I guess the human obsession with ball games is preferable to the human obsession with carpet bombing/decapitating/raping/looting people who can’t speak your language/won’t part with their oil/won’t dress their women up like tents. When you can’t play proper football, you tend to come up with ball games of your own. In the case of Australia, their version of football is brutal, fast flowing and high scoring. It is well supported in Victoria, less so in South Australia and New South Wales, and resolutely ignored in the bulk of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. The AFL is the major competition, and Cat and I had the pleasure of attending a Week 3 game in the new season while in Melbourne.
It was a relatively local derby – Melbourne has a crapload of the teams in the AFL; Essendon (where we were staying) is one, and Geelong is about 80kms down the coast (right next door in Aussie terms). So, we headed to the local train station and joined 46 million Essendon fans in cramming ourselves into a metal tube to head to the Telstra Dome, the baby brother of the MCG, holding a pitiful 55,000 people. As we headed to the stadium through the hordes of supporters, two things became immediately apparent – (1) Australian sports fans smell just as bad as sports fans from across the globe; (2) why the hell didn’t we buy tickets in advance?
The line for the ticket booth we arrived at was suspiciously small, leading me to assume that either everyone had booked early, or all these people were walking past to the stadium to a much better game we didn’t know about. Once I got to the ticket window, it became apparent that we should have booked – there wasn’t a seat left in the stadium. This does not stop them from selling tickets –you just have to stand and watch. Which for a game which lasts an average of 22 hours, is not as fun as it sounds.
Still, we shuffle in, find where we can and can’t stand, manage to get a spot with some railings in front so Cat can perch herself on them and save her spine from permanent injury, then wait for the game. The game starts after each team runs out through a giant banner containing some sort of crowd-baiting slogan and the name of their sponsor. This looks just as crap as it sounds. For Cat’s entertainment, the players are all dressed in the tightest clothing legally possible. I can see the kidneys of at least two players, and I am quite sure I can make out the last meal of at least one. As this is sport, I guess it seems the least it should do to attract a female fan base is to make the clothing as tight as possible. So they do. I guess Australian football to a woman is the equivalent of beach volleyball to a man – it just doesn’t matter what happens, as long as it goes on for a long, sweaty time.
Now, since we know nothing about the game at all, we have to rely on the early season tables to tell us if this is going to be good. This is as dangerous as looking at the Premiership table after 2 weeks, and thinking that top-placed Fulham will give bottom-placed Manchester United a severe hiding. Because Essendon and Geelong are both top 4 teams, I assume that a tight and entertaining contest is about to commence. I am an idiot. Geelong won the title convincingly last season. I have no idea where Essendon finished, but I am quietly confident that any good players they had last season have been replaced by cunningly-disguised pot plants. Essendon are neck and neck with Geelong for the first 3 minutes, after which they could have made me captain and replaced the remainder of the team with alpacas, and still got the same result. Geelong win by 99 points. You may not know anything about this sport, but there are precious few sports where losing by 99 points is anything other than a kicking, and this is no exception. Still, despite the disappointment of the competition, it’s still entertaining to watch, and the atmosphere inside the stadium is fantastic. 49,000 people were there, but all the tickets sold; I just wish the 6,000 that didn’t pitch up could have called me, so I could snaffle a seat for a bit. You bastards