War in the time of football.(Sport)

WHAT DO THEY KNOW of football who only football know?

In Melbourne, where I grew up, Australian rules football is so completely integrated into everyday life that it would be difficult to view the game with any degree of detachment or objectivity. Even the token few detractors, a rare breed that seems to have died off completely in recent times, cannot help but take football personally. No one who lives in this city can avoid some amount of contact with the game and its rituals and processes even if it is only through the media, socially or in the workplace.

To the vast armies of football fans around the nation, the game is, quite literally, the world. In his recent book The Game in Time of War (Picador), Martin Flanagan, a leading Melbourne football writer, sees virtually everything in the light of football. The game not only refracts global and local politics but also questions of ethnicity, culture, morality, history, even geography. There is, apparently, a football aspect to everything that has happened in Australia, from bushfires to Ned Kelly. For a football romantic like Flanagan, the game is the only way of finding meaning in what he seems to regard as a world otherwise complicated and ineluctable.

According to devotees like Flanagan, Australian football is the vehicle for furthering high moral and social purposes, Football has the potential to link aspects of Australian life that are otherwise irreconcilable, the sole effective means to unite different races and creeds. In Flanagan's imagination, virtually everything is related to the game, not to the rules and other technical and commercial aspects or even the play itself, but to the event, the collective happening, the pervasive presence of football in our lives.

For Flanagan and the millions of others who view the world through a football-shaped lens, their game is the quintessence of Australian civilisation. For those like Flanagan who do not identify with other forms of nationalism, football is the only thing that is wholly and inclusively Australian. In a multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-denominational society that continues to import much of its culture and ideas, football playing and watching is in Flanagan's view the sole acceptable mode of assimilation.

The reality, it seems to me, is a bit less appealing. Like other sports around the world, football is a site of division between various peoples and tribes as much as a force that brings them together. At the state school I attended for most of my secondary education, football teams in informal games naturally resolved themselves into pre-existing ethnic and social groups, as well as giving school bullies some licence to indulge their taste for violence. Similarly, at the private school I went to for a few years, games against schools of other denominations invariably brought out latent sectarian feeling, while one internal practice match between boarders and day-boys had to be stopped, I remember, due to a vicious brawl that erupted between the members of the two teams. The history of Australian football encompasses many specific regional and social antagonisms.

Throughout history war has been transformed into sport, and the reverse has also occurred. The inhabitants of Easter Island ended their civil war over scarce resources by holding an annual sporting contest which culminated in the crowning of the Birdman. Leadership of the island was determined by the individual who could scale down the vertical slopes, swim out to one of three small islets in shark-infested waters, and bring back the egg of the nesting sooty tern unbroken.