STATE OF THE UNION
THE GREAT Johnny Warren was six middies deep at the Clovelly Hotel when I quizzed him about Australians’ derision for his great love, the beautiful game, the football we call soccer. He’d heard it all before, of course, all the jibes and sledges. He’d written a book about it – THE book about it – called Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters, in which he’d chronicled decades of ignorant, dopey dumb-arsery. So instead he asked a question: “What does it matter what Australians think?”
Now, now – cool your jets, Aussie sports fan. The man didn’t mean it in a derisory way. It was more rhetorical – a statement of fact. Because the football we call soccer is a global juggernaut. It’s the whale to eat all the whales. And if a small sub-section of Australians didn’t get that, then more fool them. It’d be like a tribe from the Amazon taking a set against cricket. Like, so? The great thumping water buffalo that is football would barely notice it, as a symbiotic oxpecker nipped it off like a tick.
Which brings us largely segue-free to another global sporting whale – the game of rugby union, which in Australia, the greater group-think tells us, is “dying”. Crowds and ratings are down at the professional end. The Wallabies haven’t won the Bledisloe Cup since 2002 (when Pato Noriega was tighthead prop; he is now 48). And the third-tier National Rugby Championship engenders less tribal allegiance than Fraser Anning’s Nazi Cockheads Party.
Here in the great (if occasionally, we can all agree, mite insular) southern land, the game is perceived – rightly and wrongly – as a beached whale. Ask any rugby and/or greater Aussie sports fan about the game and it’ll be equal parts doom and gloom. Popular perception is that the game they play in heaven is already in the
