Storm and Rebels are in the Melbourne wars together

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 28 Apr 2010 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Rod Macqueen. AAP Image

Rod Macqueen, the coach of the Melbourne Rebels, is being a man of his word and smart in honouring the agreement his franchise has with the Melbourne Storm that it will not poach its players. The brutal fact is that the Storm and the Rebels have to work together to succeed in Melbourne.

Their enemy is not each other, as it probably is in NSW and Queensland.

In Melbourne they have a common enemy which is determined to stop them succeeding: the city’s power elite and its sports media. If you want to put a face to this unholy AFL-obsessed alliance, it is a mug shot of Eddie McGuire.

McGuire is the club president of Collingwood, a media personality and a AFL broadcaster. Like most people of his circle he seems to detest the rugby codes (a fanaticism he revelled in when he ran – disastrously – Channel 9).

The most recent eruption of the McGuire bile towards the rugby codes is the diatribe in the Sunday Herald-Sun in which he attacked the Brumby Government’s development of a rectangular ground in Melbourne to cater for professional rugby league, rugby union and football.

“Is it too late to lengthen the ground and smooth of the edges?” he asks in his article.

We need a little bit of history to explain the nature of the football wars in Melbourne.

In the 1960s, a group of Melbourne sports historians dubbed the boundary lines between NSW and Queensland on one side and Victoria and South Australia on the other as the Barassi Line.

South of the Barassi Line was designated AFL territory, totally and permanently. North of the Barassi Line was rugby league and rugby union territory, but land that needed to be conquered by the AFL.

When the Swans were re-established in Sydney, they were given a strong welcome by the power elite (people like Mike Willesee, for instance, jumped on board) and the media, especially the influential Sydney Morning Herald, which gave the code a designated columnist to spread the AFL gospel.

The Sydney Swans are now successfully entrenched as part of the sporting landscape of the city.

But against the advice of the Swans, the AFL is now emboldened to take rugby league on even more directly by starting a team in the western suburbs of Sydney, the heartland of the rugby league game.

This attack northwards across the Barassi Line has been backed by a huge AFL war chest and lots of chest-thumping about the inevitable and overwhelming triumph of its self-styled superior football code. There has been no appreciation or thanks to the Sydney media and power elite for supporting the Swans.

And there has certainly been no reciprocal help from the Melbourne power elite or media for the Storm in its 10-year struggle to establish a beachhead in territory south of the Barassi Line.

The smart people behind the Melbourne Rebels have realised that it is going to be a hard, possibly impossible task, to get the same acceptance from the Melbourne power elite as the Swans get from their equivalent group in Sydney. So they have made the eminently sensible decision to present themselves to the Melbourne public as a Melbourne team.

The name Rebels is appropriated from the rebels involved in the Eureka Stockade episode, an iconic event in the shaping of Victoria’s identity.

The deal with the Storm not to poach their players is another part of the plan.

Supporters of the Storm (many of them rugby union followers starved of an oval-ball team to follow) are also potential supporters of the Rebels. This notion is being encouraged with the news that the Brisbane Bronco’s Israel Falou, a former Storm star, is close to signing with the Rebels.

An intriguing development for the Storm in recent days has also justified the Rebels approach. It seems that Melbourne supporters of the Storm are rallying around their club.

There was a strong crowd to watch the Storm smash the Warriors over the weekend. More importantly, more than 300 people have signed on for memberships since the Stormgate debacle erupted.

Here’s the punch line: why is this support coming forward?

Because the draconian decisions taken by the NRL to punish the Storm for the club’s salary cap rorts have created an anti-Sydney sentiment from supporters.

And the more anti-Sydney the Storm and the Rebels are perceived south of the Barassi Line, the more likely it is that a significant supporter base for the two clubs can be established.

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