I left old Melbourne town 10 years ago, having lived there since 1980. I arrived as a young immigrant, a Welsh boy, but to the local lads I was a Pom. Eager to find a way to fit in, I got curious about the game being played at playtimes and lunchtimes on the school oval - kids jumping over each other to get hold of an oval ball so they could kick it at some white sticks or between school bags. They were wearing jumpers of all colours, but those wearing yellow and black were dominant. In 1980 the Richmond Football Club was all conquering. When that September Spring came and when the Tigers became premiers, it was sealed - my way of fitting in to a new country was set: wear the champion’s colours, watch the champion’s games and sing the champion’s song.
By 1982, I was hooked on the Tigers for life. My ‘fitting in’ strategy was working perfectly and I loved the Tigers for it. Even if we did lose the grand final that year, we were still strong and fearsome. Everyone knew it, there were plenty of bragging rights in the school yard, and I was sure I had years of glory (and popularity) to enjoy.
When I left Melbourne in 2001, the Tigers premiership drought was 20 years old. Growing up I had been to scores of matches. In the mornings before home games at the MCG, I had walked from Richmond station with the hopeful throngs, or kicked the footy in Fitzroy Gardens with my great mate Simon, rehearsing the Tigers moves. In the late afternoons - and far more often than I had imagined I ever would - I had trudged back home with the sulking masses. And let’s admit it, no mob of fans is ever so sad and self-critical as a losing Tigers mob, and it can get you down. So when I left Melbourne, it didn’t strike me that I’d suffer too much by taking myself away from the opportunity to attend games.
It’s now 2011 of course, I’m an entrenched absentee fan, and I’ve become aware that there’s actually a big pack of us orbiting far away from Punt Road and the MCG. We still swing by the MCG to catch a match but only every now and then, like thousands of yellow-and-black Halley's Comets. We carry the Country / Interstate membership card and during the season we spend a fair chunk of our weekdays trying to work out how and where we can watch the coming weekend’s match.
Don’t tell my missus, but on a holiday to Europe a few years ago, I spent about $600 on data roaming charges to watch a Tigers replay on my mobile phone. When I first moved to Canberra, I had literally no furniture in my flat when Simon came up to visit. We’d worked out that there was a Tigers game on the TV that Saturday (rare for Canberra let me tell you), so we bolted down to one of the local TV stores, grabbed a cheap telly and a six pack of beers, stuck the TV on a cardboard box in the flat, sat on the floor and watched the Swans cane us.
I have visited pubs and clubs I wouldn’t be seen dead in, but for the fact they were showing a cable broadcast of a game. And I’ve sat in a very questionable bar in Chiang Mai, Thailand with another mate of mine Ben (who was a Tigers fan but switched to the Cats when he was still just young enough to get away with such treachery). We studiously ignored the bar’s local entertainment to settle in for a late morning local time Geelong-Richmond scrap (which the Tigers just lost from memory at a time when Geelong was well and truly the best).
By September 2001, I was living in Brisbane and Richmond had made the preliminary final. This was my first year as an absentee fan and how good was it that I could walk up to the Gabba on the evening of the match and buy a general admission ticket to the game? Brisbane were just on the cusp of its glory years, and AFL was still more of a curiosity and less of a rabid passion amongst the locals. But perhaps it was this night when the locals got their first idea of what rabid passion looked and sounded like.
Richmond fans had come from far and wide, and this night, we of the yellow and black were all, in a way, absentee fans. We were all a long way from the familiarity of a blustery early Spring evening in Melbourne, the air thick with the smell of hot jam donuts. It was balmy Brisbane, and instead the air was thickening with the scent of a sub-tropical Spring floating up from the river.
To compensate for our discomfort and smaller number, we roared and roared. In the first quarter, when scores were still close, I can remember the locals turning and staring in shock at a large group of us barracking our hearts out at all four of the Tiger goals that quarter, and ripping shreds off Brisbane and the umpires every time something did not go our way. We lost the game of course, but we won the barracking that night, teaching the locals the art.
And so it is. I have come to appreciate that the further away from the game and the mob that I am, the louder I yell, the more passionately I implore, the more deeply I analyse, the more desperately I turn away in horror when a simple kick goes astray. When we win I can dance on my own without shame in the lounge, in a dark corner at the bar, on the empty street. When we lose, I have time on my own for quiet reflection about why (after screaming into my scarf for a minute or so).
This is the poetry of being an absentee fan. We see and feel things differently, and perhaps at times more richly. It can seem lonely but it’s in fact the opposite. I always imagine the thousands of others just like me, many many miles away from the ground urging our team on. Eat them alive Tigers, eat them alive.
