George Megalogenis: Global warming gives cold-weather Tigers no finals chance
THE WRY SIDE
The Australian
September 18, 2006
"HOW did Melbourne cope without finals footy?" It is a question only non-Melburnians could pose. First, they assume Melburnians have nothing better to do on a September weekend than go to the MCG. Second, they forget that for every Melburnian who might have wanted to attend a game, another 10 were happy to watch it on the tube.
The blessing in having no final played in the home of Australian Rules over the past weekend was that the matches were shown live. Sydney Swans supporters no doubt understand the value of this observation. The weekend before, the red and the white faced the West Coast Eagles on the other side of the continent. If the game had been played in Sydney, most of the locals would have seen Michael O'Loughlin's winning goal and his primal scream at the opposition cheer squad only on a delayed coverage. Home finals are overrated, and they don't rate.
But I digress.
My true love is Richmond. The Tigers win and lose when they are not supposed to. Richmond didn't make the finals this year. They finished ninth, which is the gold standard for mediocrity in the AFL, the position just below the waterline that doesn't earn you a life jacket. There are no draft concessions for the best team outside the eight, only the promise that, with a bit more luck, they might sneak into the finals next year. Richmond has now finished ninth on five occasions since the AFL allowed half the competition to call themselves finalists in 1994. Only twice did the Tigers back up their ninth place with a finals finish the following year, in 1995 and 2001.
Richmond taught me long ago that the footy season ends in August.
After watching Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth last week, I'm convinced there is a valid scientific reason why the Tigers don't make it to September like they once did. (Richmond won five premierships between 1967 and 1980, which meant my childhood was mostly a happy one).
Gore cited the example of caterpillars and birds. Scientists in The Netherlands have noticed that caterpillars are adapting to global warming by bringing forward their birth dates. The migratory birds whose chicks rely on the caterpillars for food are also hatching earlier.
Unfortunately, the birds haven't quite caught up. The caterpillars are coming before the chicks, which means the former are thriving and the latter are starving.
OK if you are a caterpillar.
But on the weekend just passed, one of the many reasons why Melburnians coped brilliantly with an empty MCG was the weather. It felt like mid summer, not the first month of spring.
Richmond is the caterpillar up the tree. The reason why my mob are peaking a month or more earlier than most other sides is global warming. No question. Even in their wooden spoon year of 2004 the Tigers were in the finals when it was still sort of cold, at about round 8. They lost every one of the 14 rounds after that. The year 2004, in case you have forgotten, was blighted by drought. So was 2003, when Richmond were sitting second on the ladder at round 8. They won just one more game, against the Western Bulldogs, under the roof of the Docklands mausoleum. The airconditioning must have been on deep freeze that night.
Some in the AFL commission might assume the solution to global warming is to adopt cricket's motto of the endless summer and play in every month of the year.
But cricket is overexposed. The attention span of the average sports nut is only six months. Fans of all codes need at least six months off to maintain the illusion of sport-life balance.
Who remembers Steve Waugh's last two Test centuries? They were struck in July 2003, in Darwin and Cairns, against Bangladesh, when cricketers should have been going to the footy. Those tons confirm that cricket had lost its body clock, and that Waugh was obsessed with his batting average. Who else would take a Test against Bangladesh that seriously?
The lesson for the AFL is obvious.
Global warming is moving every Australian city a notch up the thermometer. Melbourne now has Sydney's weather pattern; Sydney has Brisbane's; Brisbane has Cairns'; and Cairns has turned into Cairo.
September is no time to be playing finals football. The season should be brought forward a month, with the kick-off in March and the grand final at the MCG on the last Saturday in August.
So I don't really care where the first three weeks of finals are played. Nor do most Melburnians, for that matter.
I just want to see the Tigers there next year, before I head off to the beach.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20428379-7583,00.html
