No footy team ever ran through a banner that said “We are the unlucky led by the unqualified to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful”. Perhaps those should be the run-throughs on Anzac Day?
A Vietnam veteran I know thinks so.
He wants educational materials spread around the MCG – the tops of trees in the car park blown off, the ground plowed up, the mud septic, putrid pig carcasses and tyre-fires in the stands, women and children forced onto the oval to be mown down by packs and post-match players hit the bottle or jump off the balcony or both, lest the football spectators cannot grasp what he cannot forget.
I don’t know about that but I can see where he’s coming from – we don’t ever want to be mistaking footy for war.
Footballers post-career get a gig on the Footy Show and get paid to tell “war” stories. My mate can’t get rid of his – couldn’t give ’em away.
The authentic Anzac-themed possibilities are endless though – team buses to the wrong stadiums, barbed-wire run-throughs, bully-beef and warm beer in sharp tins up in the stands …
But you can see the problem there.
There is no way the Australian Defence Force is going to deliver a shiny Sherrin in a shiny Blackhawk to an outfit that is making war look ugly – no one would want to go. The ADF is there for image-building and recruiting.
Are we serious about respecting this day or not? Fake piety is not something we’d ever want to be associating with Anzac Day.
It’s hard enough watching the old Victorian Football League’s fractious relationship with the Returned Servicemen’s League being swept under the historical carpet that’s somehow seen Collingwood versus Essendon become synonymous with, and some would say bigger than Anzac Day.
Indeed, Anzac Day looks to start these days whenever the AFL’s Anzac Day round begins. This year the first Last Post first rang out on a Thursday.
By the time the last AFL match of the Anzac Day round is played on Tuesday, some will think of it as Anzac Week. They won’t know which day exactly was Anzac Day and they will wonder if the AFL hasn’t somehow usurped Anzac Day itself. For those who wonder, it will have.
Community sport has always been a big part of Anzac Day, has been since the first Anzac Day in 1916.
Commercial activities were always off the agenda though, not until 1959 when pubs, cinemas and sports that charged admission at the gate were allowed to open for business at 1pm so long as the proceeds and gate-takings went to the war charities.
The VFL and the RSL didn’t get along after WWII, a product of among other things the league’s decision to not suspend competition between 1939 and 1945. There was a lot of residual resentment among returned servicemen about the VFL’s attitude to the war effort.
It was only that handshake between the Kevin Sheedy and Bruce Ruxton in 1995 that that rift was healed, if not with the RSL members then its Victorian president at least – a full half-century after the last world war ended; lest we forget.
Barely recalled these days is the VFL’s decades-long reluctance to fixture matches at all on Anzac Day, let alone blockbusters, on account of the VFL being spooked by the expectation it give the gate-takings to, initially, the Patriotic Fund and later on Legacy.
It was only after the VFL extracted concessions from the Bolte Government in 1960 that it only be required to contribute “above normal” gate-takings to the war charities that it agreed to play on Anzac Day at all. If Anzac Day didn’t prove to be a commercial asset to the VFL, it was off the charity hook scot-free.
On Anzac Day 1960, the Victorian opposition leader took aim at the league’s Anzac Day deal in The Age: “Mr Stoneham criticised the VFL’s arrangement to share only its profits above normal gate-takings with the RSL. ‘The league seems a bit mercenary on this and keeping out of the spirit of the Anzac Day legislation … I personally thought the Anzac charities would have received a bigger share of the gate receipts.’”
The VFL did it properly on Anzac Day 1977 and made a complete mess of it.
It was the first Victorian Football League match I ever attended and it ended up a senseless and violent stuff-up that left the participants shocked to the core of their beings and doubting their own species and their sanity.
No one who was there could forget it, which is exactly how Anzac Day footy ought to be done. You should need counseling afterward.
I wandered in at half-time. What sounded like waves breaking on a beach lured me over from the Shrine where I’d been all morning paying respects to, I don’t know, something.
Perhaps they were conflicting interests in a young man, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and subverting the establishment from within while bowing to old codgers who’d walked in hell on earth? That’s the way it was.
I knew then about the VFL’s chequered Anzac Day past. Handing over money to the VFL on Anzac Day was “like going into a brothel on Good Friday”, which is what I wrote home at the time to save the old man, he of the RSL committee, saying it for me.
This Anzac Day match was no scheduled blockbuster, it came out of the blue.
In 1976 Richmond had finished seventh and Collingwood were the wooden spooners.
Tom Hafey had left Richmond at the end of 1976 and taken his T-shirt to Collingwood. Two teams in good form and the public’s imagination did the rest.
It was an agricultural MCG in 1977 and stubbies and eskies were all the go. I could see everything everywhere, which is what you get when your eyes pop right out of your head. I headed to the top deck of the Olympic Stand looking for an inch of space. Up there the dunnies were blocked and there was, well, it was pouring down the aisles.
The ump bounced it to start the third-quarter and it pinballed around until Kevin Sheedy got his mitts on it.
It was the first VFL kick I’d ever seen, one of the best I’ve ever seen, and the cherry ended up about 160 yards off course – Anzac Day-apt, Sheedy had landed on the wrong beach and thumped a torpy the wrong way that sailed all the way on down to the Pies forwards; a complete and utter waste of youthful exuberance – pure Gallipoli.
Rod Oborn, from memory, got in Sheedy’s face about it and got whacked in the mouth and fell to the ground. Play on.
The final siren might as well have been a bell; it was on, on the top deck of the Olympic Stand – drunks swinging and slipping and sliding and falling into the amber fluids and fecal matter that was everywhere; go Hawks!
Public transport was on a Sunday timetable. There were more brawls on the railway platforms. The tram-stops were probably still clagged up at midnight with refugees in beanies and scarves.
I don’t know. I walked home miles and miles thinking it was a heavy price to pay for hanging around in town an extra hour to see a bit of footy. My new desert boots were soiled in the unthinkable. I threw the socks out too.
No amount of showers and scrubbing could get it off my mind though. What was all that about? Am I of this species? Crikey. Thirty-five years and about 500 matches later I’m still looking for the answer. The things I have seen.
Footy supporters wrote to the papers after Anzac Day 1977, incensed at the VFL and the authorities’ lack of intelligence beforehand and their abject disregard in the aftermath of the for those who’d made the effort to go.
It was a lesson that’s as relevant today as it was in 1960 when the VFL cut its losses to the war charities and baulked at playing on Anzac Day; war, like the match, is one thing – the aftermath is another.
Somewhere in there amid all the ceremony and solemnity of Anzac Day football I hear my Vietnam veteran mate: “All regard for those who died on active service, mate — just don’t come back without your legs looking for handouts.”
He’s desperate for a new wheelchair. Legacy can’t help him and the taxpayer is broke.
On Anzac Day the Sherrin will be delivered by chopper. It will look fantastic.
Lest we ever f****** forget. Play football – not war.
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