You can’t turn on a television right now without stumbling across a football documentary. The highlight of the current crop is surely Adam Kingsley’s paint peeling spray at half-time of last year’s Sydney derby in the GWS Giants documentary No Holds Barred. It was reminiscent of Leyton Orient’s John Sitton berating his team of hapless, bewildered scrubbers in the 1990s. Unlike the Orient, Kingsley’s Giants responded well to the blast.
Of all of them, Amazon Prime’s Final Siren: Inside the AFL had the biggest budget and the most hype. It promised “war without weapons”, which was a bad start, and which itself was the title of a footy documentary from the late 1970s. Netflix’s Drive to Survive was very much pitched at people who normally couldn’t give a stuff about car racing. Likewise, The Test was a way of reconnecting the Australian sporting public with a national cricket team that had very much been on the nose. I’m not sure what the purpose of this one is – whether it’s to make the sport accessible for overseas people who have never seen a game of Australian rules, or to whet the appetite of rusted-on fans on the eve of the season.
It doesn’t really succeed on either front. It follows some of the best-known footballers in the game, players who have told their stories dozens of times, players who have been profiled on podcasts, in newspapers and by their own clubs. As a result, we don’t really learn anything new about them. We already knew that Toby Greene was a habitual line crosser. We already knew that Nat Fyfe was more than a little bit obsessive. We already knew that Dayne Zorko was a sublime kick and a bit of a pest. And we already knew that Marcus Bontempelli was, well, perfect. This series uses talking heads, several of whom, it must be said, are incredibly irritating, to constantly hammer those points home.
There’s a few moments where it works. Greene scoops up his 18-month-old daughter after an elimination final loss. “Dad was fucking shit tonight, sorry,” he tells her. After another even more devastating elimination final loss, we get a real sense of some of the demons driving Fyfe as he is chaired off after his final game. “It felt like they were holding me up to show everyone that I’d failed,” he says. And we get some juicy little nuggets that go well beyond the usual platitudes. Something as simple as Bontempelli moving his name tag so he doesn’t have to sit next to Greene at the All-Australian function is the kind of snark this reviewer wanted more of!
But a lot of it is just cringeworthy. The conversations between Greene and his partner sound like they were written by a Home and Away scriptwriter. Then there is the exchange between Max Gawn and Brad Green, shortly after Green has sacked coach Simon Goodwin. This one reads like it has been scripted by the comms department. It’s so wooden, so inauthentic, so contrived, and so at odds with what shows like this should be trying to do.
A lot of these footballers have interesting stories to tell, but they don’t really get to flesh them out. Greene is the son of a man who was a champion amateur footballer in the 1980s, but who struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. In this documentary, Greene speaks of knocking his dad out in the rooms after a match. When he speaks of vowing to never be that kind of father, it’s a good insight into what makes him tick – the chip on his shoulder, his vulnerability, his reluctance to let most people in. But the documentary then immediately shifts to Bontempelli making lattes at his cafe. It feels like a smother.
These type of documentaries work best when they profile players we’ve never really heard from before, players who are on the margins, players who are struggling. Most of all, they work when they’re made by people who love their sport. The Year of the Dogs had a billionth of Amazon’s budget. But it hit like a gut punch. You could smell it. The works of the late Rob Dickson and his brother Peter were two men who understood their sport – its humour, its rhythms, its meaning. The documentaries from the clubs themselves can be hit or miss. But some, like the recent GWS release, are excellent. Watching that, I got a very real sense of what is an unusual club, a club that clearly targets certain personality types – extroverts and hyper competitors who can be on the receiving end of a bake like Kingsley’s and not fall to pieces.
This one achieves nothing of the sort. It’s like so much sporting coverage these days – superbly shot, slickly packaged, cut into easily digestible segments and instantly forgettable.
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