|
There’s nothing black and white about Melbourne University’s football history, Greg Baum writes.
THE University Blacks’ only win in the miserable season of 1982 was over its Siamese twin, the University Blues, a finalist that year. As such, it characterised this oldest, best-loved and most schizoid of football clubs. A quarter-century in the amateur football wilderness ensued for the Blacks, which means they and the Blues have not met since, until today, when the battle royal resumes at the University Oval.
Both teams say only the four points matter and, for the Blacks – hit by injury, without a win and battling again to cling to their hard-won and much-treasured place in A-grade – that is obvious. But this match has been nothing if not a long time coming. A little anticipatory chiacking was heard at last year’s Melbourne Cup, more in a hospitality tent at the Adelaide Test earlier this year, not to mention fashionable bars all over inner Melbourne for the past six months.
Blues expect Blacks to come at them early and hard, just as in 1982. It matters not that most of today’s players were not born then, nor that there have been several attempts to merge the two teams since, nor that they share a name, a pavilion and a guernsey, and once shared players under a system that prefigured the draft, and still share University Oval, alternating on Thursday nights according to which team is playing at home that weekend, while the other team trains in nearby Royal Park.
Blacks and Blues have a history – long, rich and distinguished, but also at times aggravated and precious – and that is all that matters today.
The match also is a way of celebrating another blissfully coincidental anniversary: it is 100 years this year since the first of University’s seven years in the VFL, 100 years last weekend since Uni played and beat that season’s other newcomer, Richmond, at the East Melbourne ground it then shared with Essendon.
University players were required to have at least matriculation, prompting The Australasian newspaper to predict that the club, with its "superior intelligence", would prosper in this still new and exciting competition.
But "Follower", writing in The Age, was less enamoured of another development that season: minions at quarter-time distributing lemons among "the over pampered footballers of today". Where, he wondered, would it end? Eau de cologne and fans at three-quarter-time? Trainers, masseurs, free cabs to the ground, refreshments afterwards, theatre passes and other "emoluments"?
The game, he concluded, had changed since its amateur heyday the previous century. Today, in yet another century, is another heyday for the amateurs, if not strictly an amateur heyday. The match will be preceded by a fully subscribed luncheon at a Lygon Street pasta restaurant, walking distance away. Necessarily, University is a club that has stayed close to its roots.
Melbourne University Football Club was founded in 1859, three years after the university, and claims to be the third-oldest in the land behind Melbourne and Geelong. Total enrolment at the university at the time was 50. Waxing and waning followed, but, in 1907, under the strong leadership of noted anthropologist Professor W. Baldwin Spencer, it was voted into the VFL.
University was at first competitive. It beat every other side once at least, except Collingwood, with which it drew. Its stars included Ted Cordner, patriarch of the famous footballing family, Bert Hartkopf, also a great public school athlete, and Dr Roy Park, who kicked 111 goals in three seasons. Hartkopf and Park each played one Test for Australia, Park’s career famously lasting one ball, which his wife missed when bending down to pick up her knitting.
But exams, school holidays and finally war took their toll. More than 250 Melbourne University students and alumni died in World War I. University lost its last 51 matches and Park, despite leading the league goalkicking in 1913, never played in a winning side. By 1915, University’s VFL cause was lost.
As the post-war football landscape reshaped, two University teams played in the VFL reserves, As and Bs, soon Blues and Blacks. In 1920, Blues lost the grand final to Collingwood. The next year, back in the amateurs, Blues beat Blacks in what remains their only meeting in a grand final. Since, this dichotomous club has been a staple of the amateur scene, Blues and Blacks augmented from 1955 by a third team, the Reds, that has since seceded and now plays as Fitzroy.
Each has had glory days. The Blacks won a string of premierships in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, and its 1965 team is regarded as perhaps the finest in amateur football history. But they fell on hard times in the ’80s, sinking to E-grade and losing even to the semi-social Reds. The Blues have played in A-grade for all but six of the past 60 years (they were relegated one year because of an ineligible player), but have a Collingwood-like record in grand finals. University has produced more VFL/AFL players by far than any other club, 110 at last count. It is an illustrious list.
But University remains an enigma, a paradox, two clubs in one. The two play under the auspices of one – principally because it is sports union policy to fund one club only in any sport – share colleges, combine for intervarsity matches and, for a long time, fielded a joint under-19 team. They also for many years recruited by a system called allocation, evenly and rigorously dividing new talent as it arrived at the university. It meant one year that two new guns, best mates at school at Wesley, went and kept their separate ways.
In the halcyon days, the relationship between the teams was fraternal, even affectionate, steeped in the undergraduate culture. Melbourne University Football president and Blacks legend Simon Costello remembered this week a match in 1974 that had to be abandoned because of flooding a metre deep at the Trinity College end. Blues and Blacks repaired convivially to Naughton’s for the afternoon and evening.
But in the past 25 years, as the Blacks languished, then rebuilt, the atmosphere has deteriorated. Blacks accused Blues of cheating allocation, Blues accused Blacks of sloth and incompetence. "There’s no doubt it became very, very nasty," said Peter Selleck, general secretary of Melbourne University football. Periodic moves to merge the teams dissolved into bitterness and, in 2004, were abandoned altogether. There is even dispute about the accuracy of the official history of the club, Black and Blue, published last year.
"It’s a great pity that we do not have one team representing University," said Blacks stalwart Jack Clancy as he celebrated 50 years of service to the club in 2006. "We’d be so pleased to get a team to roll the Old Xavs."
Still now, as they look to reprise a golden era, an edge remains. "They’re like your annoying pre-pubescent kid brother," said a Blues veteran. The kindest word that either team says about the other now is that day-to-day, they have had little to do with one another for a quarter of a century. It is not strictly true, since they competed for recruits and in political manoeuvrings, and could scarcely avoid each other Tuesday and Thursday nights at the College Crescent pavilion. This is Collingwood and Carlton, but in identical guernseys.
Despite this, or because of it, Blacks and Blues inspire as great a loyalty as at any junior club and carry themselves as proudly as any, all the remarkable for the fact that the player lists necessarily are more transient than most. Bloodlines matter and blood spilled is remembered. Largely, it was returning legends who revived the Blacks and made this day possible, and the promise of many more.
But reality is beginning to intervene. Since the Howard government abolished compulsory student unionism, the sports union’s funding for football has been cut by 80%. University of Melbourne Provost, Professor Peter McPhee said the demise of compulsory student unionism had stripped $12.5 million out of student activities, imperilling many. "It’s something that worries us a great deal," he said. "We anticipated there would be something in the budget, but there wasn’t."
The football club will survive, but Blacks and Blues now are as AFL clubs are, on constant lookout for sponsors and members. Less grudgingly than might be expected, they have agreed to split the gate money from this and the return game in July. As so often with longstanding rivals, as much as they affect to despise one another, they also need each other now.
|
