Why follow a team?

Martin Flanagan, an essayist, novelist and columnist for The Age, sees Australia, and perhaps more specifically, Victoria, through the lens of Australian rules football. His writings on footy focus on the local, sidelines and peripheral stories that happen around footy. He writes in search of an essence of footy; looking for what it means to people who are either on the margins of the mainstream or central figures on the periphery. His novel The Call told the life story of Tom Wills - one of the pioneers of footy - while, The Game in a Time of War, written around 2001, places footy in a broader social political context. One essay is based around a visit to the footy with Waheed Aly - a now prominent writer, lawyer and columnist. At the time, however, Aly was just another (dispirited) Richmond fan. Flanagan, perhaps, sees footy as one of the archetypal Australian experiences. But his imagining of footy differs from that of popular shows which emphasise singular stories of great achievements and macho-ness. Flanagan is interested in the life stories of footy-individuals and what they reveal about both the game and contemporary Australian society. Flanagan doesn't seem to reveal the team that he supports - if indeed he does support one particular team. This seems to be a wise choice: he can jump from team to team, documenting the stories of its players, supporters, and club workers. Other writers and commentators on the other hand are easily identifiable as supportors of particular teams: Caroline Wilson with Richmond, Rohon Connolly with Essendon, Gerard Whately with Geelong, and Tim Lane with Carlton.

Flanagan's ability to jump from team to team, fan to fan, contrasts with the image of the diehard fan - endlessly supporting a team that loses perpetually. In a recent story on an elderly fan (on a club's official website), she said she had been to every game (except for interstate matches) for the past 50 years. This period covers about 20 years of success and 30 years of drudgery. Would be better if 30 years of drudgery was followed by 20 years of success? Perhaps. One's team is like a character in a bildungsroman: the team is a hero who dreams of becoming great. Efforts are made, support is enlisted, endless and repetitive training is carried out before going headlong into the world (i.e. the great competition of the Ay Ef El). If my team were a novel it would be somewhere between a mix of Cervantes's [The Ingenious Gentleman] Don Quixote [of La Mancha] and Goethe's The Sorrow's of Young Werther. It is a team that is endlessly hopeful, idealistic and convinced of the accuracy of its own planning, before it spirals downwards into a suicidal depression. The temptations of Flanagan's method abound.

The competition, however, is a novel without end and without a narrator who is in possesion of any single moral compass to direct his (her!) sense of justice. (And perhaps that is why at the end of yet another loss, some teams' supportors can be heard, whining 'it's not fair'). Yep, it sure ain't. A team, like Don Quixote, can find countless ways to fail, to screw up the plans. The commentators, wisely looking on in the manner of Sancho Panza, explain exactly to the letter why it was already written in fate prior to the game. It ain't fair and it sure as hell doesn't (and won't) have a happy ending.

VFL Merchandising Exercise #1

I barrack for the Blues. I barrack for them because my mum does. That's what you do. It's hereditary, you know.

When we were kids, I said to my younger brother, “You follow Melbourne, because that's dad's team, and I'll go with Carlton, with mum.” The split seemed right – the girls together, and the boys. Besides, Carlton were flying.

But before all that, we went shopping with the cousins.

In an ample discount barn, the mothers spot a bargain: big, plastic shopping bags, all shiny and white, with VFL team insignia on the front. “Which one would you like?” All us little girls want the swan. What else are you going to pick when you're eight years old?

Dilemma ensues amongst the mums. "He’ll have a fit." "Jack* won't mind, he's South Melbourne anyway." Judiciously, my mother tries to direct me towards the Carlton bag. It's a caricature of a man with bad hair trying to look ferocious with the ball. I am not persuaded.

"It doesn't make sense," my young mind must have enquired. "What's a Blue anyway? " Nearby, Janice* is in tears because "your father will be furious if you come home with anything not Fitzroy."

I stick to my guns because I can. Because my mum knows that a shiny plastic bag is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Because next week, I'll have moved onto some other toy, book, gadget. Because this sport has barely registered in my not so wide little world.

The purchases are made. I am delighted, but feel for the miserable Janice stuck with her wretched Lions bag.

She needn’t have worried. Soon enough the bags would tear and end up in the bin. The Swans would move north to the harbour town in the interests of a national competition. And Fitzroy, too, after battling on for another decade or so would eventually morph into the Brisbane Lions, and finally taste success.

In the meantime, I’d seen the error of my ways and become True Blue.

*Their real names? No way.