To younger generations Anzac Day and Australian football might go hand-in-hand, but they didn’t always provide such an obvious big-ticket coupling.
Prior to Essendon and Collingwood setting the wheels in motion in 1995, it had been just another public holiday on which the then-VFL would schedule one or two games of varying attractiveness and at a variety of venues.
The first Anzac Day game I covered professionally couldn’t have been further removed from the MCG blockbuster the occasion now provides.
It was in 1985, at the now-defunct Waverley, and the competing clubs were Fitzroy and St Kilda, then last and third-last on the ladder, and which to that stage of the season had won just one game between them.
If there was no great thought given to turning the day into a bigger showpiece for the game, it was as much because it was an occasion which, beyond servicemen and women and their families, wasn’t seen as a particularly big deal.
It certainly is now. And as the annual Essendon-Collingwood clash has grown in stature and sense of occasion, so has the recognition of the significance of Anzac Day in its own right.
Mutually beneficial bedfellows for 25 years now. Not always without a jarring note or two, mind you.
Over the years there's been agitation between groups who want more attention paid to the sacrifices made by our war veterans, and those who see the occasion as an unnecessary glorification of war.
There’s been cringeworthy moments when reports of the games themselves sought to draw inappropriate analogies between acts of courage on the football field and acts of bravery on the battlefield.
But one thing I couldn’t help but notice this Anzac Day was the absence of those shrill notes. As if even those driven to those sorts of ideological positions had found a sort of peace and reconciliation, an acceptance of the different meanings the day has for various people.
Those in the media who chose to focus on the unedifying booing following the game itself when Collingwood skipper Scott Pendlebury accepted his third Anzac Day medal, were missing the bigger picture on a day when it felt like football and the solemn commemoration of a significant historical event fitted perfectly together.
One often overlooked factor in the Anzac Day Essendon-Collingwood clash itself becoming so big is how perfect that very first occasion was back in 1995, one of those great, and increasingly rare moments in sport, of a spontaneous convergence of events.
Nobody that day expected anywhere near the still-record crowd of 94,825, a crush which caused chaos at the gates even hours before the game was played. Nobody banked on an epic game of football which swung this way and that. And nobody expected the sides still to be locked together at the finish, a draw absolutely the perfect result.
In 2019, on a perfect afternoon for football, it was Collingwood which came away (just) with the match points, but only after a gripping struggle in which the Pies made the early running, then had to hold on grimly as Essendon made its surge.
Recent years hadn’t seen a lot of great contests between the Pies and the Bombers on the big stage, but this one undoubtedly was. And it was fittingly epic conclusion to a day when everyone seemed to get it right.
I was part of a radio 3AW panel set up outside the MCG from midday, more than three hours before match time, but even at midday, the concourse and the Yarra Park surrounds were buzzing, not just with your standard rank-and-file footy fans, but proud veterans on to the next leg of their big day, having already marched with their colleagues or observed the dawn service.
It was a special sort of buzz, too. Not necessarily one easy to articulate, but just different. Not tainted by overblown commercialism or tacky corporate attempts to cash in on the moment. A slightly more restrained vibe, perhaps even one conscious of this not being just another big AFL game, but a day of historical importance, and respect and reverence for those whose connection, via personal loss, grief or just memories, was more personal.
We talked plenty of football, but we also interviewed Vietnam veteran John Searle, whose insights into how younger generations through school programs have become increasingly engaged in educating themselves about our war history had even hardcore fans anxious for game time suitably interested.
This was no glorification of the war experience. It was about acknowledgement of important stories of our past. We spoke about Essendon’s “living treasure” Jack Jones, now 94, part of the Bombers’ glorious sides of the late 1940s and also a World War II veteran.
I interviewed Jack in 2011 about both his football and war experiences, having been called up as a 19-year-old to spend 22 months fighting in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville, then waiting another four months for a boat home after the war had finished. Of his company, 91 were killed and 197 wounded.
“It was outrageous, the war. No one wins a bloody war,” he told me. “I was just lucky. The bullet or shrapnel didn't have my name on it, yet the bloke standing next to you is gone, just like that. It's just the luck of the draw.”
That interview has always stayed with me every subsequent Anzac Day as the pre-game ceremony is conducted and the Last Post played to that unerringly eerie backdrop of a crowd of nearly 100,000 people all completely silent on a perfect autumn afternoon.
It was perfect scene-setting for a great game of football. Which, this time, we undoubtedly got. A similar convergence of events to that first Anzac Day clash.
There’s not a lot of spontaneity left in the world of sport, seemingly every moment milked or scripted to the last clichéd drop. This, thankfully, wasn’t one of those days.
Rohan Connolly is one of Australia's foremost sportswriters – a veteran of both broadcast and print media. In the era of sanitised corporate sports media his is a perspective worth exploring. You can read more of Rohan work at FOOTYOLOGY.
