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Pippinu Roar Guru

By Pippinu, 4 Nov 2009 Pippinu is a Roar Guru

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It’s 1976 and I’m 14. It’s the last year that I am eligible for a junior membership, which, at that time, for the princely sum of $1.50, allowed you entry to all 22 VFL games of your chosen club (in my case, that was, and is, Footscray).

It’s an okay year for the Scraggers, relatively speaking, and history shows that we scraped into the top 5 after managing a draw in our final game against the top team, Carlton.

But we only won ten games for the year, meaning I had to endure eleven agonising defeats along the way – as I said, relatively successful for the Scraggers!

That season included four trips out to Waverley, and to get there from Footscray by public transport, it was definitely a case of taking a cut lunch, plus a cut dinner for the journey back.

I have a very clear memory of taking on Fitzroy out at Waverley during the season.

They were as unfashionable then as they were for most of the previous century, and took the wooden spoon that season.

Thus it was no surprise that only 7,000 hardy souls turned out to see this fixture on a bitterly cold, windswept day – and the quality of the footy was very reflective of the climatic conditions.

Perversely, it was such a forgettable game that it has left a lasting impression on me. Footscray won the game 4:11:35 to 3:16:34, and as you can see, it was quite a low scoring game.

But here’s the rub: Footscray scored a goal against the wind in the opening 20 seconds of play, and scored the winning goal after the final siren sounded, meaning we effectively only scored two goals in 2 hours of play!

As the clock ticked on towards the 30 minute mark of the last quarter, it really did look like we weren’t going to get that goal, so we started making the long walk around the non-members side to the exit, keeping an eye on whether we were within coo-ee of our own goals.

I can’t remember how exactly, but the next thing we knew, Alan Stoneham had taken a mark on the boundary, directly in front of us, where we were standing above the staircase that would take us down into the bowels of Waverley.

The siren went and we just looked at each other, we didn’t have to say a word: after all that, we’re not going to win this are we?

These were the days before the banana became de rigueur, so Stoneham went straight back, and with no angle to speak of, executed the perfect drop punt that split the sticks.

I can remember our reaction, we didn’t cheer, or jump up, or anything like that – we just laughed out loud, and laughed and laughed and laughed – running out of the stadium to jump on the first bus out of Waverley.

On the bus, we ran into those Footscray supporters who hadn’t hung around.

So disgusted were they, that when we told them we had actually won, absolutely none of them were happy: “didn’t deserve to win”; “they were bloody hopeless, every one of ‘em!”

The train trip from Waverley back to the city was always a long and boring one, but occasionally the footy fans on board from either side would provide some light relief.

On this occasion, there was a bloke from Sydney sitting directly opposite us and he had just been to the game.

He started to talk about rugby league, and how it was a much better game, as we looked at him blankly.

A couple of rows back, a drunk German bloke started to shout out strange words, like: “zie fuhrer!!”

We had no idea what he was talking about, but strangely enough, he was making more sense than this bloke from Sydney.

With all this going on around me, my only thought was: f@rk, I hate coming out to Waverley to watch the footy.

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