Raising my eyebrows, I could tell you a lot about Melbourne during grand final week. The city goes into itself, as though it’s the centre of the world, as though nothing else of importance is happening. No feel-good story is too trivial, no chasing down old footballers with tales of past glories too much effort, no dressing up houses with balloons and bunting too kitsch, no telling adults that painting your face in a team’s colours needs to stop at age 10.
I could tell you that one of the great joys of living in Melbourne is reading football commentary in grand final week. Columnists try hard to be literary (this is Melbourne and we expect it), straining to portray AFL football as a metaphor for life and struggle, for faith and hope. It’s hard not to be swept up in it, to believe in it. Only in moments of sanity do you recall that, well, it’s a game. Grand final week is Melbourne at its most silly, and most wonderful.
And yet, I can’t be arch this week, even in the Guardian. This week, it’s all true, or I’m prepared to believe it is. That bit about heroes and life and struggle, and fairytales and dreams and real people winning over the corporates.
The Western Bulldogs are in the grand final: the team the league tried to destroy in 1989 because it wanted mergers of Victorian clubs as it forged a national competition. Footscray, as the team was then called, had been around since the 1880s. It was dead broke, its facilities shabby and attendances at its games were dwindling.
The media reported its demise as though it was a fait accompli. “Footscray is in its death throes,” wrote one journalist. Another called up psychiatrists who worried that the club’s disappearance would exacerbate the “bitterness and isolation” already felt in Melbourne’s western suburbs.
But the team and its supporters resisted. People without much money gave whatever they could – the stories about pensioners tipping in a few dollars and children emptying their piggy banks would move a hard heart. And it survived, and has survived again and again, through more turmoil and heartbreak than most, without much support from the AFL, through decades of living on the edge of financial catastrophe in an era when money rules.
The team with its headquarters and heart in the western suburbs, Melbourne’s industrial heartland, that welcomed waves of migrants pouring in after the second world war and now refugees arriving with nothing but hope. The west is gentrifying close to the CBD but further out it’s still Struggletown, with high youth unemployment, drug problems and dwindling manufacturing jobs. A place that if not luckless, has to make its own luck.
A team that has battled on the ground too, more than most. A team that has not been in a grand final for 55 years – and it lost. A team whose single premiership was in 1954, when Robert Menzies was prime minister.
How can you coolly observe this grand final when talking to Susan Alberti, the club’s vice president, who has given away millions for good causes and who has as much as anyone driven the push for a women’s league? Her voice breaks when I ask her on the phone what it will mean if the Bulldogs win on Saturday.
“I just can’t wait to see the faces of all those people who have never given up,” she says. “They have faced sadness and defeat and loss. To see those faces light up, that’s what I want to see.
“I know how much some of them struggle. Some of them save up their pension, they don’t have the money, they pay (membership) by the month. Some of them are very old, they are on walking sticks, salt of the earth, wonderful, wonderful, people.”
I find my voice shaking a little, too, and tell her I have bought my “I’m on the Western Bulldogs Bandwagon” badge at the club’s merchandise store – a shop doing a roaring trade in scarves, beanies, flags, pyjamas, even a men’s skincare range. The Bulldogs are not my team, and Melburnians like to get behind any local team playing against a Sydney team – unless you’re a Swans supporter, of course. But this year, there is an extra emotional charge, something beyond parochialism.
It’s about history, long hard history, in an era of instant everything. It’s about Australian myths of egalitarianism, and underdogs and battlers. It’s about what sport used to mean. It’s about class, when we’re all supposed to be classless. Anthony Dowsley in the Herald Sun put it this way:
This team has taken on the powerful, the moneyed, on their own turf and, through sheer will, prevailed. After whipping last year’s grand finalist and then the triple premier, the club that capitalism tried to destroy defeated the team that capitalism built ... it is raging against the machine.
And it’s about that old-fashioned word, community. I cross the river to the club’s headquarters in Footscray to meet Les Twentyman, a youth worker who for decades has looked after disadvantaged kids in the west. We meet in the club’s cafe, Barkers. Everyone is welcome, and the place is packed. People wander around, talking to each other, grinning.
The cafe’s glass wall looks right over the Whitten Oval, and some people go outside and stare at it, or sit in the stands. Twentyman has lived in the west all his life, and he saw early that the love of football could be harnessed for good. For 33 years his youth foundation has run a Christmas party for children who would otherwise receive no presents – for the past two years, coach Luke Beveridge turned up on Christmas morning to hand out gifts.
“This is a massive buzz,” Twentyman says. “As I was driving here, I saw the traffic stop signs all coloured in red, white and blue. When you’re dealing with areas that are haemorrhaging with massive social issues around youth unemployment, homelessness, drug issues, gang issues, this is something that puts it all in the back seat.”
Peter Gordon comes up to shake Les’ hand – they are cousins. Gordon is the club’s president and as much as anyone led the heroic effort to avoid a merger in 1989. He’s a lefty lawyer, looks a bit like a Bulldog, and is well-known for his David and Goliath legal cases on behalf of victims of asbestos, thalidomide and tobacco companies. He is also a smart businessman who has long since made peace with the AFL, but he’s a true believer in Bulldog values.
“I don’t think there are many other clubs who open up their club to the community like we do,” he says, looking around the cafe. “You’ve got these big glass doors which open out straight out onto the oval. That is an intentional symbol of openness and access.” The club invests in its community, with men’s health programs, involvement in 38 schools across the western suburbs, and settlement services that look after new refugees.
He contrasts the Bulldogs with Carlton in the 1980s. “Under John Elliott’s leadership they were really trying to recreate an American franchise where they had dancing girls in short skirts that they called the bluebirds, and very high net worth corporate functions.
“Our philosophy was we can’t match that, we don’t seek to match it, what we seek to do is emphasise and prioritise the core values of our club. It ain’t a lot more complex than that. We try to do things in the community that are helpful, to be as open to the community as possible, and we’ve done it for a long time.” As for those jumping on the Bulldog bandwagon this week, they’re all welcome, he says with a smile. The bandwagon is big enough.
Martin Flanagan, one of the most beautiful writers about football, wrote a book about the Bulldogs in 1994. He tells stories about its working class roots and values, including the rejection of a new recruit in the 1930s because he was a strike breaker. “In the old days, if you weren’t a unionist you didn’t get a game.”
Flanagan says that in the last couple of years, a luckless team finally had a bit of luck, with a brilliant coach, a gifted captain, and a new purpose to the way they play.
“Footy is entertainment, and they are really exciting to watch,” he says.
They go into the final series and no one thinks they can win against West Coast in Perth. No one thinks they can beat Hawthorn, they do them, no one thinks they can do GWS in Sydney, they do them.
This could be the best grand final in years.
The strength of the two teams, Sydney playing its most attractive football in years, and the emotion of the Bulldogs story.
It might be an anti-climax, of course. The Bulldogs are the underdogs, of course. And it’s only a game, of course. Just to reach the grand final has burst a Bulldog dam of emotion, with supporters, officials, old players, new players, weeping uncontrollably when the team defeated GWS last weekend.
But who knows? It might turn out to be a fairytale, one that comes true in a cynical age. As Herald Sun sports journalist Rod Reed wrote this week, “if the boys from old Footscray can go all the way it will be the most popular premiership since … well, maybe ever.”
Over the top, perhaps, but maybe not. Woof woof.
