In September last year, the mayor of Perth floated the idea of a minute’s ovation for those penned in their houses on the other side of the country. It was a nice enough thought, but it went down like a lead balloon. Melburnians, in particular, were in no mood for stunts like that. The city was at breaking point. At the Shrine of Remembrance, protesters pelted police with golf balls. A few hundred metres from the MCG, newspaper photographers were capsicum sprayed. A magnitude 5.9 earthquake tipped everyone off their axis a little bit more. Most people, especially those schooling their kids at home, remember it as the worst period of the pandemic.
On grand final day, people donned their colours and blundered about like lost dogs. The pubs were padlocked. Online, people were falling to pieces at the prospect of a late twilight start. Wayne Carey, always a popular figure on Twitter, was trending. A ‘social commentator’ was questioning why this country obsesses over sport. Mike Brady was shambling around deserted Melbourne streets and laneways, carting an enormous guitar and belting out his song to an empty MCG. It really rubbed it in. After the soul rotting games with no crowds, there was something almost confronting about seeing a heaving stadium. Those lucky, isolated, Covid-free pricks.
Despite the blowout, it was one of the more memorable grand finals. More than most years, it was a grand final for supporters – many with cameras trained on them, some with dad’s ashes perched prominently, all in various states of agitation and disbelief. Melbourne fans had been subjected to more turgid football than any other supporter base. When their premiership finally came, it was on the other side of Australia, in another time zone. For Melburnians, it may as well have been played on Pluto.
Only former champions and border hoppers got to see it in the flesh. It cost Garry Lyon two weeks of hard quarantine. It cost the other two blokes their liberty. They could count themselves a little stiff. The selfies didn’t help. The judge was pitiless. But sympathy for the pair was scant. They presented as two men who’d been handed some pretty good cards in life, apart from a competent football team. They were gifted half an hour of almost perfect football, and a summer in the slammer.
Five months on, and by footy’s standards, it’s been a remarkably low-key off season. Jordan De Goey was arrested in his dressing gown. Simon Goodwin was front page news for half a week after he had a beer with his captain. Apart from that, the scandals have belonged to cricket and tennis. A captain sending a picture of his dick to a colleague? Footy, and certainly rugby league, used to have a mortgage on that stuff. But there really aren’t the scandals there used to be – no knocked-up schoolgirls, no bar patrons being glassed or urinated on, no half forward flankers skolling bottles of sunscreen.
Last year, life could flip in half an hour. You were one interstate furniture removalist away from crowd-less games, from closed borders and from curfews. Suddenly your team was on the tarmac, and you were on Twitter bickering with 13-year-old Tories and retired social studies teachers. This year, the AFL is pushing the “business as usual” angle. But there’s still an underlying anxiety. Covid has decimated the AFLW season. Most of the clubs are still living on a thin line. There are going to be a lot of mass omissions, ring ins and mental health challenges. Local clubs are going under. There’s a severe staff shortage at the MCG.
And the city is still processing the loss of its most famous sportsperson. When news of Shane Warne’s death started coming through, Melbourne was being pounded by rain. It sounded like we were under attack from the Luftwaffe. In the middle of the night, Wayne Ludbey took his camera to the MCG and captured an extraordinary image of Warne’s statue outside the Melbourne Cricket Club. It lacks the menace of the Dennis Lillee or Leigh Matthews statues. But it’s one of the better ones on the MCG concourse. The temptation may have been to immortalise the humble Warne, the curiously deferential Warne, the Warne with the ball raised to the crowd. Instead, it captures him mid delivery. It was a delivery stride, Gideon Haigh once wrote, that was “decisive but nonchalant, like somebody sliding up to whisper sedition in your ear”.
It’s nearly 30 years since Warne played his first Test at the MCG. At the toss, the West Indian captain looked up at the new Great Southern Stand and marvelled that the ground held more people than the population of his country. At the time, I thought Keith Arthurton was the coolest man on the planet. He swaggered to the crease like Dermott Brereton walking into a nightclub. In the first innings, he clobbered Warne from one corner of the MCG to the other. In the second, he danced down the wicket and tried to hit him into the Yarra. He was floundering. He was stumped. He was never the same again.
Warne, meanwhile, went solar. AFL footballers are big in this part of Australia. Warne’s fame, and his affinity with the MCG, was something else altogether. Wayne Carey, Dustin Martin and Lance Franklin could have the MCG shaking. But even in full flight, they were still somehow dwarfed by the stadium. Only Warne, by sheer force of personality and talent, seemed equal to it. Only Warne could have drawn locals – in the middle of the night, and in teeming rain – to pay tribute. There’s something unknowable about many of our great footballers. They’re mostly at arm’s length. But Warne was an open book. To Melburnians in particular, he was instantly familiar – his obsession with football, the way he dressed, the cadences of his sentences, his opinions on everything.
On Wednesday night, for the first time in two years, the MCG will be at full capacity. Mayor Zempilas never got his minute’s ovation. Instead, we’ll have a minute’s silence. A sporting crowd that embraced, forgave and fuelled Warne will pause and bow. Some of the best footballers of our generation, in the prime of their lives, will possibly contemplate their own fame, their own talent, their own youth. They may contemplate how fleeting it all is, and how easily it can be ripped away.
