The Orphans Return
South Melbourne v Fitzroy
Blood in the Streets
The Saddest Day in Footy, Ever
3400 kilometres from their spiritual home, the once mighty Fitzroy Football Club had the last stanza of their demise play out at Subiaco Oval against the AFL’s newest club Fremantle, on an unforgettably sad day in late August 1996. If the AFL ever had any sense of romanticism, they would have moved the game to Melbourne, and just for the occasion play the game at the old Brunswick Street Oval. Alas, in the age of professionalism, romanticism is dead.
The sight of the lone Fitzroy diehard running around the ground post siren carry a handmade flag with the words Farewell Fitzroy is forever etched in the memory as one of the saddest football memories I have ever witnessed.
In 1996 the Fitzroy Football Club was dead, and the future was unknown.
A handful of the old Lions players were invited to fly north to join another AFL creation club, the Brisbane Bears, to eventually form the club now known as the Brisbane Lions. Like the old University Football Club, the Brisbane Bears are now a mere footnote in VFL/AFL history.
While success came very quickly to the newly formed Brisbane Lions, the pure raw emotion and the loss of identity suffered by the old school Fitzroy supporter base burned deep, and for some, they never followed the Lions again.
Personally, I felt the uprooting of the Fitzroy Football Club more than the upheaval surrounding my beloved South Melbourne Football Club being shanghaied to a tent city Moore Park in the early 1980s. Like many Bloods, I lived through and fought with unadulterated ANGER the whole experience in the early 1980s when the Swans were hacked to pieces, whereas with the Lions, I was a voyeur, and I watched in slow motion as the train wreck came to its inevitable and very unforgiving sad ending.
The Battling Bastards of South Melbourne
A few years after South moved to Sydney, I went to a nightclub called ‘Redheads’ which was located in the bowels of the old Grandstands at the Albert Park Oval, and while I thought I was getting over my team being thrown to the wolves, on that night I was overcome by a sense of melancholy and yearning to be in the outer again. The pain was real, and I never went there again.
To this day, whenever I drive past the old ground, I still remember everything about going to see The Bloods play on that sacred turf. The old ladies with their smelly cut sandwiches in brown paper bags and umbrellas which were used more as weapons rather than for protection from the rain. I can still hear the roar of the crowd from the grandstand end whenever the Swans scored, and I wonder why nobody ever stood on the old Scoreboard wing which belonged to the Bowling Club. I recall the Peanut man, the smell of hot donuts, the stench of stale alcohol, the anticipation at the start of every game, and most importantly, it was the one thing that my Dad and I did together, and I remember the bond we formed with each other and other people we met along the way. It was community.
At the age of 19 – yes that is right I was only 19 – my childhood and sense of community belonging was dragged from underneath me, and like all diehards, a part of me died, but not without a fight (and I don’t mean slinging a few words). The anger surrounding the demise of the South Melbourne Football was real and, at times, quite bloody. It was another era when nobody had even heard about ‘anger management’, and most of the scars lasted well into the late 1980s.
The Battling Bastards of Albert Park tried a few different ways to get together on a Sunday afternoon to watch the boys live on the telly from Sydney, but it felt like getting to a New Years Eve party at five minutes past midnight and not quite fitting into the mood of it all.
It was hard being a South Melbourne supporter for many a year in the mid 1980s as the New Sydney Regime wanted the old school to stop referencing the club as South Melbourne, to the extent they would come up to us and ask us to stop calling them South (they were either very brave or stupid). The new heads did not understand the sense of loss that was being suffered.
While there was a short period of change under the Good Doctor and the Wiz, by the late 1980s the once might South Melbourne again looked like folding altogether until the Godfather of the current incarnation of the BLOODS, Ronald Dale Barassi came and set the club on the right course.
This included embracing the past.
Without Barassi there would be no Sydney Swans, nor would there be any South Melbourne Football Club, nor would there be the famous Bloods Culture, as resurrected by the Guru, Brett Kirk.
It is very much underestimated what Barassi did to not only save the Swans (again), but to also unify the northern and southern supporters of the club. Rodney Eade, Paul Roos and John Longmire were gifted a club bound to succeed by Ronald Dale.
The Orphans Grand Final
The hardest part about barracking for a club which is in disarray and has lost its identity, is keeping faith. From the blood, sweat, and tears which accompanies such upheavals there is a levelling off period as the old world and the new world get to know and trust each other. But make no mistake, the old Swans and Lions supporters have suffered something supporters of other clubs can never relate too.
I’ve heard a few people this week expressing their disdain that there isn’t a Victorian club in this year’s decider, but what would they know?
This Grand Final isn’t State of Origin, State versus State, Mate versus Mate, as the very genesis of this Grand Final can be traced back to two teams who played for many years on opposite sides of the Albert Park Lake, and who can trace their origins back to the late 1800s as foundation members of the VFL. The VFL, in their wisdom, may have orphaned both clubs at their weakest points, but both clubs rose from the ashes many years ago to succeed in a competition which tried hard, and still tries, to disown them.
Yes, in essence Brisbane is playing Sydney, but this is an old school suburban shootout between the old Fitzroy (with a dash of Bear) and South Melbourne.
The supporters of both Fitzroy and South Melbourne spilt blood when their club were forsaken, cried many a tear, and then cried more, swallowed their pride, stuck fat during the intervening years, and now they stand proud. And when the final siren sounds on Saturday, the old salty fans of the winning team will shed a tear in memory of the past. In my case, my tears will be for my for Dad, who taught me to have faith, stick fat and never give up, even though he never saw the Red and White win a flag in his lifetime.
The feeling of loss suffered and detachment felt by the old guard of both the South Melbourne Football Club and the Fitzroy Football Club cannot really be explained to supporters of other clubs.
You either felt it acutely, and still feel it, or you count yourself lucky.
May the best orphan win.