Greetings, Planet Rugby League, from the alien world of Melbourne, where the back page of The Age declares that “Daniher” is “on track for Anzac Day” and asks readers to consider whether “Buddy” is “untradeable”.
Whatever that means, it’s clear that it’s important to the fine denizens of this crackerjack city, and good luck to them.
Because Melbourne – known in the times of Ned Kelly as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, and it holds true today – has it goin’ on.
There’s trams. There’s thimble-sized cups of coffee in laneways. There’s the gritty, ‘real’ coolness of dudes in scarves and cashmere long-jackets. You can buy that clobber, you can’t buy the cool.
Fact.
It’s cool too to come to a city where rugby league is not the No. 1 game in town.
Because, friends, different is good.
Why holiday in a place where the talk’s equal parts GI’s retirement and whether GI’s salary should be counted under the cap?
You can go to Brisbane for that and sit in the traffic of a sub-tropical Sydney.
Melbourne’s footy culture, meanwhile, is slanted nearly completely towards the indigenous Australian game.
There are nods to union and league, tennis and golf. When things are topical and world-class – spring racing carnival, the F1 race, Moomba Festival Smiling Competition – Melbourne supports those things with flames shooting out the Yarra.
The Boxing Day Test match marks Melbourne as Australia’s – the world’s – premier sporting city.
The MCG is the epicentre of the sporting globe. (Photo: Julian Smith/AAP)
And it is, as Vincent Vega said of Europe, a little different.
Example? Bob Murphy is a personality here, his head’s on the back page of The Age and atop his own fine column.
Murphy played for Western Bulldogs – once Footscray, may still be among chapters – though not when they won the grand final in 2016, and it made people sad.
I know nothing about the bloke – I made sure to write this piece without a single Google – other than that he’s got a profile and appears to be more loved than the Anzac Day clash our man “Daniher” is on track for.
Daniher?
“Essendon star Joe,” writes The Age man Sam McClure, “is a chance of making his long-awaited AFL return in the Anzac Day blockbuster against Collingwood”.
So there you go.
And good luck to him. I’m old enough to remember his father and three uncles when they bombed about for the Bombers.
And if there’s one thing the NRL could learn from the AFL, it’s the father-son rule in which Danihers and Abletts and Tim Watson’s son Jobe can play for their daddy’s footy team.
Turning the page of The Age and it’s all AFL. Turn it again and, wait, there’s more. There’s fully five pages.
The Herald Sun may have had ten pages, though I can’t buy the bastard because I’m dark on Rupert and his spawn and I already give these people a hundred a month for their telly.
And so! You turn the page again and rugby union gets a page and three stories about Israel Folau, who’s challenging Rugby Australia in court for his right to be bigoted against gay people because it says in the Bible he can and perhaps should be.
But then! Dear sweet Planet Rugby League! One turns the 48th page of The Age to find the bottom two thirds about cricket! In the middle of April!
Yet scan across the top, and there it is: maybe 400 words on Souths’ submission regarding Inglis’s salary, sucked in from AAP.
Nothing about the Melbourne Storm’s blockbuster with the Sydney Roosters this evening.
Nothing about last year’s grand final.
Nothing about the two smartest coaches in the game.
Nothing about the delectable match-ups between Latrell Mitchell and Will Chambers, Cameron Munster and Luke Keary, Cameron Smith and, oh yes, his former teammate Cooper Cronk.
(Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)
And you know what, rugby league? It’s okay. It is.
The alien and still-excellent city of Melbourne – just like the crackerjack and good-in-a-weirdo-way burghs of Hobart, Adelaide and Perth – don’t need to be right across rugby league for rugby league to remain a cool and exciting and very fun sport.
Who cares if they call it rugby?
Who cares if they know all the Danihers, Abletts and Watsons but not a Mortimer, Cleary or Hopoate (outside of the amateur proctologist)?
This is not the worst thing.
Rugby league is still rugby league. The game can live and breathe and stake a mark in the Australian sports firmament without there being Perth Pirates, Adelaide-Cronulla Sharks or a Melbourne Storm as popular as Collingwood.
It’s cool that Melburnians prefer Australian Rules, that rugby league is limited to a yarn on the wire effectively whacked in the back for balance.
Because rugby league does have a toe-hold in these southern climes.
And that toehold’s name is the Melbourne Storm.
Storm jumpers are sold in sports shops with equal prominence of, for instance, Giants, Suns and Dockers jumpers.
The Storm are like an AFL club, just one of the lesser ones. Like a weird cousin from the bush. The Melbourne Rebels are like a weird posh cousin, the boarder from the pastoralist family in Broken Hill that no-one sees often.
In Melbourne, rugby league – indeed, ‘rugby’ – is Melbourne Storm.
(Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
Get into one of the sports stores to get your kids some kit, and there’s a hanger for Storm merch as there’s a hanger for Fremantle, Gold Coast and Barcelona tops with Messi on the back.
If you want ‘rugby’ stuff, it’s Storm stuff.
And there above it on a rack, all around it, full to bursting, levels and levels of it, is fat mega-stock of merchandise for those who’d spend their roubles on Bombers and Saints, Demons and Dogs.
Carlton, Hawthorn, Richmond and Geelong, there are entire walls for these clubs, these brands, these lodestones of deep-ingrained culture.
And so wifey and I decked our kids out in St Kilda hats and jumpers because we’re going to see them play the Demons on Saturday at the MCG, and that will be grand, because live AFL footy absolutely is.
And the boys had to choose and thus chose the Saints. And that’s them stuffed forever.
Because when you choose an AFL club, that’s it. And if it’s Saints, you’ll pine along with all their fans for the premiership the club hasn’t won since 1966 (I did Google that one).
Though it was still their best bet: the Demons’ last one was 1964. I Googled that too.
Final holiday tidbit: wifey and I had a moment, of sorts, when we couldn’t find a seven-year-old son in a shopping mall at Docklands.
It wasn’t too busy and wasn’t massively worrisome. But we didn’t know where he was for a couple of minutes, and in relative parents-looking-for-kiddies time, it’s long enough to think bad thoughts.
Finally, sons one and three announced with glee that they’d found their brother. And there he was, wearing a cheeky grin and all his new St Kilda kit and standing completely still in a storefront window.
Little prick will be the death of us.
He was posing with the mannikins.
E-Meter
Roar Rookie
State Of Origin 1 attracted 87000 to the MCG.
steveng
Roar Rookie
Firstly, as this is a classic example of how far and what happens in Australia, for me, I doubt that Winx is the best in the world (yes, she is a great mare and has had a fabulous record) but she is only one of the best mare that Australia has ever produced, she never ever raced against the best in the world, not like Black Caviar that had a go at the best in Europe (not the world!) at the Diamond Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot in 2012 and its time form rating was 136 while Winx has a time form rating of 134 after retiring, compare that to the best, which was Frankel at 147. Never mind, that is a cliché that is always apparent in Australia, the best of and at everything without any real comparisons! With the AFL and Melbourne, firstly, I find it very, very, very hard to watch a game of AFL, I’ve never done so in 68 years that I’ve been alive as it’s the most frustrating, aggravating game to watch on this planet, I can only ‘take it’ for a max 10min at best lol, its one of the most unnatural sporting contests that has ever been devised IMO. The NRL biggest mistake was, that they should have put a side anywhere else except Melbourne e.g. Perth, Darwin and even Adelaide but Adelaide IMO would have been the same as Melbourne. Perth has been proven as an NRL city and the NRL is extensively played in Darwin, as the NRL should have had a go there. It will be interesting to see what the NRL will do with its ‘expansion’ philosophy and if they will either go North/West or go in the Pacifica region to expand the NRL?
Scumbags&Superstars
Roar Rookie
please don't knock our world champion Tiddlywinks team.
Kangas
Guest
The city of greater Manchester with much smaller population then Melbourne has heaps more professional sporting teams .... Melb not even a close second
no one in particular
Roar Guru
LOL, like that "metrix" is credible. Lets start a professional tiddlywinks team and a professional quidditch team and a professional thumb wrestling team to boost those numbers
Aligee
Roar Rookie
Plenty of evidence, - marn grook in the western district of Victoria where Tom Wills grew up. ........Tom was the son of landholder Horatio Wills and the district's only white child in the 1830s to 40s. He grew up playing with Indigenous children, speaking their language and participating in corrobborees and ceremonies. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/historian-reveals-marngrook-influence-on-afl/8439748 Scroll down to see an old lithograph from the 1850's of indigenous kids playing with a ball. Even Tom Wills family passes down stories ..... L.Wills Cooke, grandson of Tom Wills' brother Horace, has told journalist/author Martin Flanagan, & a public meeting of Old Melburnians FC (ex Melb. Grammar students -this school played against Scotch in the famous game organised by T.Wills in 1858) that his mother told him of this family legend - Tom Wills, as a young child in the isolated Moyston area, played Marngrook with aboriginal children. (The ball, made of possum skin, tied up with kangaroo sinews, & stuffed with charcoal, was kicked high in the air between two groups of aboriginals, who faced each other in 2 lines. The winner was the person who was able to catch the contested high ball, without it touching the ground, the most times). Wills was so fluent in the Western Vic. Aboriginal dialect that, 20 years later after leaving that district in 1845, when he returned, he was able to recall & speak to the Aboriginals in their dialect. VERY COMPLICATED dialect conversations re cricket rules & coaching cricket skills for their tour of England!
Scumbags&Superstars
Roar Rookie
That'd be the city that has more professional sporting teams headquartered in it per head of population that any other city on the planet. You mean that metrix?
Scumbags&Superstars
Roar Rookie
Geez . . . very resentful about Melbourne arn't we??? One way to know the truth has been spoken is to observe the opposition it receives. Wow!
Paulie
Guest
Yes and without the game of rugby union the leaguies wouldn't have their game and Aussie Rules would be kicking around a soccer ball
Mister Football
Roar Guru
Freddie The problem might be that you do not know or understand what "indigenous" means. As for the name, the official name of the game is Australian Football, and thus the Australian Football League (AFL) is both the governing body of the game called Australian Football and the name of the elite level of compeition. The last point to make is that the last time the AFL commissioned an official history, that official history controversially debunked the Marn Grook connection, so it's quite incorrect to suggest that the AFL "is so keen to try and prove the theory of Marn Grook".
Adam
Roar Guru
The sad reality is that rugby union has been played in Tasmania since at least the 1930s, league has never managed to get the penetration in the playing ranks but probably suffers from the same issue as Victoria where people can't tell the difference between the two codes
Max
Guest
I saw some rugby posts in Hobart recently. Down by the river and the industrial area. Got the shock my life. Thought was something invading out of War of the Worlds. Seriously though would be good if the Storm and other NRL clubs spent some more time there. Better still would be if the Origin teams went there ahead of the next Melbourne game. I like Hobart Sea Eagles for NRL 2025.
Max
Guest
For all that the AFL both openly and surruptiously gives the Giants and Suns and even the Swans and Lions more help and even money. You can't compare any of that to the Storm. In the end what the Storm did illegally under the NRL cap rules was perfectly legit under the AFL's rules for its NSW and QLD clubs.
Max
Guest
Isn't the game actually all stemmed from one club's rules? It was called the Melbourne FC rules. It could just have easily come from the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo Lodge No. 26 football rules. The Melbourne club's rules were adopted by the other clubs when they started and that led to Victorian rules and then Australian rules. But there's no denying the AFL rules today are the Melbourne FC Rules Version 160. AFL isn't really born as a footy code like rugby, football, league or NFL.
Maximus Insight
Guest
Max, Australian football was never as popular as rugby football in Sydney. Whatever the extent of the truth of the rugby establishment denying it access to enclosed grounds, its league completely disappeared between 1893 and 1903 according to wiki. In 1908, rugby league was hardly some exotic game that took Sydney by storm, it was essentially rugby union without the lineouts and changed ruck rules....and of course it was inspired by what happened in the north of England and it broke the elitist union model. A large number of union players and clubs switched en-masse to form the SRL Freddie, I'd be interested in a link to this centuries old persecution of soccer in Victoria. I have read before that someone through glass on a pitch in the 1960s. Is that what you are talking about? Sports tend to face some derision and challenges to access resources in places where they are not traditional / culturally dominant.
WarHorse
Roar Rookie
OK Ken. Since you can't figure that out yourself, a genius will help you. 1. Storm has had the greatest financial backing of any franchise for a period of 15 years- care of the NRL/ News Limited. That's almost 70% of their entire existence. Without that long term support they would not be here. 2. The NRL turn a blind eye when it comes to the Storms inordinate amount of third party payments. The highest amount of ANY team. Over $1M of extra salary cap wriggle room (in 2018) providing them with an unfair advange over the majority of other clubs. Yet they attack Sydney clubs who have a fraction of those payments. 3. Melbourne have their own fully qualified private referee within their club who officiates ALL their games in referee C.Smith. I thought the 2 referee system was over the top but having 3 referees adjudicate ALL Storm games is way too much. 4. This brings me to my next point which ends up giving storm all the "rub of the green" calls when they are in trouble of losing, allowing them to hold down players in tackles longer than any other team and stand constantly offside without being penalised. As you should know, if you are allowed to control/manipulate the ruck, you go a long way to winning 99% of games. 5. Storm also get a lot of extra help from the NRL when it comes to creating favourable draws and preventing the dreaded 5 day turn arounds which some other teams are constantly forced to put up with, in the name of TV rights and scheduling, which in turn helps them recover and stay fresher to win more games. The money from these TV rights are then filtered back into Storm pockets via their related parties the NRL and News Limiteds donations and around we go all over again. 6. In Summary Ken, You are obviously a Melbourne supporter, clueless, an ostrich with a bucket of sand, or most likely all three.
max power
Guest
"all the concerts , visiting superstars, bands , is acknowledged as the Mecca of food in Australia and fashion" - nope, thats just what melbourne people say
max power
Guest
maybe the Age is for people with a brain and the Herald Sun for those without?
no one in particular
Roar Guru
You don't know what indigenous means. It comes from the latin word meaning native. It is not restricted to people of this land pre-1788
Freddie
Guest
Max, this may be true, but also read into the history of how AFL (Victorian Rules as it then was), fought a bitter war around the turn of the 20th century to keep the great satan of "soccer" in its place, even to the extent of sprinkling shards of glass onto pitches to prevent the game from being played. It still does this today via its one-eyed media, and the squeezing out of the game from playing fields and facilities. This is a war that has been going on for well over a century.