OPINION: "West Perth's Move to Joondalup, East Perth's Move to Leederville", by Jack Frost

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barkly St Footscray loyalists - but WB have gone!

To return to the topic of ground redevelopment and rationalization, Subiaco Oval today is a fully corporatized ground, sold out to West Coast season-ticket holders for West Coast home games, and surrounded on all sides by homogeneous grandstands and the ubiquitous, horrible, plastic bucket seats. The once great traditional ground with the atmospheric, concrete terracing, so close to the play on the Roberts Road scoreboard wing, is now a hollow corporate shell and is completely distasteful for traditionalists. In Foucauldian manner, the corporate people aim to control, physically as well as psychologically, every aspect of a football supporter’s game-day environs and experiences. They cannot understand that some people like to watch games from grandstands but others prefer either grassed banks or concrete terracing [by Jack Frost, written in 2011, first posted on 28 July 2012].