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| It's a Strange Old Flag: The East Perth FC club shield in front of the old West Perth club office at Leederville Oval. What next? Everton takes over Anfield? Manchester City to play at Old Trafford? Celtic to play out of Ibrox? I still just can't understand it. What would Fred Book have thought? Let us just be thankful that he never lived to see it. |
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| Celtic supporters, Perth Oval, 9/7/2011 |
Returning to the WAFL, I enjoyed attending West Perth away games more
than home games in 1998. In fact, because of the move to Arena Joondalup by the
West Perth club in 1994, the “home” games in 1998 felt more like away games and
the away games felt more like home games because I have been going to places
like East Fremantle Oval, Claremont Oval, and Lathlain Park since I was a
seven-year-old. By contrast, Arena Joondalup remains a totally foreign place to
me. Arena Joondalup feels very different from the traditional WAFL grounds
because it has no seating around the perimeter of the ground and the grandstand
is literally one side wall of the adjacent, gigantic, multi-sports complex
rather than the main focus in and of itself. The grandstand is not open to the
public, making the oval, or should we say the “arena”, very much in tune with
the elitist spirit of modern corporate football. It is indeed very hard to fall
in love with Arena Joondalup. The lack of seats around the perimeter of the
ground is annoying as not everyone likes to sit on grassed banks or to stand
up. There was literally a total lack of covered seating at the ground for
non-members for several years and, when a tin shed was later installed, it was
placed in the north-west corner (to replicate the situation at Leederville Oval
perhaps?), the farthest location possible from the single public entrance which
is in the south-west corner. Furthermore, even the long awaited for tin shed,
whilst looking somewhat “retro” in that largely corporatized arena, is
inadequate in that has no seating underneath it, merely concrete steps. (This issue has been resolved - there are now seats under the shed.) Arena
Joondalup, although a WAFL ground, symbolizes everything that is wrong with
modern corporate football with the non-members unashamedly and very openly treated
as second-rate customers. The (then) lack of seating under the tin shed might have
been an (ultimately inauthentic) attempt at producing a “retro WAFL look” but
clearly the lack of seating under the tin shed was due to financial
reasons.
Brian Atkinson, in his excellent book, in personal e-mail correspondence
with the author, and in personal conversation with the author (8 July 2011),
has carefully outlined his view as to why the move to Joondalup, “rationally”,
was the right move for West Perth. He argues in terms of it allowing West Perth
to access a large junior network of clubs and players in the rapidly expanding
northern suburbs (Atkinson, 2008, p. 222) whereas the club’s traditional
district, around Leederville Oval, is not a place now where significant numbers
of juniors live and play. He states that the Leederville Oval area nowadays is
home mostly to “yuppies and pensioners” (personal conversation, 8 July 2011).
Supporting this view, a look through The
Football Budget at the source clubs for Colts and Reserves players suggests
that the areas around Leederville Oval are not supplying junior players beyond
a tiny trickle to any of the nine
WAFL clubs. In Atkinson’s words (in personal e-mail communication to the author
dated 15 November 2010):
“I certainly miss Leederville [Oval] as well.
Once WP [West Perth] left no one could stop EP [East Perth] of [sic] Subi [i.e. Subiaco] going there.
EP’s ground became a soccer stadium. I cover the move to Joondalup in my book.
I was not involved at all in the move but I believed it was necessary and still
do. Our development zone had dried up with demographic changes to the metro
area. The only way WP could obtain that very productive northern coastal
corridor development zone was to move into the area. After a 20 year
premiership drought at Leederville, 800 more kids became available for
development. The result - 5 grand finals and 3 premierships in the 1st ten
years at Joondalup. East Perth had the same problem and the only success they
have had at Leederville with their 3 premierships was when they had ALL of the
champion young West Coast Eagles draftees available to them, which was a
disgrace and a blot on the integrity for 2000-2002. And Subi have a huge unfair
financial advantage by having access to 500 under cover seats to All AFL games
at Subi which they packageup [sic]
with hospitality, and receive huge profits”.
Furthermore, in
a follow-up e-mail (dated 17 November 2010), Atkinson continued as follows:
“The only problem with moving back to our
traditional inner city area is that as soon as the next junior boundaries
redistribution occurred the West Australian Football Commission (WAFC) would
reallocate our old zone back to us and we would lose the booming northern
coastal junior zone that has been so good to us. In the early nineties we were
given that zone on condition we moved into the area. I was a [WAFC]
Commissioner from 1992 to 1995 and I saw what was happening first hand. I have
had West Perth people say to me that we could have been given that good junior
development zone, and stayed at Leederville. That was never a possibility - the
WAFC was very firm that if West Perth stayed at Leederville the club would not
get that zone. I can say I don’t like the 52 km round trip to watch a home
game, but from a football point of view it has been a great move. The best
illustration of that is that when the club won the 1995 premiership, the draft
and retirements meant that four years later there were only four of that
premiership team left at the club (Brendan Fewster, Steve Trewhella, Brendan
Logan, and Paul Mifka). They won the premiership again and practically all of
the new players were local juniors. A similar thing happened in 2003 when they
were premiers again. Having said all that, I do miss Leederville, but there was
no chance that we could have enjoyed the successes we had at Joondalup if we
were still at Leederville struggling with our old zone. I remember sitting in
the stand during the 20 year premiership drought and saw some terrible
thrashings”.
Perth and East
Perth are still today in similar positions to West Perth’s former situation at
Leederville Oval with declining numbers in their inner-city junior zones,
although Perth is somewhat compensated for this due to its access to the
burgeoning south-eastern corridor. East Perth and West Perth, in fact, had had
to combine their junior competition (Atkinson, 2008, p. 222), something that
would have been inconceivable even twenty years previously. None of the three
“Perth clubs” experienced grand final success during the relatively long period
from 1979 to 1994. Perth’s last premiership remains today its 1977 triumph and
its last grand final was in 1978. Atkinson, in the second e-mail cited above, assumes that West Perth’s move to Arena
Joondalup was the primary reason for
the end of the twenty-year premiership drought in 1995 and for the fact that
West Perth won three premierships in the nine-year period which ended in 2003.
For Atkinson, the move can be equated with the premiership successes because
the Joondalup area gave us access to a much larger number of junior players.
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| Leederville Oval grandstand, 6/7/2011 |
I cannot dispute Atkinson’s logic here and he without a shadow of a doubt
loves the game and the club. However, his primary assumption that the
premierships were directly caused by
the ground shift, whilst extremely plausible, remains unproven and unprovable.
Statistically, even the club with the worst
zone will occasionally win premierships because it just happens to get a group
of quality players together at the same time either by chance and/or by design.
Statistically, a town of 50,000 people will produce a team equally as good as a
team from a city of one million people on
occasion even holding all other factors constant. The remarkable success of
so many Geraldton-based footballers at the East Fremantle club and in the
VFL/AFL over the years is testament to this. It cannot be disproven that one or
two or even all three of the 1995-2003 premierships might still have been won
by West Perth if the club had stayed where it was. Furthermore, Mike B.
(personal conversation, 14 July 2011) has asked the present author why West
Perth could not have stayed at Leederville Oval and accessed a zone in the far
northern suburbs in the same way that Perth has stayed at Lathlain Park but has
a zone extending far past Lathlain into the growing and populous south-eastern
corridor? Did West Perth not bargain hard enough in 1993-94? Atkinson stated
(personal conversation, 8 July 2011) that if the WAFC attempted to take away
West Perth’s zone and push the club still further north the club could then say
in response why not allow existing clubs such as Subiaco and Claremont to just
have a second zone in the far-far north so that West Perth’s zone would not
move north of its headquarters for the second time? Based on this logic, of
course, West Perth could and should have stayed at Leederville Oval and also secured a large far northern
suburbs zone in 1993-94. Furthermore, there has now been a seven season
mini-drought since the 2003 premiership, a mini-drought which is now nearly
half as long as the famed 1976-94 drought. If the Leederville Oval location can
be blamed for the 1976-94 drought then what or who can be held responsible for
the current mini-drought? If the mini-drought is just due to luck or the
strength of the other clubs can’t we make the same arguments for the 1976-94
drought?
Furthermore, I wonder how many changes to club names and moves of home
grounds can occur before a club’s essence is diluted or even lost. The club is
now “the Falcons”, rather than “the Cardinals”, and it is based at Arena
Joondalup. I feel that if the West Perth name goes, the last link with the old
club will also go. Other people may well think differently. Some regard the old
club as dead and buried already. For some others, the red-and-blue colours may
be the decisive link between the old
club and the new club. Is there an authentic, as opposed to a merely corporate
or legal, connection between the old Fitzroy club and the Brisbane Lions? Is
the Sydney Swans the “same club” as the club called South Melbourne which used
to play its home games at the Lakeside Oval? People would have different views
here and those who feel that the clubs are not the same and/or it is just not
worth the effort will choose another club, another competition, and/or another
code to follow. Rational arguments will only take us so far as emotion remains
an important part of serious fandom in all codes of football. Mike Blewett no
longer supports West Perth because he feels that the old club no longer exists
because you cannot detach it from its community. Moving from Leederville to
Joondalup was not a move “just down the street” as was the case when Subiaco
moved to Leederville Oval in the 2000s. Perth survived the move from the WACA
Ground to Lathlain Park in 1959 and the same move in 1990. However, unlike in
those two cases cited, Leederville and Joondalup are totally different areas
with vastly different cultures, ethos, and demographics. I believe that Mike
B’s position in relation to West Perth is a valid standpoint. I don’t question
Mike’s loyalty to West Perth. The Swan Districts Football Club could survive a
move to Midland and probably even to Middle Swan. However, could it relocate to
middle-class Ellenbrook (a shiny new suburb of golf-clubs, Soccer Mums, and
SUVs) and still stay the same club with that eternal, mongrel, underdog ethos
(that even its detractors respect)? How far could you move West Ham United FC from
Upton Park before it ceased to be the same club? Clearly you could not move
Aberdeen FC out of Aberdeen or Manchester United FC out of Manchester. (For its
part, Manchester City FC only moved as far as The City of Manchester Stadium on
Manchester’s eastern fringe, which is still only two kilometres or a 30-minute
walk from the main central railway station Manchester Piccadilly.) No-one
regards the Los Angeles Dodgers as being the same club as the Brooklyn Dodgers
except only in the most narrow, literal, legal sense. At our coffee meeting on
8 July 2011, Atkinson added some further thoughts on the move from Leederville
Oval. Here he moves away from the purely rational to also give some space to
emotional considerations:
“The reason I was happy we left
Leederville was because I sat in that grandstand and I watched us get thrashed
week-in week-out. We would not have won our premierships without moving and we
would not have had access to that zone. ... Since they went to Joondalup they
have never been bad or non-competitive, never mind had a period when I said
‘I’m sick of this’, not referring here to a game but to a period. Their period
at Joondalup has been highly successful, five grand-finals and three
premierships in the first ten years. Since then there have been some exciting
times but there has not been a grand final since 2003. Even though West Perth
has not had the money to recruit widely, unlike South Fremantle, Subi, Swans
now, they have replaced the players with quality juniors from their own
district. What I find very satisfying is that when they won the premiership in
1995, four years later when they won it [again] there were only four [1995]
premiership players still at the club. When they won in ’03 there were only six
members from the ’99 premiership still at the club. Almost all of those
replacements were home-grown. From my point of view, I have enjoyed the
football at Joondalup much more than the previous twenty years at Leederville.
I was not involved when the move was made [Atkinson was club president in
1987-88] but I spend half my time defending the move, saying how successful it
was. ... The spirit of our club has never been better [although] we don’t get
looked after well by people there” [personal conversation with the author, 8
July 2011].
For Atkinson then, rational factors
and emotional factors are inseparable from each other and they have both moved
in the same direction since, emotionally, the misery of watching games during
the last few years at Leederville is part of the “evidence” as to why,
rationally, the move to Joondalup was correct (because moving to Joondalup gave
the club access to more juniors which then fed into the club’s playing
performances). Atkinson does not mention the current mini-drought of seven
seasons and he does not appear to be unduly alarmed by it. He also perhaps
over-focuses on those last few years at Leederville Oval when the club did
poorly, especially 1990-92, whilst not recognizing that, from 1976-86, the club
never took the wooden-spoon and was seventh only once (in 1979). Being on the
bottom of the table for two to three years will befall all clubs as part of the
natural cycle of birth-and-death/ rise-and-fall and is not necessarily
something that Leederville Oval itself can be blamed for. Swans and Claremont
both suffered several years of misery in the mid-1970s before rising to become
powers in the early-1980s and Subiaco was an even worse basket-case in the
decade prior to Haydn Bunton Junior taking over the coaching reins in 1984.
West Perth suffered many retirements and departures to South Australia and
Victoria prior to its very poor 1990-92 seasons. The on-field heroes of the John Wynne years (1985-86), the largely forgotten and woefully underrated
Brendon Bell; Bradmore; Comerford; the Bewick brothers Corry and Darren; Davis;
Fong; Gastev; Kickett; Menaglio; Michalczyk; Mugavin; Munns; Murnane; Perrin;
Rogers; and Doug Simms had all gone by 1990 with Menaglio being the last of
these great warriors to leave at the end of the 1989 season. The returns of
Laidley and Palm were not enough to cancel out all of these player losses. The
East Fremantle premiership player, Gavin Wake, who was quite a recruiting coup
and who gave good service to West Perth, was also gone by 1990. Atkinson is
currently one of the prophets defending the relocation to Joondalup on a
regular basis to all or any of the detractors and doubters. He will probably be
able to persuade some/ most people but certainly not all.
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| Leederville Oval, sunny winter day, 6/7/11 |
The move of sporting bodies towards managerialist leadership
styles and economic rationalist ideologies occurred at the AFL, the NRL, and
the Australian Soccer Federation (ASF) (now the Football Federation of
Australia or FFA) during the 1990s. In the early-2000s, the NRL had to deal
with a legal judgement ordering the league to reinstate the expelled
traditional club South Sydney Rabbitohs. The AFL’s coerced merger of
traditional club Fitzroy with expansion club Brisbane Bears to form Brisbane
Lions in 1996-97 angered not only Fitzroy supporters but also many traditional
supporters associated with other clubs. Melbourne-based crime novelist Peter
Temple, in his 1999 novel Black Tide
(2007, pp. 23-7, 60-2, 97-100), wrote about the anguish at Fitzroy pub The
Prince when it was announced that a corporate person from Brisbane wanted to
buy all of the Fitzroy memorabilia on the pub’s walls. Temple’s main character,
the lawyer/ private eye/ debt-collector Jack Irish tries in vain to motivate
Fitzroy fans at The Prince to switch to attend St Kilda games in 1997. Ex-Richmond
and St Kilda players, Rex Hunt and Graeme Bond, write in their book, The Fat Lady sings: 40 Years in Footy
(Hunt and Bond, 2005) about the topics of coerced mergers, ground
rationalizations, and the national expansion of the VFL/AFL. About Fitzroy’s
last game in the VFL/AFL, Hunt and Bond (2005, p. 121) write: “There was sadness
mixed with pride for one of the VFL’s founding clubs ... but also anger and
bitterness towards the AFL, which the faithful held responsible for Fitzroy’s
demise”. About the failure of the 1996 Melbourne-Hawthorn merger talks to bear
fruit, the same authors (2005, p. 125) write:
“The final result was great to
see because the game could not afford to lose any more of the traditional
[ex-]VFL clubs.
The often bitter battle
demonstrated that any merger discussions in the future would be an ill-advised solution
to the woes of any struggling Melbourne-based teams”.
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| Old shed, Leederville, unchanged since 1984 |
Afraid
of vehement public backlash in its Melbourne heartland, the AFL’s approach
since 1996 has simply been to add expansion clubs to its national premier
league instead of relegating clubs or forcing mergers. The AFL competition will
have eighteen teams in 2012 when Greater Western Sydney Giants (GWS) plays its
first senior season. Although the main trend in Australian top-tier sport today
is towards corporatism, there is also a secondary move back towards
traditionalism, with North Melbourne in the AFL and Canterbury-Bankstown
Bulldogs in the NRL both recently reverting to their traditional club names.
My suggestion, as posed to Brian Atkinson by e-mail, was:
Why does West Perth not move away from the traditional Western Australian
“either-or” mentality to a “both-and” form of thinking? If the West Perth club
is determined to stay at Arena Joondalup (I would personally prefer a more
old-style, less corporate ground such as Kingsway Reserve or the Osborne Park
oval used in the former Sunday Football League), why not play three
home-and-away games a year at Leederville Oval? They might attract good crowds
of 8,000 or 10,000 people if managed carefully and advertised well. We should
not forget that a crowd of 20,112 people suddenly turned up out of nowhere to watch
the last West Perth game at Leederville Oval on Sunday 22 August 1993
(Atkinson, 2008, p. 219), which was ironic because, if the club had had average
home crowds of even one-third of that number in 1993, the club may not have had
to move to Joondalup. The photograph on p. 219 of Atkinson (2008) shows West
Perth’s “golden oldies” teams warming up in front of the huge crowd on the old
Leederville Oval scoreboard bank (now largely gone) on this day in August 1993.
Some morbid people will come out of the woodwork to watch a club (strictly
speaking an era not a club) in its death agonies. There are still literally
thousands of West Perth fans and ex-fans lying dormant out there in the inner-
and outer-northern suburbs stretching 30 kilometres from Leederville through
Tuart Hill through Nollamara through Balga through Greenwood through Carine and up to Joondalup. Many of these
thousands were part of the crowd that day, 22 August 1993.
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| Lathlain Park, P v SD, 2/7/11, great traditional ground |
Significantly, the NRL clubs St George Illawarra Dragons and
Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles have kept their cramped, quaint, traditional,
inner-city grounds at Kogarah Oval and Brookvale Oval respectively. St George
even chose to host a final recently at Kogarah Oval in front of 18,000 diehard
St George supporters rather than in the cavernous open spaces of Aussie Stadium
where 60,000 people might have attended with St George fans not necessarily
being a majority. Although part of the terms of the merger agreement between
Balmain Tigers and Western Suburbs Magpies, it should be pointed out that three
NRL games per year are still played by NRL club Wests Tigers at Balmain’s
traditional ground Leichardt Oval, the NRL equivalent of Victoria Park or Windy
Hill. A Friday night telecast match on 24 June 2011 between West Tigers, the
home team, and Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs was played at Campbelltown Stadium
(formerly Orana Park) in Sydney’s outer south-west fringe. The ground,
previously home ground to Western Suburbs Magpies and Newtown Jets and now
venue for a few Wests Tigers home games each season, was nearly full to its
21,000 capacity although it was just 7 degrees Celsius at kick-off time.
Michael Ennis of Canterbury-Bankstown spoke to the media on receiving his Man
of the Match award and stated how much he enjoyed playing on such an old-style,
traditional ground. West Perth could follow this West Tigers’ model by playing
games away from Arena Joondalup including a few games back at Leederville Oval
(say between one and four games a season). However, as few Australian Rules
Football fans in the southern states follow rugby-league, many of the game’s
fans and administrators are not knowledgeable about worthwhile and plausible
alternatives to the status quo which rugby-league has already tried.
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| WPFC cheer squad sat here, 1984-86 |
Like the AFL and
NRL, the WAFL was also hit by the corporatization trend during the 1990s, even
though the WAFL’s most attractive aspect remained and remains today its “retro”
appeal to a largely older generation of football supporters. It has to be said
that applying managerialist principles and ideologies at that second-tier level
has, on occasion, looked quite ridiculous. During the 1990s the WAFL changed
its name to the trendier “Westar Rules” (1997-99) and encouraged club mergers,
relocations, and ground-sharing arrangements. The 2000s saw the yuppification
of Leederville Oval so that the now “boutique ground” allegedly merges
seamlessly with the inner-city, latte culture of nearby Oxford Street. This
redevelopment suggests a certain naivety that assumes that the Oxford Street-Mt
Lawley latte set is the same demographic that does or might conceivably watch
WAFL football games if only the football grounds themselves became trendier. Basically,
the WAFL in the 1990s hired managerialist CEOs and it attempted to shamelessly
follow the same strategies and ideologies as used in the AFL and in North
American professional sports. Fixture dates and times were fooled about with,
the most silly and thoughtless of all being the 29 March 1987 scheduling of a
West Perth versus East Perth game (the pride of the old way of life) after the
West Coast versus Richmond debut VFL/AFL clash at Subiaco Oval (the first game
of Modern Football) (Atkinson, 2008, p. 208). Of course, the crowd streamed out
of the ground at the end of the VFL/AFL fixture, leaving only a handful of
people in the ground to see the WAFL match (Atkinson, 2008, p. 208). This must
have been incredibly disheartening to the WAFL players involved. The WAFL
deserved much more respect than this and the WAFL leaders did appear to learn
from this and similar mistakes for a while, shifting back to all Saturday
afternoon WAFL games in 1988, a year in which WAFL crowds stabilized or even
grew slightly. However, clubs such as Perth were under continual pressure
during the 1990s to merge or to relocate to the outer metropolitan area. Only
West Perth ultimately left its inner-city ground, and the club now “stands out
like a sore thumb” “all dressed up and nowhere to go” much like the former
Soviet Union after the October 1917 Russian Revolution when it was expected
that other European countries would soon follow the Soviets’ lead and become
communist. Joseph Stalin famously invented the doctrine of “socialism in one
country” whilst West Perth’s current doctrine appears to be “relocation at one
club”, i.e. it does not admit that it possibly jumped the gun but just keeps on
its operations regardless, hosting traditional clubs at Joondalup and visiting
those clubs at their inner-city traditional bases including the ridiculous
situation of playing “away games” against both Subiaco and East Perth at
Leederville Oval.
After Peel Thunder was added to the WAFL competition in
1997, it was realized that, firstly, the traditional clubs were the league’s
greatest assets and, secondly, it is very difficult to start up a new club that
can compete on the same level on the playing field as the traditional clubs.
The on-field failure of Peel Thunder over many years meant that the traditional
WAFL clubs were accorded more respect by all stakeholders, including the
WAFC/WAFL hierarchy, and the forces pushing relocations became much less vocal.
In that sense, Peel Thunder has proven to be a blessing to all of the
traditional clubs although the traditional clubs have proven to be far from
grateful. It appears now that no WAFL club will relocate. South Fremantle
effectively cannot move in any direction as it is bounded by the river and the
ocean to the north and the west, by East Fremantle to the east, and now by Peel
Thunder to the south. Perth is no longer considering the possibility of
relocation with the legendary Perth premiership coach Ken Armstrong expressing
a view, in Perth’s official club history book (cited in East et al., 2005, p.
151), that to do so might cause Perth to lose its essence and to die. Armstrong
(cited in East et al., 2005, p. 151) also refers to the fact that many of the
ex-Sunday Football League clubs exist in the south-eastern corridor already,
clubs now not so much smaller than Perth, and it is not easy to win new fans.
Trial games played in the south-eastern corridor by Perth have attracted crowds
no bigger than, and sometimes smaller than, the crowds that the club regularly
attracts at Lathlain Park. However, Perth’s case is arguably not exactly the
same as West Perth’s case since Perth is able to keep the south-east suburban
zone whether it shifts to the south-east corridor or stays where it is. Given
this dynamic, it may as well stay where it is because tradition is on the side
of Lathlain Park and Lathlain Park is much more accessible to the majority of away
team supporters, and also many or even most Perth supporters, than are the
possible mooted relocation locations such as Gosnells, Maddington or Kelmscott.
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| Western Oval, Footscray, abandoned by AFL |
This leads us on to an important related point that West
Perth and the WAFC completely ignored with the move to Arena Joondalup. The
old, inner-city, traditional grounds may look like obsolete relics to a casual
observer but, if WAFL fans are now scattered throughout the metropolitan area,
the inner-city grounds still have the advantage that they are not too far
removed geographically from anywhere or from anyone. Atkinson refers to this
point in his second e-mail above. Away team supporters of other WAFL clubs,
especially south-of-the-river clubs, can more easily travel to Leederville Oval
than to Arena Joondalup. Few away team fans presently visit Rushton Park in
Mandurah for Peel Thunder games or Arena Joondalup which is why crowds at these
two remote venues tend to be smaller now than crowds at Bassendean Oval (the
pace-setters for crowds in the current era), Lathlain Park or Fremantle Oval.
Because of the relentless urban sprawl that characterizes contemporary Perth,
it is a 100-120 kilometre round trip from Mandurah to Joondalup or from
Armadale to Joondalup. Atkinson refers (above) to his 52 kilometre round trip
to West Perth home games at Arena Joondalup from his residence in Wembley
Downs. The absence of away team fans definitely has a negative effect on
match-day atmospheres which lowers crowds yet further in a vicious cycle. In
fact, John Devaney of Fullpointsfooty.net documents that West Perth’s average
crowds for 1994 at Arena Joondalup (4,011) were smaller, by a fair margin, than those for 1993 at Leederville Oval
(5,218) (http://www.fullpointsfooty.net/west_perth_(3).htm, accessed 6 March 2011).
I suspect that what occurred here was probably a large drop in away fans
attending West Perth games as well as a drop in the number of West Perth fans
living in the vicinity of Leederville Oval going to the club’s home games. It
would be interesting to know how many West Perth supporters are old-time fans
and how many are people who go to the games primarily because they live close
to the new oval in Joondalup.
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| Western Oval, 1/4/11, not AFL venue now |
The WAFL has now re-established equilibrium as a respected
second-tier competition, with strong traditional clubs each with dedicated
hardcore followings of around 800-1,000 people each which results in average
crowds of around 2,000 to 2,500. It can be very enjoyable supporting the WAFL
again, as long as you do not dwell too long on comparing it with its Glory Days (pun intended, I support Perth Glory Soccer Club too).
The WAFL is now unashamedly “retro”. Areas such as North Perth and Victoria
Park are now very gentrified and multicultural, but not multicultural as West
Perth was in the 1980s as few of the new Chinese, Indian, and Muslim migrants
presently love Australian Rules Football. Therefore, an inner-city venue such
as Lathlain Park on a Saturday afternoon offers “retro” delights at a ground
that has barely changed at all physically since Perth’s glory days in the
1970s. There is a physical re-creation of long lost simpler times. When I
visited Lathlain Park for a Perth versus Claremont game in 2010, it was a
beautiful sunny May Saturday, people were wearing club colours again, and Perth
had a van on the scoreboard bank selling club merchandise, the club history
book, and grand final DVDs. To fit in with the retro mood, the 1976 Grand Final
DVD had sold out and I was forced to buy the 1977 DVD in its place! Obviously
it was knowledgeable insiders who had been doing the buying since the 1976 Grand
Final was a much closer and more exciting match than the game played one year
later. Happily, the clubs and the league are becoming confident in their own
skins again. It is wonderful also to see the Sandover Medallists of the WAFL Glory Days honoured one by one on special paving stones on the Roberts Road footpath
outside Subiaco Oval. You can walk in the direction away from the city-centre
and years pass you by in seconds as you walk past plaques in recognition of John
Ironmonger (1983); Mitchell, Malaxos, and Spencer (1984); Murray Wrensted
(1985); and Mark Bairstow (1986). Furthermore, old-time WAFL stars such as
Steve Marsh have been honoured by gates named after them at the same ground.
With over 25 gates at the mega-stadium presently there is pretty much a gate
for everyone! Some football traditionalists might argue that all this is
equivalent to the biblical illustration of “killing the prophets and then
building their tombs”. However, I think this would be too harsh a judgement and
it is certainly better to see these past champions of the WAFL’s Golden Era
being honoured than not. It is certainly better than seeing Subiaco Oval gates
named after second-tier Eagles’ players! Despite these positive developments,
one sad factor for a West Perth supporter is that it is no longer possible to
attend home games at the club’s
traditional home ground. In that sense I must admit that I do envy supporters
of clubs like East Fremantle, South Fremantle, Swan Districts, and Perth. One
could watch West Perth versus East Perth at Leederville Oval and try to prevent
the thought that it is an East Perth home game from intruding upon one’s
consciousness. I have never attended such a game as I believe that I would not
be able to perform the requisite mental gymnastics. I would simply leave the ground feeling
depressed.
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| Lathlain Park, few people under 30 here |
A further worrying factor regarding the future of the WAFL
competition is that crowds, as far as I can ascertain, are made up of mostly
men and a few women aged over 30 and children aged below twelve. The children
enjoy being able to kick footballs on the oval and hear the coaches address the
players at quarter time and at three-quarter time. However, key demographics
that do not seem to attend WAFL games in large numbers presently are teenagers
and people in their twenties. In the picture directly above this text, taken
at the Perth versus Swan Districts’ game at Lathlain Park on 2 July 2011, there
is a young guy in his twenties, looking remarkably like the late Sid Vicious of
the Sex Pistols from the back, who is in centre-shot of the group of Perth
supporters standing on the concrete terraces in front of the bar. This guy
stands out also for being the only supporter visible in this crowd picture who
is clearly and unarguably aged in his twenties. Teenagers were a key element of loyal WAFL support in the 1980s and they would
regularly travel to WAFL grounds on Saturday afternoons on the trains and buses
in their twos and threes or even all alone to meet up with other young people
at the grounds. As the current group of WAFL supporters gets older and its more
senior members pass away, the competition needs to be able to replace them with
a younger demographic. The WAFC/WAFL needs to think very carefully about this
issue as do the nine clubs. The WAFL has probably attracted few supporters,
whether interstate or international migrants or younger people, who were not
already supporters during the WAFL’s Glory Days which concluded in 1986.
Someone who was five years old when the Eagles was formed in 1986 is now 30
years old and this person is probably not a hardcore WAFL supporter having no
personal memory of the WAFL’s Golden Era. Perhaps consideration could be given
to granting free concession entry to WAFL games and extending this to tertiary
students aged 25 years or under. I am aware that finances are always a problem,
but the WAFL and its clubs should also consider advertising more extensively in
youth-focused, high-school, university/TAFE, and community-based publications.
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| Lathlain Park city end, PFC cheer squad's area, 84-6 |
The WAFL is now similar to non-league English soccer, far
down what in England is termed “the pyramid”, where games are run
professionally, the clubs have traditions, and the crowds are small but
dedicated. The WAFL has lost, for the most part, its army of “fair-weather
fans” that used to attach themselves especially to clubs like East Perth and
South Fremantle. The club diehards have remained, by and large, with the clubs
except perhaps for some previously staunch West Perth fans disillusioned by the
move to Arena Joondalup. The VFL/AFL era has been a real existential test of
people’s loyalties. In the WAFL’s Glory Days, people would declare and pretend
that they were hardcore fans of this or that WAFL club but in those days the
competition was glorious and people’s loyalties were not really tested.
Existentially speaking, those 800-1,000 committed supporters of each WAFL club
that continue to attend WAFL games weekly have proven themselves to be the most
committed WAFL club supporters by their actions. The great, traditional,
ex-NSL, ethnic soccer clubs, such as Adelaide City, Marconi Stallions,
Melbourne Knights, Preston Lions, South Melbourne, and Sydney United are now
relegated to the Victorian Premier League (VPL) or equivalent competitions in
other states, and are in exactly the same situation as the WAFL clubs. WAFL
football is now enjoyable but in a very different way as these days you can
spread yourself out, there are empty seats often to your right and left, and
the queues for toilets and food are small and manageable. The WAFL is now like
the premier league soccer, rugby-league, and rugby-union competitions in
Western Australia have always been in that the atmospheres can be wonderful
partly because you can assume that all of your fellow spectators are dedicated
and knowledgeable insiders! If you do not allow your mind to wander into that
place of comparing the old and the new WAFL, you will find that attending WAFL
games today is quite enjoyable. Interestingly, disillusioned Manchester United
fans set up in June 2005 a community-based club, FC United of Manchester, which
plays to small but dedicated crowds in cosy, compact stadiums in a minor league
(Northern Premier League, formerly known as UniBond Premier League) below and
outside the Football League (seventh tier of the pyramid and third tier outside
the Football League) (Fuell, 2009, p. 104; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Premier_League,
accessed 8 April 2011; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_United_of_Manchester,
accessed 8 April 2011). The club’s financial members get one vote regardless of
financial contribution. With an average crowd of 1,969 for the 2008-09 season,
up to and including 9 November (p. 102 of December 2009 issue of Non League magazine), FC United draws
around five times as many people, on average, as the typical club in its
league. The club’s record home crowd is 6,731 people at Gigg Lane, Bury
versus Brighton & Hove Albion, FA Cup Second Round, on 8 December 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_United_of_Manchester,
accessed 8 April 2011) beating the previous record of 6,023 people versus Great
Harwood Town on 22 April 2006 (Fuell, 2009, p. 104). United FC is an organic
and authentic community-based response to the increasing corporatization of
soccer and the alienation that now exists between fans and players and between
fans and administrators at English Premier League (EPL) level. The grassroots
WAFL clubs are the equivalent of FC United of Manchester whereas the
corporatized West Coast Eagles is the equivalent of Manchester United.
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| Lathlain Park, southern end |
What is the way
forward for the tier-two state leagues around the country? The two obvious
paths forward, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, are the “retro”
approach of the WAFL and the expansion approach of the Queensland Cup
rugby-league competition. A third, out-of-left-field approach would see clubs like Port Melbourne
from the VFL apply for and join a competition in another state, for example the
SANFL. Obviously this option applies to exceptional cases and not to the
majority of clubs in a league.
The Queensland Cup, the former Brisbane suburban
competition, has expanded to include teams in all of the major Queensland
coastal cities, not presently servicing an NRL team, including Cairns (“Northern
Pride”); Mackay (“Mackay Cutters”); Rockhampton-Yeppoon (“Central Capras”); and
Sunshine Coast (“Sunshine Coast Sea Eagles”) (see: http://www.qrl.com.au/default.aspx?s=qldcup,
accessed 12 April 2011). The competition has also expanded south-east to the
Gold Coast (“Burleigh Bears” and “Tweed Heads Seagulls”) and south-west to
Ipswich (“Ipswich Jets”). “Toowoomba Clydesdales” formerly played in the
competition and hope to re-enter. On balance, the Queensland Cup has probably
been right to follow the expansion course because the Queensland regional
cities are of reasonable size (50,000 to 250,000 people) and rugby-league fans
in those cities do not have a local NRL team. I have watched Central Comets (now
Central Capras) play a Saturday night game under lights within the cosy
confines of Browne Park, Rockhampton, where everyone is within twenty metres of
the pitch. The club does a wonderful presentation of the whole event there and,
with a crowd of around 3,000 people in a cosy ground, the atmosphere is
compelling. However, entry prices remain relatively cheap and there is always a
seat directly behind the fence available for someone arriving just a few
minutes prior to kick-off. Channel 9 will televise Queensland Cup matches in
2012 (replacing the ABC) which will provide a further boost for the second-tier
league. Television cameras will appear at the grounds of the three north-coast
clubs, Central Capras (Rockhampton, formerly Central Comets), Mackay Cutters,
and Northern Pride (Cairns), for the first time in 2012. Western Australia is a
different prospect in that towns in Western Australia are much smaller than
those in Queensland (10,000 or 20,000 compared to 50,000 or 150,000) and any
expansion club in the former state would probably follow the path of mediocrity
followed by Peel Thunder. On balance, I believe that the WAFL competition
should not further expand although clearly the Goldfields and Geraldton regions
have appeal. Australian Rules Football has a long and wonderful history in the
Goldfields region in particular stretching back over a century. The WAFC/WAFL
hierarchy should keenly study Queensland Cup developments as well as, more
obviously, developments in the SANFL and VFL.
I turn my attention now to two recent interesting
developments involving state league second-tier clubs in Hobart and Perth.
Firstly, Jason “Aker” Akermanis’ recent turning out for Glenorchy versus
Clarence in the Tasmanian State League (TSL) competition on Saturday night 2
April 2011 in Hobart attracted a record crowd of 8,480 people (Anonymous,
2011a). It is certainly wonderful to see such an accomplished and decorated
player give something back to second-tier football. Arguably, as Hobart has no
regular AFL team, Aker will attract larger average crowds at Glenorchy than if
he had signed for a WAFL club.
Secondly, Swan Districts’ players were recently praised by
letter writers to the Brisbane-based Courier-Mail
newspaper, Wendy and Darren Schultz of Sherwood, as a result of 64 Swans
players arriving via charter plane in Sherwood, Brisbane to assist in clean-up
operations after the floods of January 2011 (Schultz and Schultz, 2011). Of
course the letter-writers could not refrain from utilizing the expected poor
pun of swans taking well to water! The great attitude of the players involved
(there are far fewer unmanageable egos at this level of the game) and the fact
that the Swan Districts club could mobilize as many as 64 players quickly
suggests that the smaller WAFL club operations can respond more effectively to
at least some emergencies than the AFL corporate behemoths. The action of the
Swans club and its players is consistent with the club’s modern (re-)branding
as a community-based club with a community ethos. The cleaning efforts got the
club some coverage in the Courier-Mail
whereas it would be close to impossible for the club to gain newspaper coverage
in Brisbane for its football exploits. Swans’ act represents existential
acting-out of a strategic re-branding which is really just a tinkering and a
slight re-emphasis of attributes that the club has possessed throughout its
life. The concept of a community-based club assisting a community on the other
side of Australia is an interesting one and it suggests innovative ways and
approaches for tier-two clubs to carve out niche markets and brand-names for
themselves which do not involve fighting head-on the hegemonic AFL clubs. The inaugural
Foxtel Cup this year (2011) has also offered some hope and extra meaning for
second-tier clubs around Australia as players and supporters got to test
themselves out on the national stage.
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| Barkly St Footscray loyalists - but WB have gone! |
