“You can’t run away forever,” the late Jim Steinman sang, “but there’s nothing wrong with getting a good head start.” The AFL has been outrunning Covid for nearly 18 months now. Its ability to duck and weave, to keep it at arm’s length, to find a way, to upend an entire competition at an hour’s notice, and to somehow produce a half-decent product, has been remarkable. Adhering to Covid protocols, finding sterile corridors, chartering flights at $100,000 a pop, and whisking compromised players out as they warm up – they’ve done it all. Stuff putting a three-star general in charge of the vaccine rollout – hand the job to an AFL apparatchik.
These days, you can type that sentence and not be carted out by men in white lab coats. And that is sad, really. It is sad that a bunch of football administrators seem to have a better grasp of logistics, and a greater sense of urgency, than our federal parliament of chancers, flakers, shoulder-shruggers and charlatans. For the AFL, it was always a race.
But when it comes to this year’s grand final – and the finals series generally – it is almost out of aces and running out of time. As the Dylan song goes, you’ve gotta serve somebody, and the AFL has a lot of key stakeholders to consider.
First, they are beholden to the host broadcasters. In 2015, on the day James Hird resigned as Essendon coach, the league signed an astonishing broadcast rights deal. Flanking Gillon McLachlan at the announcement, looking slightly less ghoulish than usual, were Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes. From that day on, it was their sport. For anyone who caught Brian Taylor and Wayne Carey’s commentary on Friday night, that is a grim thing to ponder. Their performance was grounds for 14-day quarantine in itself. But it is a TV sport now. It is content. It’s about eyeballs, not bums on seats. “Play it in front of a heaving crowd or play in it an empty, echoing stadium, we don’t care one whit,” you can imagine them telling McLachlan.
Secondly, the AFL has a contract with the Melbourne Cricket Club. “Our view and our expectation is that we are playing the grand final at the MCG”, McLachlan said on Friday. That afternoon, his chairman, from whom we rarely hear, canvassed the prospect of a 15,000-strong crowd. It would, like all grand finals, skew heavily towards the corporate and the cashed-up. That number of people, the vast majority of them wearing suits, on grand final Day? What a depressing thought.
A few weeks ago, on Footy Classified, Eddie McGuire proposed the grandest of plans for a full MCG on the last Saturday in September. Sometimes I reckon it’s the funniest show on television. They all sit there like they’re reporting on a sub-Saharan famine. Maguire’s plan presented as the greatest logistical challenge since the march on Moscow. It was quickly kiboshed, but at least he had a crack. For all his faults, he loves the sport, loves Melbourne, and always thinks outside the square.
More than anything, of course, the AFL is at the mercy of the various state premiers, their chief health officers and the Delta variant itself. Many of us are currently penned in our houses. We are conditioned for caution. We do not plan more than half a day ahead. The AFL itself is programmed – to run with this era’s most objectionable buzzword – to pivot. They will do whatever it takes to avoid an empty stadium on grand final day. Even if it means tearing up contracts. Even if it means a last-minute dash out of Tullamarine airport. Even if it means grovelling at the feet of interstate premiers.
With that in mind, the most important person in this whole scenario is probably the Western Australia premier. He’s the hard man of the west. Mark McGowan has Stalin-like approval ratings, no opposition, no Covid, one of the best stadiums in Australia and a population who love and understand football. The Joondalup Resort in Perth has been ordered to reserve all bookings until the end of September. McGowan is apparently open to the idea. But it will be on his terms. If there is a drop of Covid in the Perth sewage system, he’ll pull the pin on crowds. Hell, he’ll probably secede.
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Nearly 30 years ago, a brutally efficient Western Australian side took the VFL/AFL cup out of Victoria for the first time. The local side completely gassed it in the second half. Their coach didn’t speak to his players for months. The original three-verse West Coast song blared to sullen and rapidly emptying stands. The ground announcer, the late Mike Williamson, implored the crowd to show some respect. For footy-loving Victorians, it felt like the world was going to end.
Victorians aren’t so precious these days. On a grey, dreary grand final day last year, with the game shipped off to safer and sunnier shores, locals in Richmond and Geelong scarves tottered aimlessly around the MCG concourse and surrounding parklands. “They were like homing pigeons,” Gideon Haigh said the next day. But the Gabba’s grand final helped. It filled a hole. The sky did not cave in, and the MCG did not turn to rubble.
McLachlan, like all of us, will pore over the Covid numbers each morning. He has had a fine pandemic, but he may finally be snookered. To stay put in Melbourne, or to risk it all interstate. For Gil, it will be one of the toughest calls of his career. For the rest of us on the eastern seaboard, it is probably the least of our concerns.
