21st century football wars: and the winner is …

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 28 Feb 2008 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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NRL v AFL - Mel Meninga has his arm raised, defeating Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson - AAP Image/Dave Hunt
The announcement by the AFL that it is going to invade the western suburbs of Sydney, the heartland of rugby league, has reignited the always simmering football wars.

The period between the 1880s and the end of the First World War in 1918 could be described as ‘the era of the football wars’ in Australia.

This initial series of conflicts for the hearts, minds and bodies of Australian males was a contest to become the national winter sport. The first battles were between what has become known as Australian Rules and rugby union.

In 1883, Australian Rules (then known as Victorian Football) moved outside Victoria and seeds of the game were planted in Brisbane. A year earlier, however, VFL authorities had rejected a plea to subsidise VFL players living in Brisbane to come down to Sydney to play VFL football against a team of Sydneysiders. A game of rugby union was played instead, with a number of the Queenslanders needing to have the laws of rugby explained to them.

The venture was so successful a return match in Brisbane was arranged, and this was the start of the NSW-Queensland rivalry – the Blues against the Reds – which has has lasted through to Super 14 rugby. It is one of the longest state (or provincial) rugby rivalries in the history of the code.

Touring has always been an essential part of the rugby ethic. Dr Arnold at Rugby School, where the game was created in the 1840s, used to go to Europe at the end of every school term. This touring ethic was picked up by rugby players, even in Australia. In 1882, following their tour to Brisbane, the NSW players embarked on the first rugby tour of New Zealand by an overseas team. A year or so later, an Auckland team toured NSW.

The touring ethic of rugby became so entrenched in NZ and Australia that in 1904 a team from the famous Maori College, Te Aute, came to Sydney. The Te Aute style of vigorous, skillful, fast and expansive play was picked up by St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill, after their match against the unbeaten New Zealanders.

While rugby was entrenching itself in NSW and Queensland, the VFL was trying to convince rugby authorities in New Zealand, Australia and in the UK that the IRB should convert from rugby to what they insisted was the more skillful ‘Victorian science’ game. For a time the VFL started to call its game, ‘Australasian Football.’ But when the overtures to New Zealand were rejected, even in flat Christchurch where the Victorian game was quite popular, the VFL began to call its game ‘Australian Rules football.’

In a fascinating article in the SMH, the sports historian Sean Fagan points out that an Australian Rules 11-club competition was established in Sydney in 1903. One of the backers of the competition was the great cricketer Victor Trumper. The competition was kicked off by a match between Fitzroy and Collingwood. The crowd at the SCG was 26,000. A few weeks later Australia played New Zealand for the first time at the SCG in front of 30,000 people.

Sean Fagan argues that Australian Rules gained a significant hold in Sydney by 1905 with as many youngsters playing the Victorian game as there were playing rugby. Two of Dally Messenger’s younger brothers were Australian Rules players, and, according to Fagan, Dally Messenger himself played for Easts in 1905.

Sydney, and with it NSW and Queensland, was saved for the rugby code (but rugby league rather than rugby union), according to Fagan, by ‘the advent of professional rugby league.’ Because league was professional, it generated the cash to pay footballers, who might otherwise have defected to Australian Rules. League entrenched its popularity as the dominant football code in NSW and Queensland during the First World War when rugby union shut down its grade competitions. The Queensland Rugby Union actually went out of existence until 1929.

By 1919 the football wars had reached a stalemate. NSW and Queensland were predominantly rugby league states, with rugby union having a significant hold with the middle and upper middle classes, a passion generated in the main because rugby union was the football code of choice since the 1890s of the GPS colleges.

There was what sports historians called a Barassi Line protecting the rest of Australia, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, for Australian Rules.

This Barassi Line, with Australian Rules ruling to the south and west and the rugby codes ruling along the eastern seaboard, was as static as the line of trenches across Europe in the First World War up to the 1980s.

The 1980s onwards saw breakthroughs in the football wars on both sides of the Barassi Line. The AFL established the Swans in Sydney and the Lions in Brisbane. The NRL established teams (unsuccessfully) in Perth and Adelaide, and successfully in Melbourne with the Storm. Rugby union became a professional sport in 1996. Super Rugby was set up and rugby tests were played in front of huge crowds at the spiritual home of Australian Rules, the MCG.

Huge televisions receipts, from free-to-air television (for AFL and rugby league) and from Pay TV (for rugby union and football with its A-League) commercialised the sports, and gave them the revenue to promote their codes in what had hitherto been enemy territory.

Now flush with money and with the ambitions of world domination retained from the 1880s, the AFL has launched a major offensive into the western suburbs of Sydney, the heartland of rugby league. The AFL has announced that it wants to have a second Sydney side, playing out of the western suburbs, as soon as possible.

This decision by the AFL has restarted the football wars in earnest. The rugby league establishment has enjoined the battle. We’ve had Sean Fagan’s historical article in the SMH insisting ‘hold hard, fellow rugby-ites (of either brand) and footballers of the round-ball kind, we’ve heard all this hot air before.’

Roy Masters, the great writer on rugby league, and a former coach of the famous St George club, is adamant that AFL is desperate to break into ‘larger media markets’ in Australia and around the world but that ‘west Sydney may prove the Rubicon the AFL will never cross.’

In Melbourne, the biggest-selling daily newspaper in Australia, the Herald-Sun, is gung-ho in its support of the AFL invasion of the hostile territory of west Sydney. But in Sydney, the Daily Telegraph (also a News Ltd newspaper), the voice of rugby league (its advertisement for an assistant sports editor specifically mentioned a knowledge of rugby league as a requirement) has taken up the fight for its code.

This is the context to the opening paragraph of a report of a Swans-Port Adelaide trial match: ‘The AFL’s plan to take over western Sydney by 2012 received a healthy reality check after a small crowd turned up to the Swans’ pre-season game … at the same time across town, the pre-season match between the Roosters and the West Tigers at the SFS attracted a crowd of 15,197.’ Ouch!

The football wars in Australia have been going on for about 120 years. It’s impossible to predict when they might end. I think it’s fair to argue, though, that it is most unlikely that any one code will wipe out all the other codes. My guess is that in time (but don’t ask me when) football/soccer will displace AFL as Australia’s major national football code.

Football already has a national coverage: it has huge numbers of players; it has a national league that has the potential to grow much bigger; it has a huge market in Asia that its clubs and national side, the Socceroos, can play into; it has the Football World Cup tournament and the Olympics to energise the local game every two years.

Rugby union also, although a much smaller level in Australia and around the world, is getting the same national reach, together with its vibrant international footprint. The Investec Super 14 is attractive to an up-market finance/investment company because it is played in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, and watched with great interest in the UK. Rugby’s World Cup tournament, held every four years, is the biggest sporting event in the year it is held.

The two other combatants in the football wars, the AFL and NRL, have deeply entrenched positions within their heartlands. But no amount of posturing, especially by the AFL, can disguise the fact that their international presence is relatively small.

If football in world terms is Coca-Cola, then rugby union is Pepsi Cola. Using the same analogy, AFL and NRL are Bundaberg ginger beer, a terrific local brand but with limited overseas appeal. If this analogy is correct, the winner of the Australian 21st century football wars will be …

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