles are wrapped in Doggies colours, other cyclists take photos of the Keep Calm and Go Doggies sign.
At Conway Fish, where the Bulldogs’ 2016 flag win is emblazoned on the proud owner’s wall, a handful of patrons hunker against the wind gusts.
That’s right, just another day in Melbourne.
Where authorities urge locals to use spare time to get vaccinated.
Where colour and vitality fades to the latest grim tidings, from rabbles without a cause to the odd earthquake.
Where ordinary people ponder breaking the law just so that they can watch the footy with a mate.
WHERE TO GET YOUR GRAND FINAL SOUVENIRS
Where the only numbers are cases and deaths and vaccination targets.
And the heroes of the moment lurk in intensive care wards, such as at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, where staff don club colours to announce their allegiances.
It’s not supposed to be like this. Not again.
For the second year running, Melbourne has forfeited its biggest street party. As we well know, a COVID capital cannot also be Football HQ.
At the start time of the usual grand final parade, a lone footy fan, wearing a St Kilda cap, stands where throngs normally clump to wave to their stars.
Even the Australian flags at 1 Macarthur Place appear to be languishing.
You get a car park right outside the MCG, which has never happened to anyone, ever.
No one huddles under the statues of Melbourne’s Norm Smith and Jim Stynes outside the ground. At least their bright scarfs liven the grey, both of sky and heart.
Meanwhile, about 3500km west, people in Perth are milling for free mullet haircuts and the picnic hype.
They bask in what used to be uniquely ours.
Two of the oldest Melbourne clubs will play in Saturday’s grand final, somewhere else, just as two Victorian teams played elsewhere last year and we were grateful that they were playing at all.
When the Western Bulldogs won their first flag, in 1954, the Whitten (then Western) Oval rocked for the week preceding. Brass bands featured, as did a women’s football match – between the so-called Cuties and the Explosives.
When the Demons won their last flag, in 1964, its fans mirrored the optimism of the Doggies a decade earlier. More flags would follow, they accepted.
But it didn’t go this way.
The winning Bulldogs captain from 1954, Charlie Sutton, didn’t get to count club premierships: instead, he counted great grandchildren.
Until five years ago, and the unlikely premiership of 2016, the club’s then 90 years of survival was shrunk into 120 minutes of glory, as narrated by Sutton.
Sutton’s elbow ran into the head of Melbourne captain Ron Barassi early in that pre-television grand final. “They run into me,” he said, repeatedly, of those early match muggings until he died in 2012.
Barassi, at Melbourne, assumes the same role that Sutton long shouldered at the Western Bulldogs. His tales of triumphalism have had to float a club long loaded with debt, failure and inexplicable unluckiness.
Tonight will be different to the Demons’ other flag tilts, and not only because the grand final entertainment is said to feature footage of health workers and patients in Melbourne intensive care wards.
It will be played in front of 60,000 fans. Melbourne will wear the navy shorts of a home game. But only a fraction of the crowd will be barracking with the depth of hope and anxiety that only lifelong Demons’ disappointment can generate.
The Bulldogs have travelled 10,000km on their finals odyssey, a resurgent force after late season stumbles. But they are not the sentimental underdogs.
A win for them would trigger talk of a footballing dynasty, whereas a Demons win will snuff the so-called (dare we say) club curse which predates decimal currency.
One of these teams, the grittiest of an uncertain season, will anoint new heroes tonight.
Will Gawn stand beside Barassi, as Easton Wood rose to stand alongside Whitten and Sutton five years ago?
Will it be Jack Viney (Melbourne) or Lachie Hunter (Bulldogs) who ventures into premiership glory where their football-playing father could not?
Such questions distract from the restrictions of a Covid culture. Of helicopters which monitor, as opposed to celebrate, the crowds below. And cordons of police, gloved in rubber, who protect the city’s precious monuments.
We may live in a city where what you cannot do matters more than what you can.
But there are no limits to the imagining. If you think about the footballing possibilities, as we always do at this time of year, does it matter that the 2021 grand final will feel like just another day in Melbourne?
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