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Footy is about passion – great big ball-kicking lumps of passiony goodness.
It’s what enables us to take a break from calm, reasonable commonsense-based conversations about furthering our species towards betterment, and instead stand around on a Monday talking stats and spectacular feats of physical prowess.
But among these weekly dissections of the games gone by, and the fixation on the minutia that makes dream team scores and tipping a more rewarding topic of conversation than work, lies a much underrated facet of this passion, yearning to be the highlight of a pre-game panel discussion: the footy theme song.
Who cares about disposals, uncontested possession and the percentage of wins that one team’s coach has over the other? Who cares about the injury list and kicking efficiency?
All these will make way over the next few weeks for a countdown of what really is the end result of every match: hearing your team’s club song blearing out of the stadium speakers, be drowned out by jubilant fans singing it in double-time, and being butchered by the players themselves back in the rooms.
With only 18 days until grand final day, let us focus on which team truly deserves to win. Day by day we will whittle down the contenders until only one champion remains standing.
Hark! The sirens have blown! The flautists and pipers stand ready! Let us commence the countdown…
The first thing that becomes apparent when listening to all the club songs is that no one should have been allowed to join the AFL during the 90s.
Why couldn’t they have waited? I know West Coast would have been robbed of a couple of premierships, but it would have been for the best.
‘Power to win’ is bad. Really bad. Bad enough that I’m considering rooting for Geelong this weekend, as much as I love an underdog upset.
Their song, however, isn’t an underdog worth rooting for. It takes too long to start, has silly breaks in the middle, bad time changes, and goes on for long.
Isn’t there anyone in South Australia who plays brass instruments? Are they banned there? Why does it sound like it’s been made it a quick two hour session on a keyboard?
It’s not entirely woeful, I suppose – if they had worked on the first verse (or maybe had just left it at that), it could have fit in with the sing-along, old-timey perfection of some of the league’s better tunes.
But it doesn’t. It has its good qualities, but it’s a mess.
Tell me honestly that if you played this to someone who wasn’t aware it was a song for a football club, they wouldn’t think it was an entry for Eurovision that didn’t make it.
Think about that for a moment – a song bad enough not to make Eurovision.
Normally I am a bit dismissive of supporters leaving the ground before the final siren to ‘make the train’ or ‘beat the traffic’, but if Port Adelaide were 40 points up over your club with two minutes left, then you have my permission.
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