For this football season, I have cut out five letters from black felt and hand-stitched them onto a yellow T-shirt. In four hours of sewing, I have joined a Melbourne custom that’s older even than meeting under the Flinders Street clocks. Mine is a parochial form of expression. I’m showing my colours. My affiliation is clear. I am a barracker.
When saddle-maker Thomas Sherrin, in 1880, made his first football, Melburnians already were parading club loyalties; wearing scarves in team colours or pinning silk ribbons in hatbands and cardboard rosettes to button-holes. Bicycles were painted in club livery. Handkerchiefs were chosen for their hue.
Sports historian, June Senyard, in her article Marvellous Melbourne, Consumerism and the Rise of Sports Spectating, says that from the 1870s the local game became “identified as one of the finest traditions of the city”, and central to this was the idea and engagement of the crowd. They watched in rain. They stood in the outer. They attended in numbers that captured public imagination.
“Without the crowd there really is no game,” wrote a Melbourne Punch writer in 1905. “And the only part of the crowd that counts is the barracker.”
As Senyard points out, during the boom times of the late 1800s, with Melbourne the financial hub of the South Pacific, a democratic liberalism emerged through which watching sport became a new avenue for expression. The word “barrack” was coined. Emotional commitments were made. The spectator became a performer, contributing to the enjoyment of the event.
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And so it continues, with modern-day identities such as Jeff ‘Joffa’ Corfe, the Collingwood cheer squad ringleader, who dons a gold-sequined jacket in the last quarter to trumpet victory. His is a sideshow to the main event, a vaudeville act, never missed by the TV cameras and a performance that adds to the spectacle of the occasion. Everybody who loves football loves ‘Joffa’. There’s nobody else like him.
“I have always been in love with the Collingwood Football Club,” wrote the man himself in Tales of the Gold Jacket, published in The Barrackers are Shouting. “And I have never been ashamed to express my love for this club.”
At Richmond, a club that for the past 30 years has had leaner times than all others, humour and wit have become ingrained traits of the way we barrack. It is our self-help mechanism for understanding loss and disappointment. We loved ‘Richo’ because of his greatness, but also because of his flaws. We’ve heard all the jokes about finishing ninth. And yes, yes, we know we’re the only club in the competition winless against Gold Coast.
Humility has made us only stronger.
But it’s also made us more creative. It’s a great mystery of football that Richmond supporters attend games in such vast numbers, full of good cheer and hope, with chants and songs adding to the theatre of the day. And that so many of them come dressed up for the occasion, hoping their creative expression of support just may help inspire the team to greater deeds.
Everyone has a Tiger within, yet some show it more flamboyantly than others.
At a pre-season night game at Etihad Stadium, for instance, I met two 12-year-old boys from Grantville in South Gippsland, Seth and Adam, who play football for Wonthaggi Power, but on this night were dressed in novelty Tiger ‘onesies’.
“They wore them all day, from the train at Cranbourne to the ground, and back,” says Tanya Smith, Seth’s mother. “If we come to another game, they’ll wear them again. Everyone had a laugh and wanted to have their picture taken with them.”
Round 1 against Carlton, I met Siobhan, 15, and Rhiannon, 17, from Boronia, outside the ground and dressed up with Tiger ears and hats and knee-high Tiger socks. “We do it all the time,” says Siobhan. “We love Richmond and want to support the team. We want to wear the colours. We’ve gone crazier before.”
Then, inside the MCG, was Chris Howard, 25, from South Yarra, and two of his mates dressed up incognito in Yellow and Black one-piece lycra ‘morph suits’ that turned heads. “It was great fun and we had our photos taken with kids all night,” he says. “But I’d check the weather before doing it again. It was absolutely freezing. The material was thin, the wind cut straight through.”
Last Sunday, I met William, 4, from Bentleigh, on the train with Tiger face-paint and a Trent Cotchin ‘tattoo’, going to the game with his mum, and ‘pop’ and Aunty Bev (both Bulldogs fans). “He was a Western Bulldogs fan, but his father converted him,” says William’s mum. “And dad did the face-painting today.”
At the ground, I met Nabila, 20, and Azizah, 21, full of smiles and incorporating the Richmond colours into their hijab. “We don’t come to many games, but we thought we’d get in the mood today,” says Nabila, whose parents were born in Indonesia and Yemen. “I started following Richmond in kindergarten, when my dad bought me a Richmond jumper.”
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The story of ‘Joffa’s’ jacket began with a gold wig he wore in 2001 to symbolise a Collingwood victory. Soon after, when he spotted Eddie McGuire on The Footy Show in a shiny gold jacket, the outfit expanded. Eddie had the jacket dry-cleaned and gave it to Joffa at Victoria Park one night at training. And so the legend began.
Richmond has its own supporter traditions and identities, of which Trout, in the cheer squad, is undoubtedly one. He is the court jester, a leader of the pack. He wears a yellow wig to games, a Tiger shirt he bought in Hawaii, and Yellow and Black boots he bought in Harlem.
“When I met my wife, she barracked for Collingwood and I said I wouldn’t marry her until she barracked for Richmond,” he says. “I once told Benny Gale I’m doing the club a service. All our children barrack for Richmond. I’m breeding out the Collingwood gene.”
On Saturday afternoon at the MCG, at a home game against Collingwood, on a clear and still day, before an expected crowd of 80,000-plus, two more Richmond supporter traditions may yet be born. One may be before the bounce, the other, hopefully, late in the last quarter.
A group of Richmond supporters are spreading the word via social media to create a ‘tifo’ among the Punt Road end crowd, as the players run through the banner. It’s a soccer tradition (‘tifo’ being an Italian word that means ‘supporting a team’), involving usually a choreographed display of support by fans in the stadium.
The plan is for every Richmond supporter to hold aloft their Yellow and Black scarves, as the team runs through the banner and towards the ground’s ‘home’ end. It could look spectacular – an act of solidarity in support of the team.
The other tradition will be a one-off. “Joffa’ has his gold jacket and in my back shed, I have a gold-glitter helmet. If Richmond is to win on Saturday, here is my promise. With Trout, and the approval of the cheer squad, I will stand up and raise the gold-glitter helmet in victory and put it on my head.* This is to be a signal – putting the helmet on, to take the lid off.
While doing so, I will hold aloft a sign in respect of ‘Joffa’. It is to be an acknowledgement of what he adds to the colour of the game. It will be a Tiger interpretation of a victory salute. I do this to follow in the great tradition of football barracking. I do this for all who have Tiger within. But I do this mostly hoping that my support might just help our players win the game. That is, I do it for the boys.
Tiger, tiger burning bright.
*If anybody going to the game has a gold-glitter wig they could lend, please email me (and join in if you want)!
or Twitter: @dugaldjellie
