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It was 1994 and the Wallabies were battling New Zealand in a Bledisloe Cup clash at the Sydney Football Stadium.
An eight-year old sat inquisitively in front of his television in Sydney’s west as George Gregan crumpled Jeff Wilson in half and over the sideline for a famous Australian win.
What was this, the boy wondered?
This wasn’t rugby league.
The next morning the boy was throwing line-outs to himself, scoring tries and kicking goals on his front lawn. But before long, not even an hour, it was back to rugby league.
Chips and chases, Western Suburbs Magpies victories, Brad Clyde cover tackles and Terry Lamb intercepts.
Kids will try anything once.
A few years later the Sydney Swans were making a beeline for the AFL grand final. Big Tony Lockett was larger than life and the boy was again intrigued. The next day he was again on the lawn, only this time he’d haggled with his mum for one of those plastic red footballs from the two dollar shop.
Again it was all over after a few kicks and a couple of self-marks. Rugby league won in a landslide.
If you haven’t worked out, that boy is now writing this piece.
A lot has changed since the mid-90s. Sport is a runaway juggernaut and forever on our TV sets. Whatever your choice, it’s only ever one click away. And who would have thought that the AFL would have a second side in Sydney under the banner of ‘Greater Western Sydney’?
All this got me thinking. The AFL and GWS don’t want you. They don’t care about you. Their plans are longer lasting than all of us.
They want our kids.
You can only tip your cap at their lofty goals and what they see as the Sydney sporting landscape in two or three decades’ time.
Over the weekend, I shared a couple of beers with mates. I asked them, with this article in mind, how many players they knew from the Swans and Giants. All three of them named Buddy Franklin and Adam Goodes but when we realised Goodes had retired we were down to one.
That was until I pulled Giants superstar and former Carlton premiership-winner Shane Johnson from some obscure memory bank. Again we were down to one when Google informed us that Shane was in fact Steve and Steve had never played for Carlton.
The plan for now is simple: Give GWS a winning side as quickly as possible through a mountain of draft picks, and accumulate fans at whatever rate it takes. Their future is in the grassroots level work they do now.
But the problem is that the National Rugby League and new CEO Todd Greenberg are finally getting their house in order.
Greenberg, a slick operator and a rugby league man, knows no sport can stand without its legs. The war for hearts and minds has already begun in the little boys and girls running around training paddocks across our great land.
AFL can’t win Sydney today, but they think they can win it through our children and our children’s children.
Now I can already imagine the AFL types are beating their chests and raging that the NRL is only played in three states, while Aussie Rules has at least two teams in each state.
For argument’s sake, we won’t mention the NRL has a chokehold on markets in Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra, Brisbane, Townsville and the entire country of New Zealand.
We won’t mention rugby league was played in some form in over 50 countries in the last fortnight.
We won’t mention the Australian markets the NRL are yet to return to, despite its TV ratings success and the indisputable, endless growth left ahead.
We won’t mention any of that, because I can acknowledge the success and support AFL has in our great country.
And, as a side note, I’m actually not Sydney-centric, nor do I believe the NRL hasn’t got many hurdles of their own to overcome. The NRL needs to cull the amount of teams in Sydney.
There is however another worrying problem for the AFL and GWS.
Yes, the Swans are a success and they have the crowd figures and membership to prove it. But it always tapers, numbers have never ballooned. You’ll get 20,000 to 25,000 to the Sydney Cricket Ground for a Swans match, and one day the Giants may reach that mark too. Is that enough of a success to the AFL in a city of 5 million people?
Probably, if you consider the Giants were theoretically created for a TV rights deal.
Does the AFL want to win Western Sydney or is it merely looking for a share?
The other question in all of this is how does the AFL turn mild success into ratings in Australia’s biggest market? AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan would give both his feet and hands for that answer, because, despite all the Swans’ success, AFL can barely break 40,000 viewers in the Harbour City.
And if you’re banking on kids being won over by victories and victories alone, the AFL has another think coming. Just ask the eight-year-old version of myself all those years ago.
Only time will tell if the Giants and Swans are a big enough force in a rugby league-mad town.
They say the kids are our future.
It will be up to them to decide if the NRL wins by knockout or a unanimous points decision.
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