Grey Morris: Time to get serious about NTFL player welfare in summer sun

IT’S time to put greater focus on the health and wellbeing of players who have to battle the brutal Territory sun during day games, writes Grey Morris

IT was the quiet Beatle, the late George Harrison, who said it doesn’t take long to go from the age of 17 to 57.

Harrison then proceeded to flick his fingers in a 2000 interview, indicating the amount of time it takes 40 years to pass us by.

Those words came back to me this week when I drove past Gardens Oval, the mecca of Top End football since 1954 when it opened for business of the Australian football variety.

It has been 63 years and one month since St Mary’s and the Buffaloes opened the ‘54-55 season in a campaign that culminated in the green and gold jumpers winning their first premiership.

The hot Territory sun was a problem back then and more than six decades later it still beats down on the unsuspecting backs of footballers of both genders, mature players and youngsters just starting out in the game.

Sadly, Gardens has never been a night-time arena, catering only for mid morning, lunchtime and afternoon matches at NTFL and representative level.

It was the norm through the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, 90s and the noughties to emerge from matches sunburnt, exhausted and desperate for fluid intake, in several cases a cold stubby for hard-bitten Territorians used to nothing else.

So it was with generation after generation of Territory footballers, brave the intense heat and humidity in order to get their hands on a greasy football and kick it towards four vertical posts.

That was until Christmas in 1994 when four light towers were erected at Marrara’s three-year-old Football Park.

A joint initiative of the then NTFL administration and the NT Government, there were collective sighs of relief that could be heard at Adelaide River and even Pine Creek if you cupped your hands to your ears and listened closely.

No more footy in the middle of the day, the chance for players to exercise their skills in the still humid conditions, but without a blowtorch on their face, back, arms, legs and torso.

We all thought the good times were here and that Territory football had moved into the modern era instead of copping barbs from southerners who kept telling us those people in Darwin who play footy in the summer have something wrong with them.

But one month short of 23 years since Nightcliff and Southern Districts played that first match under lights, nothing much has changed.

League matches are played under lights at Palmerston’s Asbuild Oval and Marrara, where the ground was renamed TIO Stadium in the early noughties.

But all the competitions below Premier League are still using handfuls of 50+ sunscreen and gulping huge amounts of water and ice as they plough through the Top End heat.

Granted football is an outdoor game and the stifling conditions may have been good enough for our forefathers to play in.

But that was yesteryear, the winds of change and a greater focus on health and wellbeing demands better playing conditions for players of all ages.

Plans for lights at Gardens and Nightcliff Oval are steps in the right direction. May the people in power expedite those plans to make steel towers and light globes sooner rather than later.