Crossing Punt Road, joining crowds on Brunton Avenue as the streets are ours, it’s as if we gather for a rout. This is a perfect autumn Sunday afternoon to smell blood. The sun shines, cool air is still, and in my mind I think only of gladiators in ancient Rome, and a duel to the death that, for this crowd, will bring tacit pleasure and approval. The weekend’s last rites are to be played – we’ve come to put the Demons to the sword.
Such insouciance before a game I do not know. Absent is the familiar anxiety, the slipknot of tension, accompanying me when my team plays. I support Richmond and this is our condition. But, on this stride to the ground, it feels as if the conclusion is foregone. What we are to see is a procession. The outcome seems a formality. Talk before the game is only of percentage.
It is a narrative that today, for me, matters. I have chosen to watch from Level 3 of the Olympic Stand, in the closeted confines of the MCG press box, a room filled with ghosts of football storytelling from where many of the great dramas of this city have been told.
I am to watch the game from behind glass, high above, on an upholstered seat, seeing it through the eyes (and over the shoulders) of a huddle of football scribes. I have come to report on the reporters. I wear my colours, but my viewpoint is neutral. And, all the time, I’m hoping my favoured sports writer is at the game. This man, he’s an alchemist; who turns Monday mornings into a pleasure, who makes words sing, who bends phrases like Peter Daicos once bent a football. His words can be as poetic as the elms that line the paths to the MCG; and his surname, in German, it means ‘tree’.
**
“I don’t have any preconceived ideas, I just let the game unfold in front of me,” says Bruce Matthews, 65, a Herald Sun sports writer who’s been in the game 30-odd years and who I introduce myself upon arrival. “But I do work on the theory that match reports should really reflect on who won the game, not who loses it.”
It’s a fraught business, to be sure, being a match reporter, making sense of the many-sided puzzle that is a game of football, on deadline. More than any other game, ours is one of interpretation. It seems often there is no right or wrong. The bounce of the ball could go either way. And even when it’s kicked between the two tallest posts – when proof seems irrefutable – there is now no certainty. A voice from above is just as likely to denounce what all others have seen, A case can be made for or against any decision, then play moves on.
What is known, for veteran reporters like Matthews, is how much the game has changed. He still talks of “filing 40cm of copy” (about 800 words), but for a readership now expecting instant gratification. The game’s speed has increased, as has our desire for digital immediacy. “When I first started, we covered the Saturday games and went to the office on Sunday to write it up,” he says. “Now we need to file copy pretty much on the siren. The editions have gotten tighter and tighter.”
Mitigating the pressure-cooker circumstance are the facilities. Before the bounce, I help myself to a lemon custard tart and decide I could eat my way through this game. Ten square dining tables are covered in white damask cloths, on which are stacks of the day’s football Record, and photocopies of each club’s official team sheet. I eat a round of gourmet sandwiches with basil pesto and roasted courgettes, note the tea selection (peppermint, green, English breakfast, Cleopatra’s tear drops, etc), and make myself a coffee. A sign on the pie warmer says: “Pastries will be ready at ½ time”. I think I can wait.
Pleasantries are exchanged among rivals before the bounce. Matthews (News Limited) chats openly with Caroline Wilson (Fairfax), chief football writer for The Age (and daughter of former long-standing Richmond Football Club president, Ian Wilson), but today sitting in the 3AW commentary booth. Everybody says hello to ‘Richo’, and Jonathan Brown, as they come and go, seeking sustenance from the open kitchen.
When the ball bounces, 18 reporters in the room share utter quiet. I realise now, for this game, I will be a silent witness. Laptops are opened, alongside A4 notepads, with pens poised. Most of the reporters have an earpiece plugged into their computer, listening to a radio feed. All of us are behind glass, under down lights, in air-conditioned comfort, and never before have I been so detached from a game.
“This is the best part of the week, when they bounce the ball,” says Matthews, who says he once barracked for Melbourne, but reassures his impartiality. “I have absolutely no interest in who wins or loses this game.”
And herein lies a great difference. When Tyrone Vickery leads and takes the game’s first mark inside 50, the crowd’s applause sounds like hailstones on a roof and I want to cheer also. A quarter-hour later, when Brett Deledio snaps the team’s first goal, at the Punt Road end, I can see ‘Trout’ in the outer, standing with his banner held aloft, wearing his canary-yellow wig, on the edge of the cheer squad and full of passion, and decide that it is with him that I truly belong.
**
Opening the doors to the Ron Casey Media Centre is like stepping into a footballing inner circle, steeped in names ingrained in Melbourne’s collective memory. It’s a gathering each winter weekend of MCG staff and a fraternity of sports writers, broadcasters and photographers, that has become a lore unto itself. Opaque name plates of those inducted into the MCG Media Hall of Fame gleam on one wall, and they read like a sporting history of this city.
Jack Dyer, Ian Major, Ron Casey, Lou Richards, Mike “I tipped this” Williamson, Mike Sheahan, Scot “keep on punchin” Palmer, Peter Landy, Tim Lane, Bob Davis, Drew Morphett, Geoff Poulter, Harry Beitzel, Rohan Connolly, Bruce McAvaney, Rex Hunt, Martin Blake, Dennis Cometti, Eddie McGuire, Sandy Roberts, Geoff Leek, Kevin Bartlett, Doug Heywood. Caroline Wilson, notably, is the only woman among a roll-call of men.
I read through the names and feel a pang of melancholia; for a time gone, for games played, for memories of childhood and the wonder that football had in it. Some of the names had been colleagues of mine many years ago – photographers Bruce Postle, John Lamb and Sebastian Costanzo, among others – and I think of them fondly.
I take two photographs of the two names whose football writings I admire the most: Martin Flanagan and Greg Baum. I grew up reading Flanagan’s stories of football games in Tasmania, and his words about footballers have sometimes moved me to tears. He is a great storyteller of our time. And I have come to realise that all other match reports are written in Baum’s shadow. Nobody else distils the drama of a game like he can. It is a private pleasure to open the sports pages of The Age and see his name atop of anything written about Richmond. That’s my team, and his are words to savour.
**
There is Baum now, sitting in the front row of the tiered seating, laptop out and notepad ready, seated alongside Michael Gleeson and few up from Matt Windley, from the Herald Sun. 
He checks his emails. He writes notes after each goal. But what I notice most, from early in the first quarter, he chews a white plastic fork and bends its tines with a fanaticism for disposable cutlery rarely seen at the football.
It’s a game-day tension that looks to rival that even of a barracker’s. “What’s changed in my time of reporting is that the matches are played later and later at night, and the deadlines have come the other way,” he says. “Most times I’m sitting there with a knot in my stomach, even if it’s a one-sided game, until I’m actually clear in my mind what I’m going to write.”
In a career in sports writing that began in 1979, when working as a junior sub-editor on The Sun, his is a body of work that can trace the evolution of a game, both as an industry and as a succinct contest. “No two games are alike, every game is different,” he says. “Part of my job is to drive out what was different about that particular game, what made it unlike any others.”
It’s an interpretation made always against the clock. On Sunday’s game, for instance, he had about an hour afterwards to file 700 polished words. And here was a luxury. For night games, copy needs to sent on the bell. “If you push your luck with an editor and an obliging ‘sub’, you might get 10 minutes after the siren.”
Imagine then, trying to make sense of Richmond’s game against Fremantle, decided late on a Friday night in Perth, in the last two minutes, nearing the midnight hour. “Close night games are wonderful for supporters, but they’re a nightmare for us,” says Baum. “In sport, the result is the context for everything. A great goal with a minute to go means nothing if there’s another goal with half-a-minute to go that changes the result again. You’re second guessing the whole time what might happen, while trying to write about what did happen.”
**
What did happen on Sunday afternoon at the MCG is that Richmond won a game comfortably that it was expected to win. But on this occasion, by necessity of what had gone before, the story was as much about the vanquished as it was about the victor. As Baum wrote in his report republished in Monday’s paper (after its online airing), here was “a match that rose to no great depths” that for neutrals was a “ghoulish watch for who the Demons eventually will beat, and when”.
Idle talk in the press box during the game was, at best, clipped asides among colleagues. When Chris Dawes kicks the game’s first goal: “Six hundred grand, and counting down.” When Aaron Davey kicks a goal from a free-kick advantage: “Pretty cheap goal, wasn’t it?” When Dustin Martin picks out Tyrone in the centre square: “Great pass by Martin to open it up.” When Richmond pushed for ascendency in the third quarter: “Finding it hard to break away, aren’t they?” When Trent Cotchin lines up for goal early in the last quarter: “If he kicks this, Richmond have kicked five of the last six goals.”
My observations, sitting high above the Richmond interchange bench, have no even-handedness about them. When Nick Vlastuin kicks his second goal in AFL football, I smile and see that Jacob King is one of the first to congratulate him. When Steve Morris runs half the ground to mark and goal, I write in my notepad: “Where were you when Stevie Morris kicked his second goal in AFL football?”
In misty rain and under leaden skies on Saturday morning, I had called out to Morris across the Punt Road Oval fence at training, asking how tall he is. A friend I was with, a Hawthorn man knowledgeable about all things football, had said to me “he’s bigger than you think”. I sought clarification from the source. Morris thought about the question, and replied he was six foot. Then added: “The important thing is, I’ve got dad covered.”
Sunday afternoon’s highlights from my vantage included Jack Riewoldt’s goal on the three-quarter-time buzzer (the man is a showman, here was his party trick), Nick Vlastuin’s scything run up the Olympic Stand wing (he moves with such balance, with such a perfectly measured centre-of-gravity), and the piercing crowd roar when Jake King, late in the third quarter, goaled on the run from 50 metres out.
Soon after last week’s game against Port Adelaide, I sent a tweet that read: “Brandon. Ellis. Is. A. Gun. How old is he? How good does that make you feel? After his 39 disposals on Sunday, I feel vindicated. He is a young man with a wonderful football career ahead of him. But, after last week’s game, I also wrote a blog suggesting that dour defenders have no place in kicking goals and celebrating afterwards.
I eat my words. It was a joy to see Steve Morris kick his second goal (both have been at the Punt Road end of the MCG), and return from whence he came to the adulation of his teammates. It was a joy also to see Troy Chaplin, at the 16-minute mark of the last quarter, kick his first goal as a Tiger (on his non-preferred right foot) and salute the moment with a theatrical fist-pump. It was a celebration to make defenders proud. Damien Hardwick, by nature a hard stopper (14 goals in 207 career games), must have had an inner glow in the coaches box.
**
From the press enclosure, I felt I could not feel the game; I couldn’t smell it, I couldn’t taste it. At half-time I had gone outside to meet a man, who last week sent me an email. He was watching in the outer, alongside his young son born with cerebral palsy, strapped in a wheel chair with a bib around his neck. Ours was an achingly beautiful encounter. I will write a story about this man and his son, but not right now. I will write a story also about those who sit around him, Tiger fans, who for two hours each weekend, at each game, share in an unspoken understanding and friendship.
I think this is what football is about.
After the game, I dropped into the rooms and met briefly with Troy Chaplin’s parents, and congratulated them, and asked about their expectant second grandchild. They said their daughter-in-law was doing well, and it was due anytime soon. The following day a tweet from Troy Chaplin arrived in my Twitter feed that read: “Great day for the Chaplin household. Baby No. 2 arrived today. Blake Jaxon Chaplin, little fella and Mum doing very well.”
Congratulations to Troy Chaplin and his wife. For those who can, and those who want, I think this is what life is all about.
Tiger tiger, burning bright.
or Twitter: @dugaldjellie
