Just before 11pm a few nights ago, Lygon Street was dead for a Friday. A few scattered tables of people along the restaurant strip. No hordes of students trailing from the pubs to cheap pizza at Intersection Cafe. Tiamo was closed, dark wood panels blended with the shadows. The blacktop of the road empty aside from an occasional rideshare cab drifting past like a reef fish scouring the coral. Then as we topped the hill from Elgin towards the cemetery: “Baggers!” screeched a woman on a rental bike who went careening past on the sliver of remaining footpath. She lurched up to the crossing, almost crashing into a couple of gormless young men waiting on rental scooters. For a beat, the three of them stared at one another. “Baggers!” she crowed again, and weaved off towards the green light.
Yes, the Blues were in the prelim. That was the first Carlton support we had seen on the suburb’s main street except a few men out the front of University Cafe, watching a TV through the window of one of Lygon’s dwindling band of Italian institutions. They must have erupted when Blake Acres scrubbed his kick to the good side of the post with under a minute to play. Within an hour they were no longer alone, an impromptu parade leaving the scene of victory at the MCG to stream back to the heartland. Drums, flags, chants, and above all, the look of disbelief. The football writer Martin Flanagan caught it: “When an old club comes from nowhere and a whole section of the city bursts into life like a paddock coming alive with daffodils.”
There is romance, especially when it’s your neighbourhood. Carlton, a place easy to love even if its team was easy to hate. A powerhouse that got decommissioned, rusting in the cellar since that last flag in 1995. A flag from the era of salary cap rorts, the old club’s swagger eventually dissolving in revelation. By John Elliott’s accountancy standards it was some pretty minor fraud, but the penalties started a downward spiral. Thirty years in the wilderness might be punishment enough, but footy fans have long memories.
This season, once more drifting, they roared back. From 15th in the league to two games from glory. On the other side of the draw is Collingwood’s more privileged kind of heartache, consistently close to the prize but barely able to land it: two decades, six grand finals, four losses, one draw, one premiership. In the middle is the chance they could play each other, the most potent old rivalry starting fresh, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny.
That, goes the assumption, is what the AFL will want. Sell every ticket, seize every attention span. But with all the hype this week about black and navy blue, it would at the very least be extremely funny if the grand final turns out to be orange and maroon instead. Greater Western Sydney and Brisbane, one test-tube club and one transplant, the fourth non-Victorian grand final at the great Victorian amphitheatre. If you look beyond the obvious, this is what should really suit the AFL, with all the funding and all the political capital ploughed into taking the game national over the years.
In a way the whole thing is bound up in Ron Barassi’s departure last Saturday: the great of Melbourne and great of Carlton dying the day after those clubs met for the last time in his span, while a Carlton-Collingwood grand final would reflect his most famous feat, coaching the Blues back from 44 points down in 1970. A rematch would be fun, but it would also be reheated nostalgia. Barassi was a man for the future. He moved clubs as a champion player when doing so was rare, made another fresh start to coach North Melbourne, won premierships at all three, then took over a shambolic Sydney, doing his bit as a believer in expansion, setting them up for a grand final in 1996. “The past was an already conquered land,” Greg Baum’s obituary said.
But even on grounds of sentiment, GWS have a claim. They may be the new kids but a dozen seasons is still a fair slate of work, especially with the beatings they took early on. They endured those to become competitive far faster than Gold Coast. They’ve had seasons with flair, close knockout wins, a grand final from outside the top four, and turned Toby Greene from a contender for most disliked in the league to a star. As the club’s first captain, Phil Davis, gave his retirement speech to teammates a few weeks ago, at last brought down by injuries after seeing the whole journey, his emotion reflected the reality that the Giants don’t feel plastic any more.
Their 2023 has been fun. Image of the season is Harry Himmelburg ascending above the pack to mark and score against Hawthorn in the final minutes, escaping a game they could not afford to drop. They still reached a mid-season low of 15th, just before the Blues were there, and have scorched home with as much heat. They have the best social media game and comfortably the best song: after the stale 1920s Pathé gunk of the establishment clubs, here comes an eye-twinkling Harry Angus with a tuba and a bubbling tub of Soviet kitsch. For 150 years clubs played in boring red, white, blue. They’re orange, they’re zesty, Dutch, unrhymable. They’re fun. Footy should be.
Then you have Brisbane’s interesting spot in between. They can claim a history to rival the length of any, though for all the identifiable remains of Fitzroy, it was less a merger and more the swallowing of a twin in utero. Occasionally, you catch some incipient trace, a glimpse of “F.F.C.” on a jumper like cutting open a cyst to find a ball of hair and teeth. But even for the new entity this century, the Lions’ mighty threepeat has been followed by 20 years on the periphery, flirting with finals in recent seasons without the grunt to get past a prelim. A long wait is a long wait, and with 18 teams soon to become 19, a flag every two decades is the average.
Don’t presume that the oldest team claims all the romance, that’s all. Even Romantica closed down in the end, always the last stop of the night as you passed Brunswick Road. That said, some hospo kids are trying a relaunch. Maybe it’s the season of renewal. I would love to see Lygon Street after a Carlton premiership win. I would also have liked to see Big Jack Elliott do some jail time, at least for something. You can’t win them all. Blues supporters know that. It will be special if they get there. It will be special for someone else if they don’t. Either way, the Giants still have a better song.
