We were no longer watching the game. Hadn’t been for some time. We were watching for our heads, and children, our eyes trained nervously upon the tier above us. That’s where the missiles were coming from. Where the thugs were.
Some were pressed against the railing of tier three, bellowing and grabbing their crotches. Aggressive, unrepentant, they visibly enjoyed our fear and astonishment. Full bottles crashed nearby. They weren’t purchased to be consumed. We lost count of how many were landing. A child was hit. A man was bleeding. Previously, the missiles were flares and a broken seat.
It was an historic football match. The first time the two Melbourne A-league clubs had met in the finals. This one was a semi – one game away from the big one – and Etihad stadium was very close to sold out. 51,000 fans.
For me, a Melbourne City season ticket holder, it was the unexpected culmination to an ordinary season. A happy end to the dismal draws and late capitulations. I had rarely missed a game. So in the preceding week I gratefully digested the pre-match hype, reflecting agreeably on the official belief in the code’s snowballing popularity.
Its time had come, and Football Federation Australia announced their intention to secure the code as the triumphant one in Australia by 2035. It was hard to tell if it was an expression of insecurity, preening ambition, or merely a calculating attempt to leverage the excitement around a well-attended season and Australia’s status as Asian champs.
Things started breaking down early. Friends walking across the footbridge to the ground watched someone launch a flare into the crowd and strike a man on the back of his head. Flares can burn in excess of 1,000 degrees celsius.
This was outside the stadium, but soon I would witness the reckless use of them inside it. In response to Victory’s first goal, one was fired from the top tier. It narrowly missed a pitch-side photographer. Suddenly engulfed in acrid orange smoke, he covered his face with his jumper.
This would be the best of it. Irritation gave way to fear and loathing as bourbon and rubbish poured down upon us. Then the full water bottles. Thrown from such a height, they assume a wicked velocity. Then a large section of a seat, torn from its moorings, crashed into the head of a woman a few metres away from us. She was shaken, but miraculously okay. This large bit of plastic and metal, flung from two stories above, could have been fatal. Children were just feet away.
With 20 minutes to play, the missiles were constant. We weren’t sure what all of them were, could only register loud thumps as they crashed into the concrete near us. One man, incensed and panicking, screamed at a police officer standing on the offending tier above us: “Do your fucking job, we need protection!”.
There were never any police in our bay. The man on my left, who had brought his two children, had no answer for his daughter’s anxious inquiry about what was going on. He took them and left.
Unhappily, I was wearing Melbourne City’s colours. In this section City fans were outnumbered 5:1 and as my mate and I copped deranged abuse from people both above and behind us, we thought it was probably time to leave. Most of the bay had already.
As I walked up the aisle to exit, something smashed into my back. I turned and paused, only for my mate to push me ahead. A brawl was breaking out just feet behind me; one guy, who reminded me of Begbie from Trainspotting, was screaming incoherently at us and seemingly trying to wrest his seat from the ground.
Never before had I felt unsafe at a sporting event. Not in a hundred or more occasions, at different grounds and for different sports, both here and overseas. Banter, yes. Occasional abuse, fine. Nothing I’d seen before came close to this. Before our bay self-evacuated – police seemed incapable or indifferent to helping us – faces were bent in rage and confusion. The match became irrelevant. I zipped up my jacket to conceal my strip, knowing if we waited until full-time to leave, the odds were high we’d be beaten up.
The following day, Football Federation Australia released a statement about the game. I assumed it would lead with some recognition of the violence, if defensively pronounced. Rather, it heartily celebrated the crowd. The headline was: “FFA congratulates fans...” (it later altered the headline to “FFA thanks majority of fans” after criticism).
Buried in the middle of the original release were wan words about some “anti-social behaviour” predictably dismissed as the work of “a minority”. While the amended release acknowledges the violence more fully, it is a useful defence. It sought to evade the scale and origins of the violence, its near-uniqueness to football, and the ineffectiveness of police and club to stop it. It is public relations flare smoke. It cauterises the phenomenon, and retards hard questions.
For instance, how many thugs attended the game who had previously been banned? Many, I’ve heard. I’ve also heard there are serious problems in effectively enforcing prohibitions.
Allow me to preempt criticism of these observations. I know what they’ll be; I heard them in the urinal of the pub across the street from the ground, and in bitter, drearily myopic responses on Twitter.
Many Victory fans, arrested by the psychology of tribalism, will assume my criticism is the bad faith of partisanship – as if disgust at the endangerment of children might only be registered if it were committed by rival fans. Then there’s the infantile paranoia – again a function of tribalism – that assumes criticism of football crowds is the work of a saboteur, an “egg-ball lover” inventing grievances to keep the sport in its place.
Both are cretinous abandonments of responsibility. I will report what I’ve seen, anxious to keep the beautiful game from the influence of thugs. I would prefer more fans had an interest in awkward truths. Would prefer that more fans absorbed these stories and transformed them into shame and embarrassment.
Yes, the few are ruining it for everyone. But the “few” at other codes is approaching zero. By arguing the “few” you are complicit in the garbage, incapable of demanding more: club sanctions, for instance, and a revised, co-operative relationship between club and police. The game is being damaged by apologists. This includes the FFA, and the patronising congratulations of its original release.
