TheGuardian - Bulldogs' AFL premiership a win for people power and community

Guys, Sorry for flooding but this is another good read. Soak it in guys. The sun is shining on us :)

The Western Bulldogs’ drought-breaking AFL premiership is a win for people power, community spirit and the hard work of some truly special individuals

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https://s.yimg.com/iu/api/res/1.2/LE...-611910770.jpg Western Bulldogs captain Bob Murphy embraces his coach Luke Beveridge as Dogs players and staff fronted ecstatic fans at Whitten Oval on Sunday. Photograph: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

cstatic fans at Whitten Oval on Sunday. Photograph: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

The Western Bulldogs are a community. More than this, they are a club of the people. When the Bulldogs won their first Premiership in 1954, they played for club and community. In the intervening 62 years, top footballers have come to work in an industry with million-dollar salaries and profiles comparable with the Prime Minister’s.

In many ways, much of the idealism and social benefits of the sport have been traded for a place at the corporate entertainment business table. The AFL has taken a wonderful product and hid it inside a corporate plan for a production house.

The irony is that the ultimate promise of the entertainment business, of pop culture, is of belonging to a community – a promise that it can usually only fulfil figuratively (is an audience really a community?). Football is able to realise the promise literally. There is no better example of this than the Western Bulldogs.

If a people’s legitimacy is derived from its artefacts, then the Bulldogs’ is found in the “Up Yours Oakley” sticker. It is found in the scarf of Bulldogs’ life member Irene Chatfield; a scarf that has more tin than wool. It is in the premature obituaries written in Melbourne papers of years gone by. “Footscray is in its death throes,” wrote one journalist. For so many years, the Bulldogs weren’t a football team so much as group therapy.

Our idea of self has always been the stories we tell, and this is all part of the Bulldogs tale. The “Scraggers”, Melbourne’s suburban battlers, are forever pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. It is a central part of a history that their half-back poet, Bob Murphy described as “a wafer-thin line between romance and baggage.”

But to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, there is no document of a people which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Without it, the battler rarely comes out on top. It applies as much to Western civilization as it does to the Western Bulldogs.

It is less than two years since Dogs president Peter Gordon, a man who fittingly possesses the ferocious mentality of a bulldog (as you would expect of a formidable lawyer from Braybrook), fronted a media conference to announce Brendan McCartney’s departure, saying that the coach’s position for the remaining two years of his contract was untenable. This two days after the club’s captain Ryan Griffen asked to be traded to Greater Western Sydney.

A week later the club turned Griffen’s torn-up contract (another Bulldogs’ artefact) and pick six into 19-year-old Tom Boyd, despite the GWS chief executive’s protests that Boyd would “not be traded under any circumstances”. If the struggles of the club’s past had taught Gordon anything it is that timidity doesn’t cut it. And seven years and $7 million beats seven kinds of shit out of timidity.

Along with his predecessor David Smorgon and fellow director Susan Alberti, Gordon has poured enough of his own money into the club to more than comfortably cover Boyd’s contract, along with the extension that might have been entertained for the first time.

But the smartest decision made by Gordon and his board was the one in which they appointed McCartney’s replacement. Despite the inane reactions, which reflexively criticised the Bulldogs for inaction, the club took its time to ensure they appointed the right man.

What the Bulldogs got in Luke Beveridge was a coach who has little time for what is both the bane of football fans and an all-purpose alibi for hapless executives, the “rebuilding process”. If Beveridge – no stranger to an analogy – was to embrace the metaphor and take it to its extreme, he’d have told the Bulldogs that he’s happy to live in the house while it’s being built, and not to bother with the roof.

At this point it is also worth considering that the club has developed its list without a pick inside the top 24 of the draft since Beveridge arrived.

In 2014 the Bulldogs selected Toby McLean (pick 26), Caleb Daniel (46) and Zaine Cordy (a father-son selection at 62). Last year they took Josh Dunkley at 25 when he failed to attract the interest of his father’s club, Sydney. Together under Beveridge, they back themselves in and play football the way it’s supposed to be played. Not one of them looked out of place on football’s biggest stage on Saturday.

Evidence of Beveridge’s mindset is also evidenced in his treatment of the club’s veterans. Speaking at the post-grand final function at Melbourne convention centre on Saturday night, Gordan said the Bulldogs had been discussing the future of veterans Matthew Boyd and Dale Morris last year with plans to move on both. It was all a part of what was regarded as a “traditional rebuild”.

“Bevo had been pretty quiet during the whole meeting but at one point he said, ‘Jase [list manager Jason McCartney], I just don’t believe in this sort of stuff [rebuilds]. I need you to know that there are a few guys on that list who can actually make really important contributions for us in the next couple of years’,” said Gordon.

“It was born of Bevo’s belief in two things really – one is that Hawthorn got a lot of success out of actually encouraging blokes like [Luke] Hodge and [Shaun] Burgoyne and [Sam] Mitchell to keep playing because of the ability they’ve got, and secondly because the younger players learn more and walk a bit taller because those guys were in the side.”

In 2016 Matthew Boyd was an All-Australian for the third time. Morris played through the last month with two fractured vertebrae and led by example in the grand final, tearing every last shred of meat from the bone. No matter how many times you watch the replay, it’s inspirational to see.

On inspiration, Bob Murphy has helped turn what is a fine team without him into something remarkable, something historic. Matthew Boyd says this premiership is Murphy’s to share with those who played in it.

“It’s as much for him as anyone. He’s been unbelievable, just a great support for all of us,” he told Seven. “Easton Wood’s done a fantastic job as a stand-in skipper, but Easton wouldn’t have been able to do it without the support that Bob’s shown… Bob was certainly a great source of inspiration and spirit through the year.”

http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/f...9851?width=650 Western Bulldogs vice president Susan Alberti cries with joy after her team’s grand final win at the MCG. Photograph: Michael Dodge/AFL Media/Getty Images

When Luke Beveridge draped his Jock McHale medal over Murphy’s head on the presentation dais, it displayed this generosity of spirit that continues to define the Western Bulldogs. The “sons of the ‘Scray”.

This finals series opened with veteran broadcaster Tim Lane calling it “the most significant weekend of finals football in the AFL’s history.” In many ways it was a statement made in the milieu of a shifting power base and the rise of the AFL’s newest franchise, Greater Western Sydney.

But when football historians look back on this period, what will be just as important – if not more so – than the success of the league’s expansion project, will be two things.

One will be clubs recognising and re-embracing their role within their communities and the second will be the rise of women’s football (noting that the two are not mutually exclusive, certainly not for the Dogs). The Western Bulldogs do both better than most.

This club plays an important role in Melbourne’s west, and through programs such as “Sons of the West” – the Western Bulldogs men’s health program – it has quite literally changed lives. Through the remarkable Susan Alberti, they have been both a pioneer and powerful force in establishing a regular and rightful place for women’s football.

In this context, it is fitting that the Western Bulldogs are the 2016 Premiers. They have reminded us that a game of the people, one that is woven into the fabric of its community, is not mutually exclusive from the ruthlessness required for success at the highest level. We always talk about the good old days. Well these are the good old days.

One of the best post GF articles I have read. Thanks for posting it Choco.

Crying again :o

"If the struggles of the club’s past had taught Gordon anything it is that timidity doesn’t cut it. And seven years and $7 million beats seven kinds of shit out of timidity."

Poetry. Beautiful, brutal poetry.

You think Bob could have bothered to wear a Bulldogs T-shirt though hahah.

Great read. Thanks for posting.