Dermott Brereton, one of the greatest players of his generation, joined a chorus of disillusioned voices last week when he said he doesn’t love the game anymore. “I love Australian rules football, but I don’t love the game now,” Brereton said on SEN last week.
Brereton believes coaches are making the game unnecessarily complicated and that today’s players are robotic. “We would write up on the board to have 10 tackles per quarter and we never lost a game,” said Brereton. “If you get 40 now you are a low-pressure team and that is because you need saturation of numbers around the ball. That’s just the nature of the game now.”
Brereton lays the blame at the feet of coaching panels that put in “60 hours a week to make their club win”. In his day, Brereton says the players used to nut it out for themselves. “If you took this current game style and immediately swapped it to the 80s or 90s style of football where you barely got rotated we would wipe the floor with them.”
It’s an impossible and almost futile argument, partly because those of us who grew up watching Brereton are not objectively entering a debate (despite another round of AFL that outside of North Melbourne’s upset over Sydney and Brisbane pushing Collingwood, had little to recommend it) as much participating in a fable of longing and satisfaction.
Nostalgia is a very human trait. In The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Stephanie Coontz notes that when school children returning from summer holiday are asked to name good and bad things about their summer, the lists tend to be equally long. “As the year goes on, however, if the exercise is repeated, the good list grows longer, and the bad list gets shorter, until by the end of the year the children are describing not their actual vacations but their idealised image of vacation.”
This is to say that consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to include or omit certain things. Or to put it more simply, anything we process by memory is fiction. So it is with our collective “memory” of football. There were a lot of awful games in the 1970s and 1980s. Selective memory is not a bad thing, but it’s a serious problem when it leads adults to try to re-create a past that never really existed.
In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is also the mother of the nine muses. The past always seems so much more vivid and more generous than the present. Football’s “good old days” are larger than life because invariably, we’re talking about the game we loved as children, when the footballers we watched were… well, larger than life.
If Woody Allen had chosen Melbourne, rather than Paris as his muse, Midnight in Melbourne may have featured Guy Pearce as Mike, a disillusioned Fox Footy writer. Mike wanders the back lanes of Melbourne when at the stroke of midnight, a Holden Kingswood pulls beside him, Centerfold by The J. Geils Band blaring from the tape deck. He joins the permed and mulleted passengers in duffle coats on their way to Windy Hill to watch Essendon play Hawthorn and sees Leigh Matthews snap a point post.
Melbourne appears perpetually alive, not only because of the ghosts of famous footballers, but because the suburbs are the source and setting of so much of their work – by day, and at the social clubs by night. The Victorian government’s $225m makeover of the Etihad Stadium precinct is a generation away.
Over the course of his visits back to the 1980s, Mike develops a crush on Debbie, a woman who has been keeping company with Mark Maclure, Roger Merrett and Gary Buckenara. But like Adriana in Midnight in Paris, who wishes she could exchange the dreary Paris of the 1920s for the Belle Époque, Debbie longs for the Melbourne of the 1950s. Debbie’s dissatisfaction with her own era mirrors Mike’s… mirrors our own.
This is largely because the joy we have for the game began in our childhood, and it wasn’t predicated on game styles or tactics which seem to consume us in adulthood, nor did it endure the minutia from a five-minute media conference that becomes a 30-minute talking point on sports radio.
But all this analysis and white noise does not an era make. When you boil the game down to its irreducible core, the present era has plenty to recommend it. And it will take more than seven weeks of sometimes ugly and predominately disappointing football to dilute that sense of wonder that got us hooked to begin with.
Last year was one of the most unpredictable and engrossing seasons of all time, and produced one of greatest individual seasons in living memory – the Dusty fend off is already as iconic as Haydn Bunton Junior, ball tucked under his arm in mid-flight. Before that we had the “Bontempelli bump” and one of the more remarkable journeys to a premiership. And through it all we’ve had the brilliance of Buddy Franklin, the reinvention of the midfielder through Nathan Fyfe and Patrick Cripps, and one of the greatest, most creative small forwards ever known in Eddie Betts.
Who knows, 30 years from now today’s generation of kids might by pensively evoking a time where you used to get more than 100 tackles in a game?
If there’s one thing we can be sure of, is that the game will change, and that’s OK, it’s part of its beauty – the game evolves, and it offers each generation something of their own.
