Melbourne was awash on Friday with prams and kids in oversized guernseys, stamping and straining at the barricades that lined Spring Street for the annual grand final parade.
It was a sight to make an AFL executive smile. Like tobacco companies, the men and women who run Australian football know you need to hook them young.
For Jack, loving this game, and the Eagles, was fate. “He was born the day of the ’06 grand final,” his dad, Steven, says. “Who else is he going to barrack for?”
Jack, who is inexplicably wielding a green bucket, announces, “I got a footy this year!” Eagles midfielder Chris Masten gave it to him after a game. He even signed it. An obsession was sealed.
To understand the hold this peculiar game has on its fans, and particularly on Melbourne, you might start in childhood. The hokey team songs, the old WEG premiership posters, the wheeling out, each year, of Mike Brady to sing Up There Cazaly: it imprints itself on the kids, and transports the adults back decades.
“This one’s mad for it,” Tracy says, motioning at her bespectacled son in a Hawks jumper. “All he does is watch footy on TV.”
His younger brother hovers nearby. At age four, he knows nothing but Hawthorn grand finals. Asked his favourite player, he offers the back of his jumper. The number 37 is signed, “To Jed. From Jed Anderson.”
“How much will the Hawks win by?” I ask.
They confer briefly. “Eighty-one hundred points.”
The past two decades have transformed the AFL. Nobody plays at Princes Park any more, nor Windy Hill, nor Waverley, a ground whose carpark – really, an endless field of mud – I remember trudging across regularly with my dad throughout the 90s, that brief interregnum between Hawthorn dynasties.
The MCG today serves Korean beef sliders, diet Coke in glass bottles and a “Left Bank Ficelle”. In one cafe the pie of the day (lamb and rosemary) comes on a wooden board and costs $20. Sports betting utterly saturates the game, and the latest deal to televise it cost a record $2.5b. Football is at the height of its powers.
This year has brought a few changes. Once again, fans are sometimes allowed onto the ground after the final siren for kick-to-kick. In March, by AFL edict, the price of pies and drinks at the game was reduced. With the eager support of the AFL, the Friday before the grand final has been declared a public holiday, driving today’s surge of young families to the parade lines.
The AFL’s new chief executive, Gillon McLachlan, seems to understand what fuels this game: obsession, forged early on, passed down from parent to child. Most of the time, anyway.
“My old man, he’s St Kilda,” Matt says, taking refuge in the shadows of the MCG with his wife and two children. “I was persuaded by my oldest cousin to take on the Hawks. It was in the late 80s, they were the best team then.
“Dad? He wasn’t overly happy about it.”
His wife, Dina, sports a brown and gold scarf. “I was Essendon,” she says.
“She’s Hawks by marriage,” Matt beams.
The kids are in Hawks colours too, I point out. “Do they have a choice?” Dina says.
The occasional family sports both Hawks and Eagles attire. “How did that happen?” I ask one.
“Well, it was a mistake,” the husband shrugs. “I should have married someone else.”
Matthew and his brood are also lounging on the grass, his son in Hawks colours, his daughter in ordinary dress. I ask about the mismatch, and he fixes me with a grimace.
“So we’re at a Hawthorn-Essendon game six years ago, my wife was pregnant, and it was the last round of the year,” he says. “I said to my wife, if Hawthorn wins, our first baby is going to go for Hawthorn. And if Bombers win, our first can go for the Bombers.
“We were expected to win,” he says. “I thought it was a shoo-in.
“And we were winning, until half-time, when Matthew Lloyd came and cleaned one of our boys up. And, yeah. The rest is history.”
Few on Friday dwell on the challenges the game has faced in 2015. Embedding itself so deeply in Australian culture means you get the dark sides, too. A conspicuous absence from tomorrow’s procession of retiring players will be one of the game’s best ever, Adam Goodes. A growing awareness of sexism around football is getting harder to ignore.
If the past 20 years have professionalised the sport’s culture, the next 20 might be about sanitising it. The AFL will be transformed again – but not completely. The day before the grand final, players will still parade past in utes, watched by kids in flowing guernseys, screaming their lungs out in the crowd.
