History will be made on Friday night when the siren sounds for the first game of the AFL women’s competition. The decision by the AFL to move the opening game between Carlton and Collingwood from Olympic Park Oval to the larger Princes Park is a huge vote of confidence in the fledgling competition and suggests the women’s game can put a new twist on an old tradition.
For more than a century, Australian football clubs played at their own suburban stadiums, but since 2005 all nine Melbourne clubs in the AFL – Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Hawthorn, Melbourne, North Melbourne, Richmond, St. Kilda and the Western Bulldogs – have shared the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Etihad Stadium.
For the AFLW season, however, matches will be played at historic grounds such as Princes Park and the Western Oval in Melbourne, Norwood Oval and Thebarton Oval in Adelaide, Fremantle Oval and Rushton Park in Western Australia and Manuka Oval in the ACT.
“Those local grounds had so much power because they were so closely aligned with the clubs that were embedded in the suburb,” says Joy Damousi, a historian and lifelong Collingwood supporter. “There was a real spiritual connection.”
The policy of ground rationalisation was a key feature of the transition from the state-based football leagues to the national AFL, but it also created some nostalgia for the traditional clubs and their grounds. To borrow a line from the 45th president of the United States, for years the old stadiums lay scattered like tombstones across the landscape of Melbourne. A few now host pre-season and reserve fixtures, while others have been returned to community sporting clubs and local dog-walkers.
For Les Street, an academic researcher and self-described “stadium nerd”, ground rationalisation helped drive him away from supporting AFL football altogether. From 1983 until the late 1990s, Street would travel all over Melbourne to attend Australian rules fixtures.
“It was quite adventurous, especially as a teenager, going to parts of Melbourne that you really didn’t have much idea about,” says Street, who grew up in Melbourne’s outer-east. “Catching a train to Footscray was almost like going to another planet. Before the internet, to cross over to the other side of the city was like going to Mars.”
Likewise Andy Fuller, a Richmond supporter and editor of the Reading Sideways blog, has become disillusioned with top-flight footy. Fuller, 39, has sworn off Etihad Stadium completely, and is considering not attending AFL games any more.
“I’ve been overwhelmed by the commercialised nature of going to a game at the MCG,” says Fuller. “Its given me little choice but to feel a degree of nostalgia for the 1980s and early 1990s. What I’ve enjoyed doing as a Richmond fan is going to the VFL games at Punt Road Oval. You might only get a couple of hundred people attending the games, but you get all these textual and sensory experiences that you don’t get at the MCG. At the Jack Dyer Stand at Punt Road Oval, it’s wooden, and you immediately get this wonderful sound from the crowd, and even just from hearing the sound of your footsteps going up the stairs.”
A love of suburban football grounds led Mike Hugo, a 34-year-old Port Adelaide supporter, to create several prints for his Footy Places series. His bold designs capture images of Carlton’s Princes Park, Fitzroy’s Brunswick Street Oval, Footscray’s Western Oval, Richmond’s Punt Road Oval as well as several historic grounds in Adelaide and Tasmania.
“I’ve always had an interest in architecture and football, so the natural progression was to combine the two,” says Hugo, “I had to keep in mind the intellectual property of the AFL – I can’t use logos or jumpers or players, which is fair enough, so it led me to the idea that footy grounds are just as well known as the footy teams. They’re typically public places, owned by local councils, and are often open at all times. It’s a form of architecture that’s often overlooked. There’s no footy in the picture, but [the prints] give people an instant memory or connection to a place.”
This sense of place hasn’t only been eroded in the AFL. In the NRL, the cavernous, 83,500-seat ANZ Stadium will host five clubs in 2017 – South Sydney, Canterbury-Bankstown, Wests Tigers, St. George-Illawarra and Parramatta. Yet Street believes that the NRL, more than any other football code, has retained some sense of localism as games are still held at smaller, suburban grounds in Cronulla, Brookvale, St. George, Penrith, Belmore and Leichhardt.
Meanwhile football has gentrified itself almost beyond recognition. Since the demise of the National Soccer League in 2004 and the establishment of the A-League in 2005, football moved out of the suburban grounds and into large, centrally located stadiums that are good for families and for television.
Indeed it is television that will likely dictate the future of all the major football codes. Yet for some, this has negatively impacted on what it means to actually follow their team. “At one stroke,” once wrote the author Thomas Keneally, “television challenged the rationale of [rugby league], leaving it twisted and hanging halfway between its working-class, regional beginnings and the sort of professionalism which characterises American sport.”
The question is, of course, whether any of this matters for the fan who still pays at the gate. Football’s crowds are bigger than ever, it is more affordable for most of the Sydney-based NRL clubs to share ANZ Stadium, and in Melbourne, Etihad Stadium and the MCG are conveniently located near the centre of the city, better able to cater for large crowds, with superior facilities and greater levels of comfort and safety.
More than just the aesthetic and spiritual qualities, however, what has been lost is the potential for club’s home grounds to impact upon the game itself. The forgotten footy grounds of Melbourne had different dimensions and idiosyncrasies, such as Essendon’s former home ground, Windy Hill, which was exposed to elements that made kicking for goal a tricky exercise.
The modern stadiums also change the relationship between supporters and players. Think of the old Moorabbin Oval with its Animal Enclosure, for example, or Victoria Park, once described as “the most feral piece of real estate in all of football”, or the atmosphere at the now-demolished Middle Park in South Melbourne. Those were intimidating cauldrons that gave clubs their identities as well as a true home ground advantage.
“Supporters become transformed when they’re at their own ground,” says Damousi. “The passion was so intense, and it’s not quite the same at the MCG or at Etihad these days.”
The problem for those who prefer attending matches at traditional stadiums is that second-tier sport can be quite a lonely experience. The faded grandstands and empty hills serve not only to remind us how much the game has changed, but also how irreversible the process is.
In this regard, the return to suburban grounds in the AFLW might provide an interesting alternative. Hugo already has plans to design a print for Thebarton Oval, which will host the Adelaide Crows’ match on Saturday afternoon, while Street and Fuller hope that it will encourage footy fans to demand more games be played at clubs’ traditional homes. The opening match between Collingwood and Carlton on Friday night is expected to draw more than 10,000 spectators.
“I think it’s a wonderful initiative, because it revives the relevance of those grounds,” says Damousi. “The grounds are almost like museums now. Reviving them and giving them a whole new lease of life will be a fantastic next chapter in the game.”
