Scribbling away
There are sporty kids in our family. Grandsons, grand-daughters, nieces, nephews, you name it, they’re running around in shorts and team tops, fit as fleas, having a high old time of it.
And they have one thing in common: They. Are. All. Playing. Soccer.
So let’s swing into the year on a topic that’s enlivened public debate, driven editorial comment and got Tasmanians shouting words of rage, threatening to bring down governments, and sticking needles into voodoo doll images of AFL executives.
I refer to that damned football stadium.
Scenario One:
A cold misty morning in Trowutta. Cows milked. Dog chained. Jug and toaster turned off. Hunched figures shuffle their way towards the old Valiant.
“Get a wriggle on Merle. Got a bugger of a drive ahead.”
“Coming, coming. Just putting egg sandwiches in the boot. Not paying twenty quid for a pie!”
“You’re not wrong. Let’s move, a lot of frost about. Have to take it slowly.”
And off rattle Merle and Trev on the long, long, slippery, roadwork-stalling drive to a grandiose stadium on the Hobart waterfront to watch Gold Coast Suns play Fremantle Dockers.
As they sit, rugged up, amid the sparse crowd, AFL luminaries and business executives take in the game from the comfy surrounds of a corporate box.
Scenario Two:
The Front Bar. Mick, Sam and Andy chat with Football supremo Gillon McLachlan on the subject of Tasmania inserting a team into the AFL.
McLachlan, raised eyebrows making him look disconcertingly like C3PO.
“Have you ever been to Tasmania?” The boys chortle mightily. A Tasmanian team in the AFL? The very thought!
And there’s the nub of the matter. Far be it for the column to go over the bleeding obvious demerits of a proposal to build a zillion dollar monument to a game hardly anyone plays these days, on the site of one of the most beautiful waterfronts on the face of the planet.
These have been pointed out by just about anyone in Tasmania who can hold a pencil or make a phone call.
The ‘build it and they will come’ mindset is seriously out of whack on this one.
It particularly applies to the Australian Rules code of football.
Like it or not, the kids are ditching the game in droves.
Their heroes are Lionel Messi and Jamie Vardy. Young girls have posters of Samantha Kerr on their walls.
You cannot move from one part of town to another on Saturday mornings for cavalcades of cars whisking them to soccer grounds.
And here’s another thing: proponents of this Taj Mahal of stadiums assume we’re all going to ditch our AFL team and become avid Tasmanian supporters.
Really? Not this Magpie of decades standing. Not old Tigers, Cats and Bulldogs.
And before I go - that stunning precinct in Hobart is to be cherished.
To paraphrase the wonderful Jacqui Lambie, if we allow it to be clogged with cars, empty beer-cans and discarded sausage rolls as we grovel for scraps from the AFL high table, we deserve a football boot straight up the clacker.
