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Sittin' on a Docker the bay
For a fleeting moment I thought I was at a Hurricanes rugby match. Inside an oval stadium the crowd bayed for the umpire’s blood, the home team’s lead ebbing away as penalties mounted against them. But such thoughts were only fleeting, this stadium was bigger and an almost capacity house of 38,000, almost all dressed the purple of the Fremantle Dockers, roared in support and spurred their team on just as it looked they would crumble at the hands of the Geelong Cats. Welcome to the Australian Football League (AFL) or Aussie Rules Rugby as it is commonly known.
And that is where this match differed from a Hurricanes’ encounter. The stadium was bigger; the pitch 180 meters long and about 120 wide and the crowd, instead of whinging and wilting before the final whistle and heading home in the face of defeat, started a cacophony of relentless chants, thunderously so, urging their team to pull back from the brink. It was ear-splitting, deafening; these were fans like nothing else, infinitely more passionate than rugby union supporters and at the same time somehow more civilised than English football fans.
It would be pointless to try and explain Australian Rules football, it is helter-skelter, seemingly a cross between Celtic and other forms of football, the various rugby codes, handball and netball all at once and played at a frenetic pace, the players each looking like they’ve had a methamphetamine hit before running on the field. And perhaps they had, last week two West Coast Sea Eagles were fined for making mobile phone calls in the three-quarter time break, they claimed to their ruck coach but in reality probably to their dealers.
Before the game there are five, four, three, two and one minute sirens, each one resembling an air raid warning and I looked overhead, waiting for the rumble of World War II Lancaster Bombers, but then I realised the war was more than sixty years ago and we were in allied territory.
That aside, there are a stack of goal posts at the each end of the field; a kick, punt-style, between the centre ones earns six points, a kick between the outside ones a single point. There are four, twenty-five minute quarters, but each quarter runs to about 33 minutes for no apparent reason, the game taking more than two and a half hours in all. There are about ten umpires, the main one bounces the ball on the ground at the start and at breakdowns, each time initiating a melee for ricocheted possession, and then there are the throwers in. They’re a weird mob, when a ball goes into touch one of these odd people, back turned to the players, returns the ball to the field of play by a carefully choreographed, blind-throw over the head. And if that is strange, whenever goals are scored, tight-panted umpires go into an almost orgasmic frenzy comprising something resembling the bird-dance, popular in the 1980s, followed by waving of flags, semaphore-style, quite to whom it was impossible to tell.
Subiaco Oval is the shrine of AFL in Perth, and the name is something in itself. Kiwis may pronounce the ground as Sue-be-ar-co, in Australian it is Sue-be-ack-o, and while pronunciation lapses can result in mocking, talking Australian, or ‘Strine, just isn’t right. My boss is named Lyn, in New Zealand pronounced Lin, but here in the West it is Len. Aside from the obvious comparison to the Johnny Cash tune, A Boy Named Sue, it just feels plain disrespectful to call a female boss by a boy’s name. So I don’t.
But back to Subiaco Oval, we, some work colleagues and I, had seats the equivalent to being in the God’s at a London West End Theatre, perched high, ever so high, above the field while the players scrambled their way through what seemed about three days of football below. “Subi” could never be described as a comfortable stadium; the seats are more rigid and upright than on a Jetstar aircraft and seemingly built to paralyse anyone with poor posture. Slumping would certainly have resulted in being unceremonially catapulted to certain death several stories below, so we didn’t dare. We watched, riveted, instead.
If the game was entertaining so too was the young man seated next to a couple of youngish women directly to our front. Clearly unknown to each other before the match this young man commenced a a flirting ritual, his confidence buoyed in direct proportion to the amount of beer he consumed. As the Dockers pulled back from a twenty point deficit he became more animated, as they took a slender lead his hands tentatively, then confidently, clasped around the buttocks of the nearest woman, and as they took the lead he pulled her, vice-like, in close embrace. When the final air raid siren sounded giving a seven point winning margin to the Dockers, our young man was as keen to score a winning goal as had been the Dockers; the poor woman, also in an almost choreographed sequence, was attempting to wriggle out from under him. This could have been the Kama Sutra, although clearly she was experienced in escaping such encounters; last heard she was telling this clumsy but eager young man that she was leaving the ground in the opposite direction to him, but this was no obstacle; he was leaving in whichever direction gave him the most hope, and he thought her accompanying him to the Subiaco Hotel was a suitable option.
A couple of hours later, after drinks and a dinner at an overpriced but delicious Subi Indian restaurant, the northbound platform at the train station was all but deserted. That is aside from me and that same young man, forlorn, drunk and alone. Clearly the fortune of the Dockers hadn’t translated into equivalent success for him but I refrained from asking for a score card.
Perhaps next time because I’ll be back for another game now that I’m a true, fair weather, Dockers fan.