Opinion
You’ve got to be a trainspotter to care if the NRL wins Sydney’s stadium wars
Malcolm Knox
Journalist, author and columnistIn the past month I have been to five NRL and NSW Cup games: three on rectangles, two on ovals, one viewed from a seat, four standing or sitting on a grass hill, once on a rug, once under an umbrella. As I go to games as one of the spectators rather than to observe them from a glassed-in box, I feel qualified to referee the bout between Dominic Perrottet and the Premier of New South Wales, Peter V’landys, on whether $800 million of public money should go on purpose-built rugby league stadiums in Sydney’s suburbs.
It can be stated from the outset that Mr V’landys is correct about toilets. Irvine Welsh’s description in Trainspotting – “It’s oddly reminiscent ay the foot pool at the swimming baths ah used tae go tae” – suggest that he’d done his research at a suburban rugby league facility. You could sink your whole $800 million into the men’s rooms and still “feel the pish soak intae ma trainers as ah step ower the door ridge”. An upgrade? There needs to be an investigation.
The toilets might justify the expense alone, but then there’s the problem of how to get to the toilets in the first place. Logistically, the worst venue to get into and out of is Moore Park, which is presumably why the new stadium has been built there. The Moore Park precinct remains Destination Victoria’s best advertisement for Melbourne Park. Sydney’s suburban grounds, offering rat runs, holes in fences and secret parking spots, capture the essence of local knowledge. Round two to Mr V’landys.
In the current venues, the entrances are so primitively narrow that when everyone pours out of the pubs to try to get in at once five minutes before kick-off, they end up missing the first ten of the match. Then there’s the inevitable tall person with a very large head impeding your view. On grass hills, your choice is a wet bum from sitting or a sore back from standing.
Mr V’landys says we deserve better. We should be seated in comfort, and when we are out of our seats we should never have to queue to buy food or drink. Mr V’landys calls us “punters”, and so we also deserve wagering systems delivered direct to our brains.
Once we’ve sampled the glories and unimpeded sight lines of the new Parramatta and Moore Park citadels, with toilets clean enough to eat off, we will no longer tolerate facilities where “one piece ay good luck is that the lock oan the door is intact”.
Renton from “Trainspotting” knows all about toilets.
Just when it’s looking like a walkover for the V’landys camp, however, a setback occurs. If suburban fans felt so hard done by, why aren’t they staying away? It’s not just me: every one of those inadequate grounds was full or nearly full with fans who remained stubbornly content.
Even watched across the vastness of an oval field, the games I’ve been at have all produced exciting, high-quality football with results in doubt up to the final minutes. League is enjoying a vintage season and people are happy just to be outdoors. If there is unhappiness, fans are not complaining about the stadiums but the things they are meant to complain about: their team dropping the ball and the referee not keeping the other mob onside. (If Mr V’landys can find a way to monetise the words “Get em onside!”, he’ll be onto another winner.)
Contrarian Dragons fans remain soothingly unhappy with their own players and coach even when they are winning. Unhappiness has reportedly been abolished in the Parramatta stadium, but I’ve heard about even those lucky folk waxing nostalgic over the old hill and the old dunnies and the old entry prices, and wishing they’d never set fire to the Cumberland Oval grandstand.
It’s not enough that we are con-TENT with our league. The NRL wants us to be CON-tent. Have you noticed this latest vogue word? “Content” needs to be produced for these facilities, as if the world is one big streaming service and our tribal loyalties are some kind of fluid that can be pumped into a commercial pipeline. Our experience of being a spectator involves suffering and praying and living and dying; if we are “content”, all that matters is that this range of emotions ends up with consumption and being consumed.
“Get em onside!”Credit:Getty
The redefinition of sports as “content” becomes especially pernicious when you reflect on Phil Gould’s outburst during last week’s Souths-Manly match. In the eighth minute, Manly’s Karl Lawton was sent off for upending Cameron Murray. From the point of view of player safety, enforcement of the rules, and basic duty of care, Lawton had to be sent off. In commentary, an exasperated Gould, who saw the tackle as accidental, said, “if that’s your product, I give up.”
If rugby league is “content” and a “product”, then Gould was right. The prime-time content was spoilt. For 72 minutes, the result was not really in doubt (ironically, the rule changes that have sped up the game to make it a more attractive “product” mean that 12 can no longer match it with 13; with speed equalling “entertainment”, an early send-off effectively kills a contest).
The conversion of fans into “punters” and sport into “content” is of a piece with Mr V’Landys’ transactional view of the rugby league universe. If everything is a commodity and a bargaining chip, then of course the suburban stadium proposition will be sold on its economic merits and the grand final will be taken hostage until the NRL gets what it wants from poor Mr Perrottet.
More transactions, more deals, more winning bets, more content. It’s one thing to appreciate these achievements, another to be seduced by them. We would love to have everything Mr V’Landys wants for us, especially “considering the atrocious state ay the bogs”.
Nothing to see here.Credit:Channel Nine
But then again, it’s not us who’s being asked to pay for them, it’s the other five million taxpayers in NSW who couldn’t care if the NRL grand final is played in Timbuktu, who don’t go to games but may still consume the product on TV while sitting in hospital waiting rooms or minding their schoolchildren who aren’t in the classroom for lack of teachers.
We would love a fancy new stadium in every league suburb. We would also love a new car if someone else is paying for it. But if the State faces an either/or choice between stadiums or schools and hospitals, it’s hard to find anyone in a league ground who would put their own comfort first.
Perhaps the stadium investment is eventually meant, like everything else, to trickle down somewhere.
In the meantime, what we know and they don’t is that the greatest game is just as great when it’s watched standing on a hill, in the rain, on an oval, in soaked shoes and with some goose blocking our view. If the powers came out here, they might find that even when we’re whingeing, when we’re at the footy we’re quite content.
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