Melbourne is an amazing town. The AFL grand final week transforms the city. It is even more noticeable when your team is one of the final combatants.

I was fortunate enough to be able to buy a ticket for the big game and as I went to pick it up at lunch time last Monday, there was a line of people waiting at the box office, already queueing up to buy the next block of tickets which were due to go on sale the following day.

Every morning as I walk to work, I walk past a group of guys having their morning cigarette and coffee - and every day during the past week I listened to them discussing possible tactics and strategies that the Collingwood coach would use. People I didn’t know were talking a language that I understood.

The muzak in the stores changed to play football anthems and folk songs, and most importantly the theme songs of the two teams left in the series.

On Thursday I joined with 15,000 other people to watch my team take part in their final training session. We packed one of the old suburban grounds - hundreds of kids coming out to see their heroes. Most of those there would not be able to attend the game as they would miss out on tickets. After the team finished their training session, the kids (and some just young at heart) swarmed onto the ground with their balls to kick a ball to each other and attempt to emulate the players that had just been running over the same turf. We sat in the stands and looked at the numbers on the backs of the fans’ jumpers - the ones referring to current team members were easy, the older jumpers left us remembering past greats who had moved on.

On Friday I went to watch the Grand Final Parade. Members of both teams drove past in open cars waving at the over 100,000 people who turned out to clog the streets of Melbourne. I was there with a couple of colleagues - one of them brought her son along. This six year old pushed his way through the crowd to the barriers and watched gaping. His McDonalds fries were forgotten as he grasped the fence and tried to find the four or five players that he was able to identify by name. At the end of the parade he earnestly discussed with me the rules of the game and where each of the players were allowed to play.

On the way to the game, I was crushed in a train carriage with hundreds of other supporters. On the way to the game, we began singing the club theme song and sharing our stories and hopes for the game. The lady next to me told me that she had saved the ankle-length silver sequined dress, long black gloves and white wig for the grand final. She declared that she didn’t mind that it was forecast to rain - “It is like a wedding dress, it is just the dress that you wear for the occasion, whatever the weather is like!!”

None of us had slept well the night before.

I was sitting by myself in a new stand in seats hurriedly completed for the last game of the year to provide some extra seating. There were few facilities and the back wall of the stadium was still not closed in - allowing the wind to whistle through, chilling me to the bone. Everywhere I went, though I knew nobody were I was sitting, people would strike up conversations with me, sharing tales about our common interest.

Last night, we went to the supermarket and, without thinking about it, I donned my members cap. At the supermarket a group of teenagers paused in their loitering and smoking out the front of the store, they approached us and commented, commiserating on the loss and wishing us well for the future.

This may sound like an overreaction, but Melbourne in Grand Finals week sometimes gives me a vague impression of what it must be like to live in a religious society - where there is a common unspoken understanding of something of significance and which underpins normal life.

This is a true secular religion. To sit in a stadium with 80,000 people (and that is at reduced capacity) and have everyone hanging their attention on every kick of the ball. To have the ability to turn to your neighbour and strike up a non-superficial conversation, with the knowledge that you share the same passion.

In the grand scheme of things, football is just a sport, not a religion. But it has an amazing capacity to capture the community’s attention, passion and excitement in a way which religion just can’t seem to compete with. In comparison, religion sneaks around appealing to the lowest common denominator and trying not to offend anyone.

Last year, when some were suggesting that Victorians should support my team in the grand final because it was the only Victorian team left in the competition, the president said “If you are only barracking for us because we are Victorian, we don’t want you!!”. Would the church be able to be so uncompromising about its message? And yet, the club is booming with membership, people putting their money where their mouth is and signing on. Would the church be able to boast such success?

On Saturday night, the president said in a speech that this team will not crumble under the weight of its disappointment - we have the structure and the planning to survive to support the next attempt and to not allow a failure to divide us. Would the church have the same confidence in the face of gut-wrenching failure?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2003 at 4:15 pm by dan and is filed under us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.