Footy fever?
The football season has begun. Here in WA the supporters of West Coast and Fremantle are strutting and fretting as the case may be.
Delayed coverage from Victoria and South Australia tells me the Lions are in demise, the Kangaroos are jumping and the Cats are looking good. Do I care? Not really.
2006 is the 10th year since my beloved Fitzroy was axed from the league. They “merged” with the Brisbane Bears to form the Lions.
In 1996 I knew Fitzroy couldn’t survive at the remote Western Oval. I hoped they would merge with North Melbourne to create a new inner Melbourne club. That was the plan. Both clubs agreed.
Unfortunately it was a North Melbourne premiership year and some rivals (mainly Richmond) feared the creation of a super club that would dominate the competition and vetoed the idea.
I met West Coast Eagles CEO Trevor Nisbett recently and discussed this issue. He agreed that a merger between Fitzroy and North would have been better for the supporters and commented on the negative attitude of Melbourne clubs.
I will always hate Richmond and I hope they fail miserably!
I’m lukewarm about the Lions. Brisbane has tried to do the right thing, but they don’t play home games in Melbourne and will never be Fitzroy. If the team played in Fitzroy jumpers during all Melbourne games it might make a difference to me.
I encouraged my son to barrack for the Lions. He doesn’t really care for football just now, preferring soccer and hockey. Despite that he’s seen three premierships, but has no passion or interest.
I really don’t care about the AFL. I followed Myrtleford when I lived in the Ovens Valley and will attend the occasional local game here in the Goldfields. That’s more relevant to me.
As for national football, I’m more interested in the Western Force than any other side.
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You know I can’t resist commenting on the footy Michael.
I didn’t know about that story of Fitzroy-North possibly merging only to be vetoed by the Tigers. I agree it would have been good but North were already a “super side” in those days, as they proved by going on to win the flag again in ‘99. They had Carey then so they hardly needed any of the Fitzroy players anyway. Richmond should have just let it happen.
I think it was in 1989 the AFL proposed a Fitzroy-Footscray “merger”, which would have been even better than merging with North because it involved two underdogs. As I recall it was the Footscray supporters who stopped that happening.
When Fitzroy went “broke” I think they owed not much more than $1million. So how come Carlton is still alive? They owe the national debt.
I’ve always thought that the AFL should encourage one of the Melbourne sides to “relocate” to Tasmania, which is a very strong footy State but needs a “kick-start” to be truly competitive.
The ideal side would be Richmond because they could then be called the “Tasmanian Tigers”. It’d also be poetic justice for what they did to the ‘Roys.
Then again, looking at Richmond today they’d probably struggle to beat Launceston reserves.
By the way, what the hell is “the Western Force”, an army reserve side?
Footnote: Mergers would (and could only) work if the new club adopted the “hyphen” principle. Eg. When Melbourne was to merge with Hawthorn it was proposed to call the club the “Melbourne Hawks” and they were to wear the Melbourne jumper with a small Hawk badge on their shorts!
Hawthorn fans understandably rejected the proposal as it meant an almost total loss of identity. If they’d adopted the name Melbourne-Hawthorn (that’s the hyphen principle) and if they alternated strips (say Melbourne colors for home, Hawthorn for away) I think it might have got up.
I guess you’ve had enough footy talk for now though.
The “hyphen” merger was proposed in the Fitzroy-North scenario; I can’t remember details of the proposed merger with Footscray. Either would have been good. As for North being too powerful, well Brisbane went on to win three flags in a row.
In 1995 Fitzroy was prepared to partially relocate to Canberra, which at that time had the Bruce Stadium and was ideal for football. It might have resulted eventually in a full relocation but with an ongoing Melbourne presence.
All those possibilities, and Tasmania, would have been preferable to what happened. It was simply the urgency to get Port Adelaide into the comp and a quirk of history (we were the most broke at the time) which worked against Fitzroy.
The current Launceston games for St Kilda and Hawthorn are only viable because they’re underwritten by the Tasmanian Government. Hawthorn-Fremantle had a crowd of 13,000. They’d get more at Albury. Fitzroy played some games in Hobart in the early 1990s without AFL or government support, but found Canberra to be more commercially viable.