The Swans beat North Melbourne at the SCG, but the result mattered little at the end of a week that has been a wake-up call for all connected to club
Under normal circumstances, Sydney’s game against North Melbourne would have been one of those bloodless, half-arsed dead rubbers of which there were quite a few in round 24. It would have been an opportunity for the Swans to rest a few superstars, and tune up for two home finals. It would have been one of those jolly Sunday-afternoon SCG romps the Swans are renowned for. It would have been a day of celebration for the club – the first ever double-header, a chance to talk about inclusion, respect and culture.
The alleged events at the Pullman Hotel a week ago, after which five Swans players were suspended for breaching club standards by “drinking … staying out late … and bringing women back to the hotel”, put paid to all that of course. It put paid to a lot of things – trust, relationships, reputations, careers, endorsements, campaigns. It brought forth much else – opportunist lawyers, performative and presumptive op-ed columnists, out-of-their-depth chief executives, amateur sleuths, thrice hourly “breaking of silences” and a lot of rage. It’s very much a story for our age – with battlelines drawn, with facts disputed and with all sense of scale and perspective torpedoed.
Much of the anger early in the week was directed at the sports media for framing this as a football story. Some poorly-worded tweets from newshounds and a tin-eared statement from Sydney’s CEO set people off. But this is a sports story. It’s the story of a club, of a team, of individual players, of a supporter base, of an entire footballing ecosystem. It’s the story of a club and players who purported to have cracked the code, to have landed on that perfect balance of performance, marketability and, ahem, culture. It’s a story that proves how fragile those claims to sporting magnificence can be.
If you waded through the muckraking, the rumour-mongering, the conclusion-jumping and the straw-manning, one thing stood out – the devastation of the supporter base. On air, in print and in person, there was a sense of betrayal among Swans fans. It was particularly evident among women and older supporters. There was the thudding realisation that they’d been sold and bought a lie – the lie of the clean-cut, squeaky-clean superstar, and of the unimpeachable culture. Malcolm Knox captured this in an excellent piece for the Sydney Morning Herald. Swans fans, he wrote, “feel like they’ve been made fools of.”
Much of it, I suspect, came down to who the implicated players were. These weren’t a few bad eggs on the fringes. These were some of the best and most popular Sydney players of their generation. At training, Isaac Heeney was the player kids swarmed to. He was the player boundary riders gravitated to when the siren blew. He was the player sponsors wanted a piece of. He was the one who sat down with Hamish McLachlan for the Unfiltered program last Saturday. He was the one, when all hell was breaking loose at the Pullman Hotel on Monday morning, who still found time to pose for a selfie with a young fan. It was muscle memory for him, like exiting a stoppage, like flashing the Colgate smile and reeling off a few inanities to the host broadcaster after a big win.
But this has been a wake-up call for supporters as well. So much of what we’re fed as fans is a carefully curated construct – from the club hierarchy, from the person running the social media account, from the media who fawn over them, from the ads in between goals, from their partners on Instagram, from the players themselves. As fans, it’s easy to buy into this when the player is so freakin’ good, when they’re so comfortable in front of a camera, when they’re on a long leash at the club, and when they’re being cosseted and feted every minute of their day.
There were doubts over whether the fans would turn up at the SCG on Sunday. Kelli Underwood wrote a column predicting a “funeral”-like atmosphere. It was nothing of the sort of course. The atmosphere at the AFLW game was joyous. Sydney’s women had done the heavy lifting all week, compelled to defend the culture of the men’s program. When their game finished, there was definitely a walk-out of sorts. One woman, according to reports, “turned to face the stadium and stuck her middle fingers in the air”.
Those who stayed all had their reasons. They stayed out of loyalty, out of habit, out of hope, and maybe out of curiosity. After all, it’s rare to see a team so disembowelled of its talent. Gone was that Sydney swagger. Gone was the silk of Heeney, the acceleration of Chad Warner, the harebrained dashes of Nick Blakey, and the lock and key of James Jordon. In their stead was a team shorn of much talent and confidence. But the bare bones were still there. Errol Gulden played one of the best games of his career. And that was enough.
They won, but it didn’t really matter. They said all the right words, but the words didn’t really matter either. They booked a qualifying final date with one of great teams of their generation, and that certainly doesn’t matter. Everything that matters, the Swans players and coaches told us for two decades, lay within the four walls. Everything that matters now is in the hands of Victoria police, even though none of the five Swans players have been arrested or charged. Those walls have been shattered anyway, replaced by something far more rickety. The men in tears in the middle of the SCG on Sunday were no longer ambassadors, or automatons, or untouchables, or cultural exemplars. They were footballers – nothing more, and nothing less – and football, after a week in a sewer, was something to celebrate again.
