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As a born and bred Sydneysider, I’ve always felt lucky to live in the harbour city. After travelling some of the world’s great cities – Paris, London, Barcelona – my love of Sydney has never wavered.
There are three things that come part and parcel with being a Sydneysider:
1. Love of beaches.
2) Love of 3am kebabs.
3) Love of rugby league.
After spending a weekend in Melbourne though, I was interested to see how different Sydney and Melbourne are in terms of their sporting culture.
Now I don’t want to start any ‘Sydney versus Melbourne war’ as both cities are amazing and totally unique. I also have no interest in starting an ‘AFL versus NRL code war’ as no amount of online bickering is going to change people’s minds about what they follow. However, I did make a few observations about the presence of sporting culture in both capitals.
Firstly, I was amazed at how easy it was to get to a game. From Southern Cross Station, Etihad Stadium was no more than a 10 minute walk and a 10 minute tram ride from the MCG right there in the CBD. Having spent my time in the CBD, I’m not sure how those in the suburbs find travelling to games, but I couldn’t help but as I hopped on a tram to the MCG, I couldn’t help but think that if it was this easy; I would be more than happy to go to games as often as I liked.
In Sydney however, if one wished to visit the SFS or SCG, they would (in most cases) first have to travel to Central station. Which means:
– No express services on the North Shore Line.
– Infrequent express services on the Northern Line, Western Lines and Southern Line.
– No rail services from the Northern Beaches and most of the Eastern Suburbs.
From there you would face either a 20-30 minute walk or pile into crowded, un-timetabled bsses as they make their way through the nauseating Sydney traffic.
As for ANZ Stadium, punters are forced to switch trains at Strathfield station, then usually again at Lidcombe station, causing the commute time to escalate. Getting there is the easy part, however. Queuing up at Olympic Park station in the cold for what seems like hours to get home is another matter entirely. Sport in NSW is very much a victim of terrible infrastructure which makes it difficult for sport mad people to get involved as active supporters.
Another thing I noticed was the way people support their teams. You could spot supporters on every street, each wearing a guernsey, a scarf, a beanie or a combination of all three. How does this differ from Sydney you might ask?
Well, if you chose a particular team, and tried to spot all their fans on a given street their would be little variation in what they wore. All the guernseys would match. All their scarves and beanies would match. If you tried to conduct the same exercise in Sydney with an NRL team it would be very hard to find two items the same since every club seems to update its jersey (and often, even its colours) every week.
I was impressed with the value people seemed to place in tradition. The NRL could learn a lot from this lesson; that if they value traditions in the same way that the fans do, the all important dollar will follow.
There’s no question that Sydney folk are just as mad about sport as their southern counterparts, but perhaps we are being let down by poor infrastructure and management.
While I’ve never really been a fan of AFL, I do think that there’s a lot that NSW and the NRL could learn from Victoria and the AFL in terms of moving forward.
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