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After 16 straight days of weather that would have had religious Sydneysiders building arks, the last day of winter saw the sun emerge and the crowds come out on the northern beaches.
Brookvale Oval was packed for the Manly versus Penrith game and the almost 19,000 fans witnessed an extraordinary game that the Sea Eagles seemed to want to hand to the Panthers on a silver platter.
Manly found some late rhythm in an attack that had looked hitherto disjointed and uninterested, and pulled off a miraculous victory.
All this was played out in front of a heaving local crowd at a ground that is showing the scars of neglect and under-funding over the past decade or more. When I was a kid, Brookvale Oval was one of the showpiece grounds of the competition, rivalled perhaps only by the shiny new place with the game’s first electronic scoreboard, Penrith Park.
Recently, it was announced that funding for suburban grounds would not be continued, signalling a move by the NRL to consolidate their Sydney-based teams into playing out of the bigger, showpiece venues at Moore Park and Homebush. However, there did seem to be an even more recent backtrack on that stance, with the Federal Government promising long-awaited funds to Brookvale.
What works for the AFL does not necessarily work for rugby league. While Docklands and the MCG are well-served by a variety of public transport options, the stadiums at Homebush and Moore Park are currently not.
The MCG can empty a 90,000 crowd quickly and efficiently. You can be in the city centre in a matter of minutes, or take a leisurely 15 minute stroll. Getting out of the Olympic Stadium after a big match is like being herded through customs at Heathrow airport; a frustrating and time-consuming experience.
The SFS is similar, with no rail link and buses going east are irregular. It may all be a giant conspiracy theory to get patrons to walk up to Paddington or Surry Hills and plough some more money into the local pub and restaurant economies – because you’re not making it home for dinner.
The argument for centralising NRL clubs to play out of these stadiums is the facilities. No doubt the SFS is a more ‘comfortable’ watching experience than Brookvale or Leichhardt or Kogarah or Shark Park. But getting there is not comfortable and the costs to do so are climbing.
Sunday at Brookvale Oval was not about comfort, it was about atmosphere, it was about a local, tribal, shared experience that is impossible to duplicate at Sydney’s showpiece venues. When the Wests Tigers are travelling well, a full Leichhardt Oval rocks, and afterwards fans spill out onto the streets of gentrified Rozelle, head down to Norton Street for a meal and dissect the game they have just witnessed from the hill or the Latchem Robinson stand.
Taking the game away from suburban grounds also takes away the ‘special’ feeling attached to finals time. Come September, the privileged few compete at the city’s best stadiums.
This has changed with the advent of expansion and grounds like Lang Park or Melbourne’s AAMI Park, but rugby league’s suburban roots are much harder to untangle than the AFL’s. Sydney is geographically bigger, more chaotically served by trains and buses, and has grown into pockets where, for better or worse, rugby league fans live and support their local sides.
Rugby league needs to take the game to the people, not put the game where they think people will come.
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