Blood Rising

Blood Rising – Footy Fever in a Foreign Land

It all came down to one pack of desperate, exhausted men and an oval-shaped ball. When Leo Barry caught the football and the final siren rung out across the Melbourne Cricket Ground this past Saturday, the Australian Embassy in Washington DC roared its approval. Oversized plastic swans were bandied about, as diplomats, expats and their American tag-alongs made like they’d just won the Olympics. The Sydney Swans had defeated my beloved West Coast Eagles by a slender four points in the sacred ceremony that is the Aussie Rules Grand Final, leaving the small minority of West Australian barrackers in the house to wander home with dragging steps.

We had reached the Australian embassy, an ungainly, monochrome example of modernist architecture turned impotent, closely before the match kicked off; I, five-year landed explorer of this mid-Atlantic jungle and Juliette, month-old Melbournian exchange student. Neither of us absolute footy die-hards (a rarity in our Motherland), we had gone more for the ritual of it all, the spectacle and the heart-ache of scenes that were drenched in the sauces of our antipodean home, quietly nestled a tidy 20 hours plane time away. And besides, the Eagles were playing! Some of my fondest Ocker memories include innocent weekend afternoons, watching blue and gold gladiators like “Can’t-kick-for-shit” Peter Sumich (whose parent’s lettuce farm sales were boosted by the number of goals their son kicked the previous week) and greyhound-built wingman Peter Matera steer us to national supremacy in 1992, at age 8.

I had expected a small, perhaps even sedate, bundle of embassy employees and widely drawn nationals working temporary positions “up at corporate.” What I got was a rousing army of roughly one hundred, some even came fitted in their chosen team’s apparel. And there was tea to boot. For such a crowd, the embassy had upped the authenticity ante far beyond wheeling out a big television screen and a satellite link. That tremendous trio who go by the names Sausage Roll, Meat Pie and Pastie were there in all their flaky, chunky splendor, greeted, less surprisingly, by their well-oiled partners, Victoria Bitter and Bundaberg Rum. My stomach greeted both parties with aplomb. That night, 1601 Massachusetts Avenue had been resettled by a new, ravenous foreigner previously known only for feats of crocodile-heavy daring do and shrimped out barbies. And they had some serious business to attend to.

When we arrived, Dame Edna—a cross-dressing comedic personality whose presence on Australian TV has been consistent for several decades—was banging out a number in purple wig, truly a fitting welcome into Australiana. For Juliette, the airship pans across the MCG were a much more familiar spectacle, she’s been attendee of numerous football matches at the home ground of the sport over the years. For me, it was more of a second breath of the cleanest, more refreshing coastal wind I’ve thus far inhaled, a chance to revisit home almost exactly one month after departing Sydney on my too-short summer visit. Suddenly, I could visualize myself in a pub in Subiaco or in the living room at Bigs, Choc and Asher’s place, screaming, shaking, and refilling stubby holders. Or having a kick around out by Lake Monger, working on my wonky drop-punt with Perth’s gorgeous river skyline in the distance. This schizophrenic jumping around we label “cosmopolitanism” loses all meaning at such moments, when my generally straitjacketed yearning to move back home slinks back to the surface. “Even the Vodafone billboards make me homesick,” I told Juliette.

In their upper-thigh length shorts and spikes, with steely calves and Rambo-toned arms, the Aussie Rules footballer epitomizes the Romanesque model of Australian masculinity. Having lived in two of the world’s most sport-mad nations, I’ve reached the conclusion that no sport is more holistically physically challenging than Aussie Rules. Speed, raw strength, agility, endurance, cunning and occasionally a mean right hook are all essential tools in this game, where 18-player sides charge back and forth for 90 minutes across a large, oval-shaped field. Like all games, the purpose is misleadingly straightforward: one scores by kicking the rugby-shaped ball through two posts. But as Spike Lee once remarked, “thrown in the defense, and it’s a whole different story.”

Defense, while not generally considered the most exhilarating aspect of any game, was the dominant theme of this particular one. Vice-like tackles (where a player literally bear hugs an opponent, often leaping upon him as if to strangle or fornicate) and punishing spoils (where the defender emphatically punches the ball away as if it were his wife’s adulterous lover) offered all the answers to promising attacks again and again, leaving little work for the scorekeepers. By the end of the first half, the Eagles had scored a miserable two goals, in a sport where four times that amount is more common. One old friend in Perth sounded quite convinced of our inevitable triumph in this year’s season, and I smiled at the string of expletives he would no doubt be bellowing that very moment.

However, though the man-dressed-as-a-lady had sung, the fat one certainly had not. In a deliberate, steady ebb, the Eagles clawed their way back from having the Swans double their score in the first half, and at one point I sniffed victory.

“I just want a close game,” Juliette had told me earlier, and at the time I had whole-heartedly agreed.

But slowly and surely, my cheering became a little less well humored and a little more tribal. When I stood up and fist-pumped my approval at each hard-earned goal, when I bemoaned the umpires’ obviously one-sided calls and when I began to hide my face in my hands as the momentum began its final Sydney-side shift, the novelty of watching a footy match in the heart of Washington began to fade. This was a battle for the ages, and ethnic nationalism be damned, for that last half an hour I bled blue and gold. Between three and three thirty AM my time, five and five thirty PM theirs, Captain Ben Cousins and his Eagle troops had become the Anzacs in Gallipoli, the anti-Fascist forces in Civil War Spain, courageous guerilla rebels in the heart of some ignoble enemy’s fortress.

Western Australia is a resilient, isolated little chunk of the earth, and that afternoon, its two million odd inhabitants had their hearts resting delicately somewhere between their beanies and their television screens. Whereas Melbourne has countless (well, maybe 10) national teams, we have only two, and one of them—the Fremantle Dockers—doesn’t really count. And where the East Coast has more people, better coffee, the luxury of more than one actual city and countless other bourgeois airs, we in the West have only the Eagles. Since I can remember, Hungry Jacks (Burger King, randomly renamed for a nation of hungry Jacks, it appears) has been marketing it’s kids meal with the Eagle celebrity of the moment, and car rear windows have worn the classic, uncomplicated logo from time immemorial (1987, to be exact). So when that dreaded final siren sounded, as the screams of the triumphant rung out around me, I laid my head in my hands, heart pounding, throat hoarse. The boys from the west had gone down, and with them, at least for the time being, the hopes and dreams of nearly everyone in the state. And, incredibly, at the opposite end of the world, I was experiencing the exact same exhilarating pain.

Before long, we stepped out of our bizarre, antipodean outer-dimensional plane and back into the muggy DC night. I churned out hypothetical what-ifs and game analysis into an indifferent American air; again, Juliette became my confidante, just as I had been hers whilst discussing another mutual love, cricket, strolling through Adams Morgan earlier in the evening. Drew Banfield’s missed goal, the day I played footy in the Czech Republic with some Australian backpackers and tomato sauce as opposed to ketchup all faded against a mental backdrop of returning collegiate obligations. But oh, how good it did feel simply to lose.