Footy returns with a matter of respect and solidarityGreg Baum
The Age
12 June 2020As if this AFL season – this whole year – wasn’t already eerie enough, at the MCG on Thursday night Collingwood and Richmond re-started the AFL season not with empty gestures in a full stadium, but a loaded gesture to an empty stadium. It was their contribution to the Black Lives Matter protests.
Momentous in a completely different sense was the low-scoring draw played out by the Magpies and Tigers. It meant that footy’s return to centre stage began in silence and finished in a hush. In this season of one-round only, these two premiership contenders won’t meet again now until the finals.
Minutes before the first siren, all players mingled around the centre circle, then each took to one knee to show solidarity with the BLM movement. The umpires joined them. It is a long time since they have been the men in white and in charge anyway.
This group genuflection was inaugurated in 2016 by American footballer Colin Kaepernick to protest injustice to blacks in that country. It brought him opprobrium then, but has been adopted latterly by sports teams around the world as part of the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Once, using sport as a platform would have been frowned upon here, but that was in another time, two weeks ago.
If round one was odd, this was dystopian. The way the MCG looked and what happened in it, it was as if all laws – of the land, of nature – had been suspended. In their place, there is only one: stay away. It’s Dusty’s don’t argue, but to 80,000 people. Stretching a point, it’s to seven billion people. The only familiar aspect was the game, and even that came as something of a shock to the system after 81 days without it. Later, coaches Damien Hardwick and Nathan Buckley agreed that it was at all levels a bizarre occasion.
To begin, Collingwood played and beat Richmond at their own high-intensity game and kicked the first four goals of the match. But bit by bit, the Tigers reclaimed their patent. They’re well conditioned now to being the hunted instead of the hunter.
The Magpies did not kick a goal after the seven-minute mark of the second quarter. But the Tigers could only cobble together five of their own against the sturdy Magpies defence. A heavy dewfall did not help. Jack Riewoldt’s set shot to win the game for Richmond inexplicably failed to make the distance.
In style and standard, this did not look so much like round two as starting all over again. Hardwick said that because of the long hiatus and minimal recent training, it was like starting from behind scratch. So it looked.
The special effects – that is, the extraordinary effects to simulate the normal effects – probably worked on television, but at the ground, they served only to highlight what was missing.
Collingwood’s cardboard cut-outs, you might be surprised to know, looked and sounded like cardboard cut-outs: static, placid, unmoving, gormless in a way a footy crowd never is. When Richmond’s Jack Higgins was paid a doubtful goal-line right in front of them as the Tigers stormed back in the third quarter, not one of them even twitched. Joffa, where were you?
As for artificial sound effects, they echoed and only managed to make the 'G sound even emptier. The trouble with fakery is that it is so hard to fake.
For now, they’ll have to do. As any coach worth his salt would say, it’s not a controllable. It’s strictly a television game for now anyway, very strictly, so it’s props and prostheses only. The Olympics have been pulling this trick for years. If either club had gotten to play its anthem at the final siren, it would have rung true enough.
For the players, old habits, like the virus itself, die very hard. Try as they might, it proved impossible not to slip in the odd low five, the periodic tousle of a mate’s hair. You could hardly blame them. Somehow, they’re meant to switch at will between fierce physical contact and none at all. They're meant to get everything dirty except their hands.
It’s incongruous, but what isn’t just now? Eventually, the elbows came out, but that was just so that they could exchange felicitations at the final siren.
Expect more of the same as round two unfolds: grounds that echo, gestures that resound. It is expected that there will be some sort of Black Lives Matter symbolism at every match. Richmond defender David Astbury said the Tigers were not going to treat it as a one-week movement.
It is certain there will be more footy. Maybe there will even be a result.
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/footy-returns-with-a-matter-of-respect-and-solidarity-20200611-p551sy.html
