For much of Australian history, the RSL and
its allies in the anglophile Tory establishment conspired to make Anzac Day the
most boring day of the year. No sport, no shopping, just standing around
unquestioningly honouring Australian deaths fighting Other Countries’ Wars. The
only consolation was that two-up was legal – which wasn’t much of a consolation
because no-one plays two-up the other 364 days of the year, nor knows how to
play it, nor remembers why it’s illegal in the first place. Since the
mid-1990s, however, Anzac Day has become the occasion for the annual grudge
match between two of the fiercest cross-town rivals in Australian sport – Essendon
and Collingwood Albury and North Albury.
Football has been played in Albury since
1824, when a lack of Qantas flights forced Hume and Hovell to walk to Melbourne
for the Grand Final. Since then, the Queen City of the South has been a
veritable footballing mecca, producing two of the five New South Welsh Brownlow
medallists and being the fulcrum of the finest league in country Victoria – the
Ovens and Murray and Football League, or ‘O&M’ as she is known locally.
In the early days, football in Albury was a
sectarian affair, as the city’s two O&M clubs were aligned along religious
lines. The rivalry between (Protestant) Albury and (Catholic) St. Patrick’s
ensured a bi-annual Old Firm Derby Down Under. By 1929, we had all melded into
one big shiny, happy ethnic group called Anglo-Celtics, so Mayor Cleaver Bunton
arranged for the two clubs to be replaced by geographical ones, West Albury and
East Albury, who then merged four years later to create the present Albury
Football Club. As Albury expanded northwards, there was a market for a second
local club, and North Albury joined the league in 1947. In 1962, the city
annexed itself some lebensraum from
Hume Shire called the Black Range, renamed it Lavington, and watched it fill up
with people after Mr. Whitlam designated the hyphenated metropolis as one of
his growth areas. Lavington’s football team joined Albury and North Albury in
the league in 1979, but not before a bare-knuckled fight between the VCFL
(which supported Lavington) and the Victorian O&M clubs (who resented the
adhesion of another club from the State of Pokies).
In recent years, the O&M has served as
a retirement home for aging ex-AFL players who find that country footy is good
for keeping fit in between episodes of Dancing
with the Stars. Yarrawonga waltzed away with last year’s premiership with
the help of former Carlton and Brisbane forward Brendan Fevola. Wangaratta
Rovers are home to Big Bad Bustling Barry Hall, Albury enjoyed a brief visit
from the only man in history to hold aloft both the AFL premiership cup and the
Sam Maguire Cup (Tadhg Kennelly), and North Albury have this year secured the
services of 2001 Brownlow medallist Jason Akermanis as playing coach.
Your humble correspondent trekked to the
hallowed turf of the Albury Sports Ground, a poorly-drained, picket-fenced
venue nestled between the Riverina Highway and the municipal pool, to take in
this year’s event. Albury (the Tigers) had won three premierships in a row
before succumbing to Fevola’s Pigeons by two goals in 2012, and had made a good
start to the season, defeating Lavington, Corowa, and Wodonga. North (the
Hoppers) finished last in 2012, but had won two of their first three matches,
including a 117-point routing of Wangaratta the previous Saturday. Entry to the
only venue in country NSW to have hosted a VFL/AFL home-and-away game (North
Melbourne v. South Melbourne, 1952) was twelve dollars, and a crowd of
approximately five thousand settled in for a cracking contest on the
sunshine-bathed oval.
The match began in the usual fashion with
the Last Post, a minute’s silence, and some local performer murdering the
national anthem. Neither side wore its traditional guernsey – North’s bottle
green has been replaced by peppermint and Albury were decked out in some
monstrous grey and white number. Albury began the match strongly, piling on a
23-point lead by the first change. They extended their lead to thirty-three at
half-time. The first two terms were marked by Albury’s dominance in the
midfield, North’s reliance on their star recruit, and the mismatch between
North’s forwards and Albury’s backs – themes which would be apparent for most
of the match.
Then came half-time and one of the weirdest
things witnessed at a country footy ground. In order to determine a winner for
its raffle, the Albury Football Club in its infinite wisdom hired a helicopter
to circle the Hallowed Turf late in the second quarter. After landing in the
centre square to collect a box of golf balls, it returned to the skies to drop
the balls onto the field; the entrant whose ticket number was on the ball
nearest a flag deposited in the centre circle won the raffle. If there was a
point to it all, the announcer’s explanation was drowned out by the
helicopter’s blades.
Normal service resumed when the two sides
returned to the field and continued much as they had in the first half. The
Tigers steadily built up a lead which briefly erred on the side of ten goals
mid-way through the third quarter. There then followed a purple patch for the
men in peppermint. Albury’s lead was quickly reduced to thirty-five, as North
kicked five straight goals, two of them scored by the Lithuanian Marvel resting
in the forward line. At one stage, North got within twenty-eight points of the
home side, and the Hoppers faithful started dreaming of a comeback of North
Melbourne-Essendon-2001 proportions.
It wasn’t to be, and the number of visiting
fans dwindled in the final quarter as they packed up their fold-out Bunnings
chairs and headed home to avoid the tinny strains of ‘Yellow and Black!’ coming
from the speakers. (Albury takes its club song from Richmond, not from those
other Tigers downstream [Glenelg], who once celebrated victories to the refrain
of ‘we’re dashing, we’re gay / we’re the pride of the bay’, until the language
of Shakespeare had so evolved that ‘gay’ had come to mean something else
entirely.)
A post-siren behind by Matt Fowler, the
only surviving veteran of the Tigers’ mid-90s threepeat, gave Albury the win by
a margin of forty-three points, 19.15.129 to 13.8.86. Thus concluded an
enjoyable if mostly one-sided spectacle, and a much better way to spend Anzac
Day than tossing coins in the air and filling Bruce Ruxton’s coffers. It was a
commanding performance from the home side, who look Premiership Material™ after
only four rounds. Boosted by reigning Morris Medallist and connoisseur of that
sorely-lacking ingredient in modern football – The Biff – Joel Mackie, and
lifted by a best-on-ground performance from Chris Hyde (ex-Richmond), the Tigers
simply had North’s measure. As the Border
Mail put
it, “[t]he Tigers just don’t lose when it counts.”
For North, Akermanis was certainly one of
the best players on ground. Unlike a certain other ex-AFL player in the O&M
who stands in the goal square and expects the ball to be delivered to him on a
silver platter, Aker gets stuck in. Jason Gram (ex-St. Kilda) went into the
game with an injury and scored nothing at full-forward, Kane Godde was the
match’s top scorer with five goals, while the Hoppers’ Territorian goalsneak
Jethro Calma-Holt, not content simply with having the coolest name since Che
Cockatoo-Collins, showed flashes of brilliance in a losing cause. The coach has
attacked
unnamed teammates, suggesting that the Hoppers have only four players who
performed – himself, Godde, Calma-Holt, and the other one, as Lord Palmerston
said of the third person besides a dead man and a madman who understood the
Schleswig-Holstein Question, I’ve forgotten.
The win puts Albury second on the ladder
and equal on points with Fevola-wonga, who won their Downstream Derby against
Corowa by 134 points on Saturday. North, who fancied themselves after last
week’s demolition of the Magpies, were brought down to earth in a big way and
sit fifth, with Lavington and Wangaratta Rovers filling the places in between.
The smart money would be on a fifth consecutive Albury-Yarrawonga grand final
pairing, but North, Lavington, and Rovers are also contenders.
