Fans getting warnings and booted for being too loud

[What'sinaname]

Time for people to boycott the game. Gil and his Commission have list touch. In fact, AFL in general has lost touch, including the AFLPA.

[Pi]

[Dark Beanie]

Behavioural Awareness Officers - should employ some of them at the local pubs where parents let their kids run amok while others are trying to have a nice meal.

[Mr Miyagi]

[Skids]

[Dave The Man]

AFL is happy for people to get Blind Drunk but They can't make a Noise?

Just because they make money out of Selling Alcohol.

Shows what the AFL only care about - $$$$$$$$$$

[Dave The Man]

[RudeBoy]

Mathew Richardson was the only one critical of the security thugs. The others simply toed the party (AFL) line, and then virtually ridiculed Joffa's call for a boycott.

[Johnno75]

If we had BAO back in the “Victoria Park” days they wouldn’t have lasted a quarter, they would have been turfed out.

[Woods]

When footy was so much better — without sushi, armrests and AFL interference
by Terry Brown, Sunday Herald Sun, 16 June 15, 2019

On a soggy Saturday arvo, three quarters and seven cans in, no place in the world was finer than One Eye Hill at Victoria Park.

Amenities? It lacked the lot, and so what? Who cared?

Rain kept the toxic cloud from the urinals down. VB stayed cold in rigid steel cans that stuck to your flesh, and you can only get so wet, right? More fun than footy now.

If we wanted warm, cosy, or nice even, we would have gone to the Hopetoun Tea Rooms.

Footy is not about niceties, though. It was always about the opposite.

For three hours you could randomly, or pointedly, howl at the players, umps and footy gods, insanely cold until all feeling went, steam coming off your booing. You could bait total strangers too, a personal favourite.

Every bit of crap your boss and life had thrown at you since the Saturday before flooded down the hill like noisy mustard gas, better out than in.

The best part was the banter. There was an art to it. Bald headed flog and green maggot would not have made it off the bench, such was the quality.

You needed a thick skin to be at the footy anyway, if only because there were no puffy parkas back then. Duck down was a panicked scream as a kick-to-kick Sherrin tried to scalp some child. St John’s must’ve treated more kids than a Nimbin measles ward. Lucky ones would get it in the forehead, laces out, branded clearly for show-and-tell at school.

Duffel jackets, beanies, bonds singlets, long sleeve knitted footy jumpers and the obligatory beer overcoat were in vogue when football was pure. On a wet day you’d go home several kilos heavier and a lot wittier and better looking.

There were no video screens, sushi, armrests, chairs or inflatable advertising clap sticks, but somehow we survived. No multiple roaming flogs wielding microphones like alien probes.

There was no escape from the rain, sure, but no real problem either.

Yeah, footy had it all before the league fixed it up.

Back in the day Ross Oakley, the chief, kept a straight face and said they didn’t want to own the game. They were just custodians of the treasure.

The difficulty is that the AFL is that dodgy caretaker who steals your silver bit by bit, sending you broke and wondering if you’re mad? With loud barracking an official caution now, we’re down to the bent fish forks.

It is hard to point to the exact moment the AFL got fair dinkum about despoiling the game. They never ask, of course. Stuff just turns up like something on your sole.

How do people come to be the AFL chief, and who votes for them, and who votes for those people, all the way down the AFL centipede?

I’d bet it’s a long time since any of them got wet at the footy, or sat in Row ZZ bleeding from the ears to Nickelback maybe, or drank water labelled beer out of plastic. Betcha.

The rot set in when? The murders of Waverley, the Roys and South? Culling the crepe paper flogger? Branded ovals?

Light blue M&M navy blues, Captain Carlton’s hovercraft, the annual joke that is the draw, changing the songs and hoping no one notices, plastic cups of mid-strength fluids best left in Pathology? The list is longer than the MCG goalsquare, er, rectangle.

Maybe it was when the hills and standing room were morphed into individual plastic buckets to keep fans contained. Booked seats stopped you randomly consorting, the ground DJ stopped you talking and, if you were near a speaker, ever hearing again.

Everything the AFL touches, it screws up then presses ahead with unfazed, in the certain knowledge fans got it wrong again.

Every-poll-ever says to leave the big one alone, and every year until Gill gets fireworks the league will cough up the rancid furball of an idea that is a Twilight Grand Final. They already killed the replay without asking, the one that gave two clubs fans a bonus week’s bliss and some hope of going, but plays hell with the fly-ins and corporates. Boo.

Twilight Sunday games, megawalls, exhibition matches, Roaming Brian, Channel 7 in every nook and orifice, the jumping castle they run-through in Perth that looks nothing like an eagle? Who asked for any of it?

AFLX, under any merciful God, would be taken out the back of Etihad/Marvel/Colonial/Docklands Stadium and dropped in the harbour, weighed securely down by chipped-off corporate signage and oversized zooper goalposts.

The sooner Me-Too claims KissCam, the better. You can’t yell flog, but you can still penetrate a stranger with your tongue.

The core problem is the AFL doesn’t much like football, especially its lack of showbiz and its rough ways. Pity the players. Nuns drink more and spend less time around hospitals and schools. The league has cracked down on drugs too, unless they’re sold at Chemist Warehouse, who sponsor the injuries — ghouls.

The league contracted buggering the tickets up to Ticketek, too busy were they watering the beer, scheduling Chinese matches and inventing rules nobody can umpire without looking like a flog.

Now the best available reserved MCG seats come with an unobstructed view of 30,000 better empty ones.

The video review system has great views too and provides exclusive and conclusive content to Channel 7 — but not the umps, whose cock-ups are then replayed from nine angles in slow-mo.

No wonder they are grumpy and are taking it out on fans who correctly identify the floggishness of their haphazard ways.

(If they do not like being derided, perhaps don’t dress like leprechauns?)

Joffa has had it up to his beanie and he is not alone, but how do you stand up for footy when there’s no standing room?

It is enough to make you scream, except that’s a prohibited weapon now.

No, it’s check your passion at Gate 5, I guess. Bite your tongue or, if KissCam’s on, someone else’s? That’s OK with the AFL.

[stui magpie]

^

I used to like Terry Brown's articles in the Sun. He's been retired for years, great to see a blast from the past.

[masoncox]

I too was a creature of one eyed hill.
My best memory was a day that was as cold as ice.
We had sleet and hail all day.
I never felt more alive than on that day.
It was heaven. But my memory goes back even further when I was
a kid growing up in echuca.
My local footy team the echuca bombers made the GF.
Special trains and buses when booked and I reckoned half
the town went down to bendigo to se the gf.
The local fruit shop owner drove his pick up truck around the streets
of bendigo all morning with a gallows with a south bendigo dressed dummy hanging from a noose.
Now that would not happen today.
After echuca won the gf the whole town gathered and celebrated along the highway and finally to the civic centre for a grand celebation.
Football was king and long live the king!
But today it is a commodity with tinges of tribalism left just for colour.
But even that is under threat with the thought police out in force.
My experince at echuca reflected what most people thought of football whether it was local or the big time with the vfl.
It was part of our dna.
I still love football but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
When i see what has happened.
The afl represents the corporate world more than my world.
I mourn for my lost world.

[Doc63]

^^^

What a great article - should be on the front page of the paper

[RudeBoy]

A brilliant article. I never buy Murdoch's Hun, so thanks for the share.

[K]

'We've gone too far': Marvel Stadium to review security measures

https://www.afl.com.au/news/2019-06-16/weve-gone-too-far-marvel-stadium-to-review-security-measures

' "It is the same level of security as previous years," Green said on 3AW.
...

"Categorically it's a stadium decision. We haven't had any directive (from the AFL).

"We have increased our visibility. Clearly we've gone too far and it's something we’ll review." '