Southern Sky, Western Oval: A Year Inside League Football
By Martin Flanagan
McPhee Gribble, 1994. 191 pp., $14.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Footscray, in the western suburbs of Melbourne, has the highest unemployment rate (24%) in mainland Australia. It is a battered victim of capitalist economic restructuring. Its football club, too, is feeling the pressure from the corporate ethos and business philosophy of the survival of the richest which has invaded the Australian Football League (AFL).
Martin Flanagan, in Southern Sky, Western Oval, reflects on the near death experience of the Bulldogs in 1989, when, with declining attendances and lack of on-field success to attract the corporate sponsor, the club faced a merger with Fitzroy, another struggling club.
The Bulldogs, and the working-class families of Footscray, rallied, however, raised $1.5 million and saved the club. Recharged by community support, the Footscray team was, by 1992, making a bold tilt at the premiership.
Flanagan, the Age football writer, was invited by Footscray in 1993 to write a book on the club from the inside. He has produced a profoundly sympathetic portrait of a working-class institution of proud longevity and the people who are its lifeblood.
Flanagan is not afraid to talk of class politics, tracing the events which made Footscray a "union town" from the 1890s depression to the 1930s depression when the local meatworks bosses attempted to use non-union labour and were met by a month-long strike. When one strike-breaker later turned up to Western Oval as a recruit, the Footscray players refused to train with him, and the club also refused to sign a star centre-man because he had crossed a picket line.
The club has retained its aura of a "workingman's team" at odds with the more affluent parts of Melbourne. Its champion player, Doug Hawkins, had a background of homelessness in his youth, and the club president is an ALP member who read Marx at uni, worked as an articled clerk with the CPA's Ted Hill and earned his proletarian stripes as an environmental lawyer taking on the asbestos mining company at Wittenoom. Carlton, on the other hand, have always offended because of their display of "wealth and power", symbolised by their arrogant president John Elliott and Liberal Party prime ministers as No. One ticket-holders.
Sociological exactitude, it can be argued, is not a strong point in the football world. The generals at Carlton may come from the swimming pool set, but their foot-soldiers out on the ground do not have such origins any more than other clubs. Tony Campbell, the Footscray full-back in 1993, is a business person and was so keen for personal monetary gain that he left the club to seek the big bucks in US football. Generally, however, the game is played and supported by working-class people.
Control, however, increasingly rests with a remote elite in the AFL hierarchy who treat football as a business. Their values permeate down into the clubs. Footscray's coach, Terry Wheeler, was sacked in 1994 because the club failed to make the finals in 1993 and was failing in its search for the corporate dollar. The Bulldogs' ALP president, who was behind the sacking, spoke as any economic rationalist would about "taking the hard decisions" to avoid failing in "the race of history".
The players, too, are on the sharp end of the increasing pressure and competitive struggle that is modern football, over contract negotiations and player horse-trading in the annual draft.
It is felt, too, in a directly physical way on the field: increased intensity of training and the frenetic, high-paced nature of the modern running game, in which the amount of work players do and the risks they face from body clashes have increased enormously. Some players finish their days almost addicted to pain-killers. The injury toll is horrendous.
In the end, it is the players who win Flanagan's admiration. It is the people's game still. It thus also reflects the contradictions of popular culture, an issue which Flanagan does not shirk. Aboriginal players, for example, receive racist treatment, yet Doug Hawkins contrived to get North Melbourne's Phil Krakoeur off a striking charge after he had lashed out in frustration at some abuse.
There is also a lot of rather unattractive "male ritual", violence and masculinist stereotyping, reinforced by a win-at-all-costs mentality. But the players are also warm, supportive and sensitive. They are aware that they are a part of a broader community — a battling but proud working-class community in Footscray.
For an informative look at football, and for some of the most lyrical writing about what the players do best — playing footie out on the paddock — Flanagan's book is recommended. By book's end, it is impossible not to feel for Footscray and to wish them every success — except when the play the Adelaide Crows; let's not get too sentimental!