Paranoia for Aussie Kids?

Reviewed by Phillip Dimitriadis

Boyd Hicklin, Crunch Time: The Fight to Save Football, Geoff Slattery Publishing Pty Ltd (AFL Publishing).

Crunch Time has all the ingredients to stir the hearts of most fanatical followers of AFL. The fact that it is a work of juvenile fiction makes it read like a recruiting manual for future members of the Church of Scientology. Something is wrong with Aussie Rules, conspiratorial forces are afoot and are attempting to ‘De-animate’ the great indigenous game. It is up to ten-year-old Toby ‘Torpedo’ Coleman to ensure that the game retains its innocence and community spirit. With the help of the sixteen club mascots Toby must fight against the forces of the GDL (Global Domination League), an interactive television based code of football that borrows heavily from the rugby codes and Gridiron to usurp and destroy the wholesome AFL brand.

GDL is run by a former fan and passionate player who never got to play AFL because she was a girl. Zee Sweet is out for revenge and wants to destroy the league that shunned her by setting up a code that encourages viewers to plug into their TV headsets and follow the game. With unashamed misogyny, Zee is cast as a Nazi-cum-She-Wolf figure that is determined to realize her ‘final solution’ of destroying AFL. It seems that she is succeeding as virtually all of Australia is ‘plugged’ in and ‘drugged’ into watching GDL, even Toby’s parents.

Toby was one of the few to escape through a rusty turnstile in the middle of the bush and into ‘Mascot Manor’, which houses the 16 AFL Mascots. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it is the author or the characters that are living in a parallel universe. The Victorian Mascots derive their characters from many former VFL players from the 1960s and 70s. Collingwood Mascot Jock ‘One Eye’ McPie is an unnerving mix of Jock McHale and Eddie McGuire, Richmond’s Tiger ‘Stripes’ Dyer is more like Jack Dyer than Dyer ever was and Woofer ‘Dog’ Whitten reflects the loyal and passionate fanaticism of Footscray’s Ted Whitten. This often-cantankerous band of misfits must form a team to defeat the cyborgs of GDL in order to save Australian Rules football, with Toby as their captain coach.

Crunch Time is at one level an enjoyable tween/teen fantasy that appears as a harmless, even playful adventure story. However, there is an implicit ideology at work in this AFL endorsed text that seeks to discourage readers from engaging in other football codes. The ruse seems to be to use the apparent evil of television, the internet or play station as a smokescreen for warning against the cultural dangers of Gridiron and Rugby overtly and Soccer with much more subtlety. The cover of the book depicts the West Coast Eagle mascot fighting a GDL cyborg for possession of what seems to be an oval ball with the distinct hexagonal pattern of a soccer ball. The implications are that soccer is the global code threatening to destroy the innocence of Aussie Rules. However, to state this bluntly would be to admit to a siege mentality so a combination of the evils of other codes serves the book’s propaganda more holistically.

The problem with Crunch Time is that it is written for people who were teenagers in the 1970s and 80s. Ten-year-old Toby’s nickname is ‘torpedo’, a kick that has rarely been seen at AFL level since the early 1990s. Juniors are generally not encouraged to use the spiral punt because it is too hard to master and awkward to mark when booted haphazardly.

The use of VFL icons from the 60s, 70s and 80s to characterize the mascots would hardly resonate with most ten-year-olds today. The interstate club mascots are not attached to any ‘name’ players and this also reeks of a Victorian centric ideology in the text, implying that it was names like Dyer, Barassi, Whitten, Skilton and Barker who forged the legacy of Australian Rules. Interestingly, the Brisbane Lions mascot is the only one who becomes addicted to GDL and this may be a veiled swipe at the death of Fitzroy after being taken over by Brisbane in 1996. This volatile mix of sentimentality and paranoia insults the intelligence of most children today because they are exposed to a number of sports, particularly through the media. Today they can enjoy AFL while still actively playing and watching other sports. That sounds to me like a healthy and relatively democratic way of engaging in sport, but Hicklin and the AFL cronies who supported this book obviously think otherwise. If it is the intention of the AFL to promote books that are so blatantly propagandistic then they are in danger of becoming football’s version of the Amish.

The irony here is that AFL football is not in danger of becoming extinct. It musters healthy crowds and youth participation is still strong among boys and girls despite the protestations of some doomsayers. The game has evolved and is much more skilful and exciting to watch than it was in the 70s and 80s. Old school skills like kicking the drop-kick and the torpedo went out of favour because fans belligerantly demanded success from their clubs leading to a style of play that minimizes risks. Too many fans blame the AFL for changing traditions but it is the clubs and their members that have the final say.

If we were to take the rhetoric of Crunch Time literally, we would be lead to believe that Australian Rules football will become extinct in the next decade. And yet there is no need to use tropes more suited to Rocky movies and the Matrix trilogy to alert and alarm readers of the consequences supporting other football codes. It is time for the AFL and writers like Hicklin to wake up and give the fans some credit by acknowledging that in the 21st century people are more flexible about how they choose to view sport in this country. They can attend and watch Rugby, AFL and Soccer on any given weekend and be passionate about all three codes if that is how they feel. Perhaps the future actually looks brighter for all football codes in Australia after all.

Phillip Dimitriadis tends to see the world in black and white. He's a passionate Collingwood supporter and a long-suffering follower of Newcastle United. He is currently enrolled in a PhD at Victoria University researching the literature of Australian Rules football.

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