Asian Cup Group A match review: Australia v. Kuwait at Melbourne

The opening match of the 2015 Asian Cup took place at what this blog, due to its gauchiste horror at stadium sponsorship, will refer to as the Melbourne Rectangular Stadium.

A lot of rubbish has been written in the lead-up to this tournament. The usual suspects who seek to denigrate our historic links to Britain and the United States have been out in force, telling us that Asia Is Our Future™ and that we need to get really excited about playing against a bunch of petrotyrannies and tacky post-colonial tourist strips. The reality is that the A-League has been interrupted to make way for an overblown sixteen-team tournament (soon to be increased to twenty-four, just like its European counterpart) featuring mostly weak national teams who bring to the table large television audiences but little in the way of footballing pedigree. We are set for a month of low-grade soccer played in hot weather between countries no-one cares about, and if the Socceroos are bundled out early, it could all start to look like a waste of time and money.

(If this blog had its way, the Socceroos and the All Whites would take the eleventh and twelfth spots in the Copa América. That way, we would play against better opponents [sometimes at altitude!] while rekindling our cultural links with South America which have been forgotten about over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

The Socceroos’ first opponents were the oil-rich, human rights-poor swamp known as Kuwait. The Blue qualified for a World Cup once upon a time (*checks Wikipedia and sees that it was 1982*), but have generally not set the world on fire (although Saddam set fire to some of their oil wells…boom boom tish).

The first sign that we might be in for a long tournament was the manner in which Kuwait scored the opening goal. Hussain Fadhel poached a goal out of thin air, diving to head home a poorly-defended corner kick in the eighth minute. The same player was cautioned eleven minutes later for a trip on Mathew Leckie just outside the box, but the resulting free kick was deflected over the bar.

After half an hour of not posing any real threat to the Kuwaiti goal, the Socceroos redeemed themselves in the thirty-second minute, when an Ivan Franjic throw-in found Massimo Luongo, who in turn found Tim Cahill unmarked in the middle of the penalty area, and the trademark corner flag-boxing celebration ensued. Generally, a well-shaped phalanx of al-azraq defenders was in place to block any Socceroo advance, but the visitors would eventually be worn down. With just over a minute of regulation time remaining before the interval, a perfectly-weighted cross from Franjic soared towards the heads of Luongo and Cahill, the former getting to it first and putting his team 2-1 up.

The second half saw a bit of rain, falling perpendicularly into the Rectangular Stadium, and a bit more success in penetrating the gulfsiders’ defence, though i gialloverdi lost too many balls in the final third for comfort. Though Leckie struck and hit the bar in the sixtieth minute, their offensive efforts paid off just past the hour mark, however, when Robbie Kruse was felled in the area and captain Mile Jedinak converted the resultant penalty. They were unlucky not to get another such opportunity in the sixty-eighth minute, when Kruse, this time the recipient of a delicious through ball, was brought down again.

Both sides hit the cross-bar late in the match: Kuwait’s Fahad Al Ansari from a crafty outside-the-box strike and the substitute Nathan Burns, who got his head to the pointy end of an Aziz Behich cross. The Socceroos fired a barrage of crosses and headers at Kuwaiti goalkeeper Hameed Youssef, who skilfully batted each away, before running up the score with a goal in injury time, in which Leckie dribbled around two defenders but lost control, with James Troisi perfectly positioned to slot it home. It was all over, and the pride of the southern continent had withstood an early scare to begin the campaign with a win.

Next up for the lads is another Gulf monarchy, Oman, the one-time colonial overlords of Zanzibar, which was the birthplace of Freddy Mercury. Does this mean that the Socceroos will be singing We Are The Champions on January 31? You know it makes sense.

Australia 4 (Tim Cahill 32’; Massimo Luongo 44’; Mile Jedinak 62’ pen.; James Troisi 92’) – Kuwait 1 (Hussain Fadhel 8’)

Cautions: Hussain Fadhel (Kuw.) 19’; Faisal Zaid (Kuw.) 46’

Man of the match: Massimo Luongo (Aust.)

They should get 100%...

…the Western Sydney Wanderers, that is. The players have been embroiled in a pay dispute with the club, which has offered them only ten percent of the revenues from participation in FIFA’s pointless annual parade of continental champions’ league winners, the Club World Cup. The players have been asking for fifty percent – the same ratio that Adelaide United got when they partook of the same event in 2008.

There are a few examples of professional sporting teams being run along the lines of workers’ co-operatives. In 1890, baseball players disenchanted by team owners’ use of the reserve clause to hold down their earnings formed the Players’ League, once of three major leagues in operation that season, with franchises in Boston, New York, (the then-still independent city of) Brooklyn, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. Players took the profits for themselves, and clubs didn’t collude to reduce players’ bargaining power.

Prior to 1905, Australian cricket tours to Britain were run by the players themselves for their own financial benefit, with the Melbourne Cricket Club getting a slice of the profits in exchange for lending its support and branding (pre-Federation Australian tourists wore the blue, red, and white of the club rather than the green and gold introduced by the Board of Control). The formation of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket (now Cricket Australia) ensured that the profits from outbound Ashes tours would be siphoned away from the players and towards the administrators. The final blow to player sovereignty was inflicted in 1912, when six of the country’s top cricketers were left out of a touring squad bound for Britain when they demanded the right to choose their own manager for the tour.

1890 and 1905 were victories for capitalist owners and administrators over the players – the sporting equivalents of the Freikorps’ shooting of Rosa Luxemburg and Franco’s coup against the Spanish Second Republic. They helped to ensure that professional sportspeople would spend the rest of the century battling the reserve clause, the maximum wage, and other restraints on their bargaining power.

What is needed is for professional leagues to be run on the lines of the Players’ League, with players owning and managing their own franchises, and controlling one hundred percent of the profits generated by their labours.

Alternatively, players’ bargaining power can be increased by upping the number of owner-controlled franchises bidding for their services. American baseball players benefited from the existence of ‘third’ major leagues in the 1910s (the Federal League) and the 1940s (the Mexican League), in both cases either jumping ship to the new league or using its existence to get a better deal from the established leagues. A rebel league is a difficult proposition in soccer, with FIFA’s totalising control over the sport, but the original North American Soccer League showed that it can be done.

The players, not only of the Wanderers but of all the other professional sports franchises across the nation, would do well to study the examples of the Players’ League and the pre-1905 Ashes tours. They shouldn’t settle for ten percent, or even fifty percent.

Film review: Semi-Pro

Since the formation of the NBA in 1946, some decidedly medium-sized cities have been home to big-time professional basketball teams: among them Fort Wayne, Indiana; Moline, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Waterloo, Iowa. Flint, Michigan was not one of them, but that didn’t stop the 2008 Will Ferrell film Semi-Pro from focusing on a fictional team from the hometown of Michael Moore.

The American Basketball Association, or ABA, was a competitor to the NBA which lasted from 1967 to 1976, and which featured three-point shots (later adopted by the NBA) and a red, white, and blue ball. When it merged with the senior circuit in 1976, four of its franchises were accepted into the NBA: the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs, and the New York-cum-New Jersey-cum-Brooklyn Nets. Semi-Pro presents a counter-factual history in which those four places were determined by the teams’ results in the league’s final season.

The opening scenes show Ferrell as Jackie Moon, a platinum-selling disco singer who has purchased, and is the captain-coach of, the Flint Tropics, a perennially bad ABA team who play in front of more cheerleaders than paying spectators. Over drinks at the fashionably multi-racial Kremlin nightclub, he learns of the ABA-NBA merger, and at a meeting of team owners he further learns that only four franchises will be accepted into the NBA for the 1976-77 season. The remainder will be dissolved; Moon asks “is that even a word?”

The protagonist convinces the other owners (the names of real-life ABA teams are displayed around the table in front of each Old Rich White Guy) to change the terms of the merger agreement to allow on-court results in the 1975-76 season to determine which four teams will make the jump. (If this had been done in real life, the Kentucky Colonels would have joined the NBA in 1976 instead of the Pacers.)

Former Boston Celtics player Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson) is recruited from the Colonels, traded, unbelievably, for a washing machine. Despite his own personal issues, he takes over as coach from Moon in a Western Bulldogs-style player revolt (Moon, however, retains the style of coach while Monix takes on the Orwellian title of ‘offensive and defensive co-ordinator’). Under Monix’s leadership, the Tropics learn some new tactics and begin to climb off the bottom of the standings.

Meanwhile, in a satire of the increasingly show-biz nature of pro sports, Moon and his team-mates get involved in a series of barmy-as-a-pot-of-whitewash matchday stunts, culminating in him ‘fighting’ a live lion. (In a case of life imitating art, the Brisbane Lions have announced plans to have a live lion on the field of play next season.) All this is rather a distraction from the plot; it is unclear whether its purpose is to critique the commercialisation of the modern NBA, or to pine for the comparatively innocent stadium atmosphere of the seventies.

The final game of the season sees the Tropics at home to the most successful of the post-ABA franchises, the Spurs; in true Hollywood fashion, the Michiganders need a win to qualify. This is where the film gets ridiculous: a Tropics player traded to the Spurs switches sides mid-match, and a concussed Moon has a conversation with his dead mother, who, mind-bogglingly, is African-American. One can probably guess the ending: the Tropics win by one point with an after-the-buzzer shot, and Moon gets a job with the NBA even if his team doesn’t.

There are many ways to interpret Semi-Pro. One possibility is that the film represents a longing for the small-city teams which once populated America’s pro sports leagues, and of which only the Green Bay Packers remain. The film, however, doesn’t focus much on Flint itself (perhaps due to it not being directed by Michael Moore), and the possibility of the Tropics being admitted into the NBA remains live until near the end. A more realistic idea is that it is a paean to simpler times, before the world of sport was taken over by commercialism and when players simply went out and played, not worrying much about tactics or fitness.

Like most imagined pasts, this supposed golden age was not what it seemed. All sports are better to watch now that their players are full-time professionals, and all are better for the tactical revolutions engendered by men like Lobanovskiy, Barassi, Gibson, and Lombardi. On the other hand, television coverage has had a negative impact on most sports, as the type of gameplay and presentation favoured by casual fans in their living rooms often differs from that appreciated by the rusted-on fan in the stands. Basketball presents good examples of this: just look at the NBA’s codes regarding players’ off-court dress and behaviour, which are designed to make the league’s predominantly African-American players more acceptable to white, middle-class America.

Semi-Pro doesn’t deviate from the usual script of Hollywood’s treatment of sports. It sheds little light on the real history of the ABA, and it valorises amateurism and tactical innocence while failing to identify What Went Wrong for professional sport in the last few decades of the twentieth century.

What would make a better sporting film? One that highlights the key problems of sport in the neoliberal age: the greater dependence on television revenue than on gate revenue, the de-proletarianisation of crowds, the trend towards taxpayer-funded all-seater stadia, the increasing tendency of the managerial state to intervene in the affairs of once-autonomous sporting organisations, and the exploitation (in the Marxist sense) of players by clubs and leagues. Semi-Pro has very little to say on the social and political aspects of professional sport.

The Australian National Football League: a counter-factual history

(This is the first in a series of [approximately] five alternate history scenarios, intended to show how various sporting leagues could have evolved differently.)

Following the success of the 1933 interstate carnival held in Sydney, the national code continued to grow in New South Wales. By the 1960s, most Sydney first grade clubs had licensed clubs and used the poker machine revenue to lure star players from the southern states, and the increasing revenue allowed the NSWANFL to build its own equivalent of Waverley Park at Homebush Bay, which it named Pemulwuy Stadium. When the idea of a national competition was first discussed, the NSWANFL was of at least an equivalent standard to the SANFL and WANFL. In the mid-1970s, top clubs from the VFL and NSWANFL hammered out plans for a national league, which began play in 1977.

The league was named the Australian National Football League; at the time, all state leagues except Victoria had the word ‘national’ in their names. The VFL’s traditional ‘big five’ (Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Geelong, and Richmond) and post-war powerhouse Hawthorn were joined by the NSWANFL’s four power clubs (East Sydney, Newtown, North Shore, and Wests) as well as up-and-coming suburban side Campbelltown. They invited Port Adelaide and Norwood from the SANFL, Mayne and Sandgate from the QANFL, and a composite Canberra side, to be known as the Rams. To better market themselves to a national audience, Newtown and Wests rebranded themselves as the Sydney Bloods and Sydney Magpies respectively.

The sixteen teams played a twenty-two round season, with two televised matches each week at Waverley Park and Pemulwuy Stadium, followed by a final four. Minor premiers East Sydney held off Port Adelaide, Geelong, and Campbelltown in a tense finals series. Soon after the Bulldogs’ grand final triumph in front of a near-capacity Pemulwuy Stadium, the ANFL announced its seventeenth team, the Newcastle Dockers, would enter the following season.

The 1980s saw the league expand further, with the Wollongong Hoppers and Tasmania Devils joining, before the increasing ease of trans-continental air travel made it possible to recruit Perth-based teams for the 1987 season. Like Adelaide and Brisbane, Perth was allotted two spots, which went to East Perth and a combined Fremantle team, known as the Sharks. To even out the competition, a Cairns-based team, the Crocodiles, was added in 1995.

Nowadays, the ANFL’s twenty-two teams play an uneven twenty-two-round fixture which allows for blockbusters and derbies such as the Port Adelaide-Norwood ‘Showdown’ and the East Perth-Fremantle ‘Derby’. The top eight teams qualify for the finals series, which is a knockout, but the minor premier retains the right of challenge (i.e. if knocked out, it plays the winner of the final in a ‘grand final’). Matches are played over twenty-five-minute quarters with two interchange and two substitutes per team, and an ‘offside’ rule introduced to stop flooding mandates that each team have two players in each fifty-metre arc and four in each half of the field at all times, leaving ten who can follow the ball around the field.

The introduction of a national league made the old interstate matches obsolete, and though a ‘state of origin’ concept was mooted early on, the abolition of the states and the rise of Australian nationalism made such an idea seem pointless. The increase in the number of foreign players, however, has led to an ‘international’ match being played every year between the all-Australian team and ‘the Rest’.

The teams are listed with their nicknames and home grounds in parentheses, and any other relevant information in brackets.

1. Carlton (the Blues; Princes Park)

2. Collingwood (the Magpies; Victoria Park)

3. Essendon (the Bombers; Melbourne Cricket Ground)

4. Geelong (the Cats; Kardinia Park)

5. Hawthorn (the Hawks; Waverley Park)

6. Richmond (the Tigers; Waverley Park)

7. Adelaide Redlegs (Norwood Oval) [formerly Norwood]

8. Port Adelaide (the Magpies; Football Park)

9. East Perth (the Royals; Subiaco Oval)

10. Fremantle (the Sharks; Fremantle Oval) [merger of East Fremantle and South Fremantle]

11. Tasmania (the Devils; North Hobart Oval and York Park, Launceston) [composite team; nickname taken from the early 2000s Tasmanian VFL team]

12. Campbelltown (the Swans; Monarch Oval, Campbelltown)

13. East Sydney (the Bulldogs; Sydney Cricket Ground)

14. North Shore (the Bombers; Gore Hill Oval, Chatswood)

15. Sydney Bloods (Pemulwuy Stadium) [formerly Newtown]

16. Sydney Magpies (Pemulwuy Stadium) [formerly Western Suburbs]

17. Newcastle (the Dockers; Newcastle No. 1 Sports Ground) [composite team; nickname inspired by the real-life Fremantle franchise]

18. Wollongong (the Hoppers; Wollongong Showground) [composite team; nickname inspired by North Albury FC]

19. Canberra (the Rams; Manuka Oval) [composite team; nickname taken from the NSW-ACT TAC Cup team]

20. Brisbane Seahawks (Brisbane Exhibition Ground) [formerly Sandgate]

21. Brisbane Tigers (Brisbane Exhibition Ground) [formerly Mayne]

22. Cairns (the Crocodiles; Cazaly’s Stadium) [composite team]

Scoring rates: a post-season update

Earlier in the year, I wrote about how the average score per team per match in the AFL was trending downwards this season, and was then sitting at its lowest point since 1968. Over the 198 matches of the home and away season, 4962 goals (at an average of 12.53 per team per match) and 4501 behinds (at an average of 11.37 per team per match) were scored. Teams averaged a score of 86.55 points per match, and 110.24 goals were kicked for every 100 behinds.

The figure of 12.53 goals per team per match is a drop of nearly one whole goal per team per match from last season’s figure of 13.5. The previous lowest since the introduction of twenty-five-minute quarters in 1994 was 13.05 in 1997; the lowest in the post-Colonial era was 13.11 in 2010. In 2000, the figure peaked at 15.18. Prior to the lengthening of quarters, one would have to go back to 1970 to find a lower rate of goals per game (12.38) than this season.

The figure of 11.37 behinds per team per match is also down from last season, when it stood at 11.78. This is also the lowest in the post-1994 era, and the lowest since 1965, when 11.38 behinds were scored per team per match.

The figure of 86.55 points per team per match represents a drop of more than one goal per team per match from 2013, when it was 92.78. The previous lowest post-1994 tally was 90.34 in 1997; the lowest in the post-Colonial era was 90.47 in 2010. The last season in which fewer points were scored per team per match than this one was 1968 (82.08), the last season in which out of bounds on the full resulted in a boundary throw-in; the introduction of free kicks the following season forced teams to centre the ball to avoid being penalised, resulting in a jump in scoring rates of over fifteen points per team per match in 1969.

The fourth statistic, the 110.24 goals per 100 behinds, is the only one mentioned which is not the lowest in the post-1994 AFL; it was only the fourth-lowest, behind 1997 (when it reached 108.5), 1994, and 2007. The rule change made in 2006, which enforced a time limit on set shots, ensures that we will probably never again see the 123.06 goals per 100 behinds figure reached in 2000.

This was a superlative season, the lowest-scoring and fourth most inaccurate of the twenty-five-minute quarter era. Part of this is due to fluctuations in weather conditions, but the downward trend in scoring rates is also due to the way the modern game is played. Teams have mastered the art of defence, applying ferocious pressure when not in possession of the ball. Conceding fewer goals, they need to score fewer goals to win.

Paul Roos and Ross Lyon are the apostles of the new model football, and it arguably reached its apotheosis in the 2013 preliminary final in which Lyon’s Dockers swarmed any Sydney player in possession, and produced a twenty-seven-minute period in which i biancorossi failed to get the ball into their offensive fifty-metre arc. With thirty-six fit bodies huddling around the ball (when they’re not coming on and off the interchange bench), modern football can degenerate into a stop-start series of rolling mauls and ball-ups, but it makes for much more tactically intelligent football than the twenty-five-goals-apiece shoot-outs fondly remembered by nostalgics who preferred the way the game was played ‘back in my day’.

Football is not unique in this regard. Soccer goes through the same cycle, from the catenaccio of Helenio Herrera’s Inter Milan to the totaalvoetbal of Rinus Michels’ Ajax, and from the tiki-taka of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona to the low-possession, reactive style of Inter and Chelsea under José Mourinho. Roos and Lyon are merely the eighteen-man code’s versions of Marcelo Bielsa, whose teams place great emphasis on retrieving the ball high up the pitch when not in possession, and then moving contested ball directly towards the goal. Bielsa has had success with this style in recent seasons at Athletic Bilbao, and is now working his magic at Olympique Marseille. (But the bielsista style affects the two codes differently: it increases scoring rates in soccer while helping to decrease them in football.)

So, congratulations to the league and the clubs for putting on such a great season of football – the best, in my opinion, since the 1990s. All eighteen clubs played to win this year (even Melbourne!) and the fact that three teams tied on points for the minor premiership demonstrates the evenness of the competition.

NRL grand final match review: South Sydney v. Canterbury-Bankstown at Sydney

It has been nineteen years since noted sporting expert Tina Turner proclaimed rugby league ‘simply the best’. South Sydney and Canterbury-Bankstown proved her right in front of the [Insert Sponsor’s Name Here] Stadium’s largest post-Olympic crowd, as they played out a bruising and entertaining encounter, the result of which broke the former’s forty-three year premiership hoodoo.

The signs that the match wouldn’t disappoint were evident from the kick-off, whereupon the head of Canterbury enforcer James Graham collided with that of his compatriot Sam Burgess, doing a number on the tough Yorkshireman’s cheekbone. The Bulldogs were jittery and error-prone in the first few minutes, and when they fumbled a sixth-minute bomb into the waiting hands of Lote Tuqiri, the Souths faithful thought that the wait was finally over, until the video showed that the fumble had been caused by a high shot by a Souths player.

The Rabbitohs only had to wait another fourteen minutes to open the scoring, when a penalty put them downfield and Alex Johnston received a crafty shove-pass on the wing. Adam Reynolds made up for the missed conversion in the twenty-seventh minute: Greg Inglis intercepted and advanced to within forty metres of the Bulldogs’ line, the fourth play-the-ball of the set of six was interfered with, and Reynolds duly followed his coach’s instructions to take the two points.

The remainder of the first half proceeded trylessly but not without incident. Josh Morris almost scored Canterbury’s first try but lost control of the ball, which was then pounced on by quick-thinking Souths defenders. Sporadic outbreaks of argy-bargy occurred, usually involving Morris, and threatened to break out into good old-fashioned fisticuffs on the half-time whistle until cooler heads prevailed.

The second half started much the same way as the first, with Souths pressuring Canterbury into making crucial errors in the vicinity of their goal. They failed to capitalise, and the match took a turn seven minutes into the half when i rossoverdi lost the ball inside their own ten. Tony Williams was the beneficiary of a perfectly-weighted grubber on the last tackle, and Trent Hodkinson’s conversion tied the scores at six points apiece.

The Rabbitohs hit back in the fifty-sixth minute, when George Burgess, back on the field after being cleaned up in the first half, received the ball from dummy-half and waltzed his way around a few Canterbury players before grounding under the posts. Two penalties in successive minutes, one for a shoulder-charge and one for interfering with the play-the-ball, gave Adam Reynolds the chance to put Souths further ahead; he fluffed the first and hit the second, bringing the scores to 14-6.

Souths had the momentum, and it was up to Graham to stop it. The feisty Lancastrian stopped the clock in the sixty-eighth minute with a hip-and-shoulder hard enough to put David Tyrrell on a stretcher, and when normal service resumed, Canterbury looked the more likely side. Twice in two minutes they forced Souths to knock on in-goal, and it was when the Bulldogs’ third consecutive set of six was arrested prematurely that the tide finally turned for Souths.

The avalanche began in the seventy-third minute, when a Canterbury smother gave Souths a second kick on the last tackle; Greg Inglis aimed for the far corner, the ball bounced over the heads of one chaser from each team before Kirisome Auva’a grounded. Five minutes later, Adam Reynolds couldn’t believe his luck when he duelled with Sam Perrett for receipt of a kick and the Bulldogs player ran into the goalpost in a slapstick fashion; by converting both of these, he helped put the Bunnies up 26-6, and we had reached the Gatorade-bucket-over-the-head moment.

The icing on the cake was provided by Inglis in the final minute, when he broke through a tired Canterbury line, went one way and then the other, and scored his team’s fifth try. Sam Burgess was given the honours but failed to convert, but it didn’t matter. For the twenty-first time, South Sydney were premiers.

Although he failed to get on the scoresheet, this was Sam Burgess’ match. The man from Dewsbury had Clive Churchill Medallist written all over him, from his first-up head clash, to the blood evident on his face for most of the match, to the tears of joy he shed at the final whistle. I was going to label him the Joel Selwood of the NRL (one of the highest compliments this Geelong supporter can give a sportsman), but my knowledge of northern English sporting history gave me an even better comparison: Bert Trautmann’s match-winning performance in the 1956 FA Cup final, when Manchester City’s German goalkeeper inspired his team to victory despite breaking his neck making a diving save.

Sam, and Souths, you were simply the best.

South Sydney 30 – Canterbury-Bankstown 6

Tries: Johnston 20’; G. Burgess 56’; Auva’a 73’; Reynolds 78’; Inglis 80’ (S. Syd.); Williams 49’ (C.-B.)

Conversions: Reynolds 3/4; S. Burgess 0/1 (S. Syd.); Hodkinson 1/1 (C.-B.)

Penalties: Reynolds 2/3 (S. Syd)

Ovens and Murray grand final match review: Albury v. Yarrawonga at Lavington

Last Sunday, your humble correspondent witnessed the deciding match of the 2014 Ovens and Murray Football League season, the sixth in succession between Albury (the Tigers, playing in black with a yellow sash) and Yarrawonga (the Pigeons, playing in navy and white hoops). The league’s two power clubs, boasting a combined six hundred and sixty-six games of AFL experience between them, played out a thriller in front of a healthy crowd in a match which showcased the best of our great game.

This season, the Tiger ranks were bolstered by the arrival of the O’hAilpin brothers, Setanta and Aisake, late of Carlton, and Brayden O’Hara, a midfielder from Central Districts. The squad, one of the finest ever assembled in country football, took home the minor premiership with sixteen wins, one loss, and one match abandoned (the season opener at home to Yarrawonga, in which young Albury player James McQuillan was airlifted to Melbourne after suffering a spinal injury, which left him a quadriplegic.) Yarrawonga finished third on the ladder, but two wins over second-placed Lavington in the qualifying and preliminary finals (of a McIntyre Final Five, if you’re playing along at home) put them into the Big Game at the End of the Season.

Before the match, as your humble correspondent enjoyed some hot chips and a can of a prominent black fizzy beverage, we were treated to a brilliant rendition of Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Holy Grail’ by local performer Jason Ivill, a song which ought to become the antipodean version of ‘Abide With Me’ and played before the grand final of every football league in the Commonwealth. Legendary Brisbane Lions forward Jonathan Brown, en route to the Brownlow, tossed the coin and we were off. Or, more precisely, Yarrawonga were off – the out-of-towners scored the first three goals of the match, two of them from the boot of our old mucker Brendan Fevola, and it was looking like they would take home their third successive premiership. The nerves of the Tigers faithful were settled, however, by a flurry of goals, one each to Dean Polo (ex-Richmond and -St. Kilda) and Andy Carey, and two to Setanta O’hAilpin. The minor premiers led at quarter time by just four points.

The Tigers’ ascendancy continued in the second term. Despite some poor clearances from defence, they out-goaled the Pigeons five to four. The highlight of the quarter for Albury was an eighteenth-minute running goal for indigenous speedster Lonnie Hampton; for Yarrawonga, it was the leaping grab and subsequent set shot conversion by Fevola in the thirtieth minute which trimmed the margin to twelve points at the half. Despite some minor outbreaks of guernsey-pulling, the match calmed down somewhat in this quarter, and that ingredient which makes country football so delicious – The Biff – would be sadly absent in the second half.

The long break came, and your humble correspondent tucked into a hot dog (our hosts having run out of chips and warm pies) and his second can of the black fizzy beverage. When the teams returned from the sheds, it was again the Pigeons who came out of the blocks firing. You-know-who scored two quick goals within nine minutes to tie the scores at nine goals seven apiece. I gialloneri could manage only behinds in response, allowing Yarrawonga to take the lead with a goal in the twenty-first minute by Jeremy O’Brien. With the Pigeons’ defence keeping the brothers from the Rebel County relatively quiet, the men from Moira Shire smelled blood in the water, but two goals from O’Hara in time on gave the locals an eight-point lead at lemon time.

What followed was a final quarter to remember. A ninth-minute Fevola shot on goal was ruled a behind by the goal umpire without benefit of score review; Albury led by fifteen. Andy Carey marked on the fifty-metre arc and played on to O’Hara in the eleventh minute; the Croweater’s goal (enlarging the margin to twenty-one points) would be Albury’s last. Tigers full-back Michael Thompson got a hand to a Fevola soccer one minute later, and Albury led by twenty despite Fevola’s rather in-your-face protestations to the goal umpire.

Two Yarrawonga goals and then a behind narrowed the margin to eight points. The ‘Big Mo’, as George H. W. Bush called it, was with them as they yet again moved the Sherrin goalwards into the waiting hands of Fevola in the twenty-seventh minute. Situated twenty minutes out and straight in front of goal, and realising that the siren could blow at any second, the former Dancing with the Stars contestant played on, taking two steps to his right and snapping around his body, somehow missing to the right by about one metre. The siren did indeed blow soon after, followed closely by the triumphal strains of ‘Oh we’re from Tigerland / A fighting fury we’re from Tigerland’.

The best defensive football is played on relatively large ovals in dry and warm conditions, and this match was a textbook demonstration of this fact. In a year in which the AFL’s average score per team per match has dropped to the lowest level since 1968 due to the expert application of pressure by defences, the O and M’s Big Two showed that they too adhere to the tenets of Roosism-Lyonism; the air was alive with the glorious sounds of pigskin being smothered and imported talent being unceremoniously thrown onto the turf. Although Fevola and Setanta O’hAilpin bagged six and four goals respectively, they would have had more if not for the efforts of the backmen who kept them quiet, Thompson and Luke Packer of Albury and Connor Hargreaves and Marcus McMillan of Yarrawonga. The latter became, at just nineteen years of age, the first player to be awarded the Did Simpson Medal in a losing side; having already represented country Victoria at under-19 level, he undoubtedly has great things ahead of him.

The flag is Albury’s nineteenth, and after two years of grand final heartbreak, the Ovens and Murray premiership cup has once again taken up residence on the side of the border where it belongs. But what next for the league, and for the Tigers? Six consecutive Albury-Yarrawonga grand finals has brought equalisation to the top of the agenda, and it seems likely that some sort of points system will soon be implemented, limiting the ability of big clubs to recruit players with AFL and state league experience. (A working group of local football identities has already drawn up a scheme, as detailed mid-season in the Border Mail.)

After the demise of the Bendigo Gold left the VFL with fifteen clubs, the Weekly Times published a non-story speculating about Albury replacing them. Of course the club denies any interest, but this club deserves to seek greener pastures, and North Ballarat have already demonstrated how a country club can make the jump. One of these Septembers, we might be hearing ‘Yellow and Black’ blaring out across the Docklands.

Albury 13.13.91 – Yarrawonga 12.12.84

Goals: S. O’hAilpin 4, O’Hara 3, Mitchell 2, Carey, Hampton, A. O’hAilpin, Polo (Alb.); Fevola 6, Pettifer 2, Ednie, Gorman, O’Brien, Seymour (Yarr.)

Best: Polo, Hampton, Packer (Alb.); Hargreaves, Fevola, Gorman (Yarr.)