How old am I, you ask?
Well, I am so old I remember when Aussie rules was purely a down-south thing! In black and white they used to run around in a game that looked like a cross between an upturned bowl of spaghetti and the fall of Saigon, and all we could do was wish them well without having the first clue what it was about.
Brodie Grundy and the Swans are riding a wave of excitement.Credit: Getty Images
I am so old, I remember when, every year one team or other from – get this – Melbourne, used to exclusively win the grand final, and while if the wind was blowing in the right direction, we might hear a distant roar coming from somewhere south on a Saturday arvo in September, we didn’t care, particularly.
(Do you remember, too? It was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, a balanced diet meant putting tomato sauce on your meat pie and Aunty still broadcast sport.)
And no, I am not here to poke gentle fun at Melbourne teams and the good-hearted folk who still support them, despite everything.
They try, they really try.
Sydney Swans fans celebrate after the siren against Port Adelaide.Credit: Getty Images
And they mean well.
After all, in the face of our champions strutting their stuff on the field of dreams, the Victorian Lawnmowers can always take solace in the fact that history itself will smile benevolently on them for doing their bit to contribute to the invention of Aussie Rules, before we Sydneysiders took it over, refined it, and – hear me clearly, Eddie, Jeff, Mick and Hamish – dominated it.
Oh, do settle down.
And take heart from the fact that you Melburnians needn’t panic about losing the perpetual rights to hosting the grand final. Look to Wimbledon as your noble precedent. There were whole decades when an English person didn’t win anything more than the toss on centre court, but Wimbledon remained the natural home of the most prestigious tennis tournament of the lot – by reasons of historicity, atmosphere and strawberries. So too with the ’G.
Swans superstar Isaac Heeney.Credit: Getty Images
While everyone north of the Murray agrees that the best thing to come out of Melbourne is the Hume Highway, visiting there for a weekend to go and get that shining AFL trophy thingammy can be a delight if you don’t mind the haunted eyes of the locals as they gaze longingly at the departing silverware which shines even more brightly from their glistening tears.
At this point, we must pause while our friends the Melburnians point out that their city, too, has a champion rugby league team, called the . . . the . . . the . . . oh, come on, don’t say you can’t immediately conjure the club’s name?
It rhymes with “warm” and comes on strong like thunder?
The Storm?
Melbourne at least have the Storm this weekend.Credit: Getty Images
Yes, that’s it!
Yes, indeed, the fact that Victoria also has a great rugby league team the way we in Sydney have two great AFL teams is interesting, but no more than that. The difference is that while not one member of the Storm was ever wheeled down Collins Street in a pram – for they are merely a transplanted Sydney team with little in the way of local football ecology around to sustain them – that is not the case in our town.
Despite the efforts of commentators like your humble correspondent when I was young and stupid to put a stop to all the nonsense, the truth is that Aussie rules goalposts have been spreading all over Sydney for decades now, including in former purely rugby league strongholds like the western suburbs and rugby union strongholds like, (thank you, I know,) boys’ private schools on the north shore and in the eastern suburbs.
The point is that while Melbourne has a great rugby league team the same way that land-locked Switzerland once held the America’s Cup – a curiosity, borne of well-placed money, but no more than that – the Swans now sit atop a genuinely vibrant local Aussie Rules community that continues to grow. And when the Swannies win on Saturday, the city as a whole will celebrate, unlike the Storm victories, which don’t make enough of a splash to dampen a Toorak poodle.
But, yes, we must also acknowledge that the struggle – if you want to call it that – for Aussie rules supremacy is not an exclusively Sydney preserve. Against all odds, the Greater Western Sydney Giants didn’t make the grand final, which is a pity as it sort of seems against nature these days not to have the grand final as an all-Sydney affair. Instead, the Swannies will be playing some mob from north of the Tweed, which I think go by the name of the Brisbane Lions.
We needn’t worry about them.
The Queenslanders tend to make an inordinate amount of noise about their football supremacy. (See, State of Origin.)
But, these days, they lose anyway. (See, State of Origin.)
In sum, praise the Lord and pass the champers.
Swannies to win on Saturday arvo, not as a Wowee-Can-You-Believe-It??? thing, but merely as part of the natural order.
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