It’s almost 38 years since Monash University history professor Ian Turner, with his tongue in his cheek, coined the phrase the Barassi Line to denote the invisible border that divided the nation into two camps: a huge geographical expanse in which Australian rules was the dominant football code, and a much smaller (though equally populous) area in the nation’s north-east in which rugby league and union were more popular.
Turner could have called this line the Raudonikis Line, of course, but he didn’t. Why? Perhaps because naming a perfectly good imaginary line after someone who played a game designed for brainless thugs would have given that game a status it didn’t deserve; or that Turner, being from Melbourne, had been brainwashed into thinking that someone (Reg Barassi, wasn’t it?) who played a sport that is the human equivalent of seagulls fighting over a hot chip was worth referencing.
Really, you’d almost be tempted to call Turner a fool but for the fact he wasn’t thick enough to name his line after a rugby union player, one who’s name wouldn’t have been recognised by anyone outside of the members of a sports-coat appreciation society.
As for the round ball game? Would Turner have had cause to even consider whatever influence it may have had? Surely not, for what was football back then but a game for sheilas, wogs and poofters, one that had about as much hold on our sport-loving populace as teetotalism.
Oh the late ’70s. Such unenlightened times, such hairy-chested parochialism, right? If only we were in a position to judge. When you scan the Australian sporting landscape today, and when you take in its media, and listen to and read the comments of fans who interact with it and each other, not a lot seems to have changed. Football’s imprint on the national consciousness has certainly become deeper since 1978 (thanks as much to the Socceroos’ success as the establishment of the A-League in 2005), and the major league, union and Australian rules competitions have all established teams in “enemy” territory, but the Barassi Line is still in place. So too is the sneering and sometimes downright hostility some fans – and media outlets – appear to hold towards rival codes and their supporters.
Witness the Sunday Telegraph’s 22 November article that published the names and photographs of 198 people banned from A-League matches. As subtle as an effigy burning, it reignited the long-standing gripe the A-League’s active fans have had towards FFA’s banning procedures, it saw these same fans boycott a round of matches in their effort to force changes to these procedures and, with the help of professional flame-fanner Alan Jones, it whipped up a conflagration of anti-football sentiment. This roused the trolls into trip-trapping beneath the line to remind A-League fans what an inherently boring game they follow, how violent their game’s supporters are (or, at the very least, appear to be – and what’s the difference, right?), and that the A-League may as well be packed up and put away considering it will always be inferior to the bigger European leagues.
As sure as profound regret follows one’s decision to open the door to a salesperson from an electricity retailer, this triggered a return of serve, and the debate, if you can call it that, was overwhelmingly of the “my dad is bigger, richer, better looking and can run faster than your dad” variety. It’s all so petty, tedious and predictable, but it’s what we do: Australian rules football gives it to league, league sticks it back, and rugby union barks around the edges like a little white dog hoping to get a nip in as it tries to avoid a kick to its well-groomed flanks.
All three, meantime, sink the slipper into football (known to them as soccer) despite it having positioned itself as a summer sport; one not, in actual fact, in competition with them. If you’d think that would cut football some slack you must have come down in the last shower.
Australia is considered unusual in that it offers four major football competitions within a relatively small market place of 23 million people. But for a nation that supposedly confers on sport the importance of religion there’s no convincing evidence that we’re ecumenical in our tastes; that we’re just as likely to be thrilled by the gifts of Johnathan Thurston, David Pocock, Cyril Rioli or Aaron Mooy. No, rather than gorging on all that the various codes have to offer, it appears we tend to limit ourselves to one, possibly two. It’s almost as if to define yourself as a passionate supporter of many codes is to announce yourself as a passionate support of none.
At the same time we fans adopt the attitude of our favoured code’s governing body by considering the others as “rivals”. So as the AFL, NRL, A-League and Super Rugby talk of, and engage in, the battle to improve their market share – a battle that involves sorties into each other’s territory and the building of outposts so fortified as to hold the weight of Israel Folau’s mighty thighs – we fall into rank and, almost reflexively, circle our wagons and become defenders of the one true way.
There isn’t, of course, one true way, any more than there’s a best flavour of ice-cream (apart from vanilla, that is). Let’s be honest: our preference for a code of football hasn’t been based on any clear-eyed comparison of the various sports’ merits (“Hmm, football employs the feet more than the other codes and I really do love feet so it’s football for me!”) but, rather, is usually an accident of birth. Don’t we simply tend to follow whatever sport is the most popular in the house, school, city or state in which we grew up?
And once we do choose a sport, or, rather, it chooses us, we grow up with it and the game’s stories entwine with our own to such an extent that even if we extricate ourselves we’ll be transported back in time at the mere whiff of a meat pie and sauce. Incense works the same way on lapsed Catholics.
Further complicating matters are conflicts of class (league v union), geography (Melbourne v Sydney) and ethnicity (football still being the preferred choice of immigrants which, in the eyes of some, is its biggest crime). Add in our natural inclination to be wary of, or even fear “the other”, and you can understand how our bias is maintained.
The media, naturally, plays a huge role in driving our parochialism. Given the amounts various outlets pay to broadcast sports, and given the investment of staff and resources within the sporting markets in which they operate, TV networks, broadcasters and newspapers tend to hitch their wagon to one particular sport to such an extent that often the line between reporting and promoting a sport is not so much trampled under foot as obliterated.
Unfortunately the promotion of one sport can be done, in part, by the negative presentation (or the willful ignoring) of another. For instance, even in the height of summer the number of AFL-related stories in the Age or Herald-Sun (or NRL-related stories in the Daily Telegraph or Courier Mail, for that matter), vastly outweighs any on the A-League. And if you’re looking for an NRL story in the Melbourne media in mid-winter, you’ll need time, application, and possibly a magnifying glass. Unless of course some NRL player has got himself into hot water. Those sorts of stories are easy enough to find. And the situation is more or less reversed in Sydney – although as a purveyor of both cities’ sporting media my observation is that the AFL gets a better run in Sydney than league or union does in Melbourne. Decide for yourself whether that is down to the longer tentacles of the AFL or a more broadminded attitude in Sydney.
If these are examples of small-time bias there are bigger ones to consider, such as the AFL’s and NRL’s efforts to obstruct Australia’s 2022 World Cup bid (by denying football access to the big stadia it needed), or Channel Seven’s purchase of football broadcasting rights in 1998 only to bury its coverage in what one Channel Seven executive later said was a deliberate attempt to suffocate the game. As the bumper sticker said, “Nobody screws soccer like Seven”. That makes Channel Nine’s recently-defunct witching-hour coverage of the NRL in Melbourne, and its leaving of NRL grand final coverage prior to the awarding of the premiership trophy, seem like child’s play.
So where does this leave football in Australia? On the one hand, considering where it’s been, it’s in a pretty good place. The Socceroos are flying the flag, the A-League has established itself as a serious player in our sporting milieu, and the number of people playing the game at the grassroots level is greater than ever. But as this year’s ratings and crowd numbers will have reminded the game’s governing body, if it wants to maintain and indeed increase its presence (and of course it does, for no matter how many fans might be satisfied with what they’ve got, growth is the mantra of any business) FFA needs to ensure the quality of the product continues to grow, that enough people see the game either live or on TV, that more grassroots players become A-League fans, and that the minority of anti-social supporters who do exist don’t hand opponents a stick with which to beat the game around the head.
It wouldn’t hurt, either, insofar as it’s possible, to attract the interest (attracting love is too far-fetched) of fans of league, Australian rules and union and help them realise there’s more to summer in Australia than cricket. But that will surely have less to do with FFA than with the ability of these fans to put their biases aside. There’s a cornucopia of wonderful football out there should they dare to have a taste.
