Blurring of cricket and footy seasons will force fans to choose their poison

A clash of kings is coming. Eddie McGuire has revealed the Australian Football League plans to expand its yearly fixture to mid-October, a time usually reserved for laying turf wickets and warming catching fingers. Cricket Australia, too, is on the march.

On 12 March 2027, the MCG will host a one-off Test match between Australia and England to celebrate the sesquicentennial anniversary of the first ever international Test match, a time when eyes are fixed on the AFL’s round zero.

This blurring of football and cricket seasons will force sports followers to pick their poison. Which way they lean will largely depend on where their loyalties lie. Which prompts the question – what is the difference between a cricket and Aussie rules supporter (don’t be offended rugby fans, as a Victorian I would not dare speak on your behalf)?

The enquiry is of course flawed. Cricket and football devotees are often one in the same. But while sharing a body, they remain a two-headed monster, harbouring split personalities that rear depending on the seasons. As Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote in his famous novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck, that man is not truly one, but truly two.’

Let’s start with Dr Jekyll. As Gideon Haigh points out, the Australian cricket follower has traditionally been known as ‘cricket lover’, albeit a distant one. They sleepwalk slowly into the season after a long winter hibernation. Bleary eyed and somewhat groggy, they celebrate their renewed acquaintance by having ‘a hit’ down at the nets or glancing at a local park match while walking the dog.

Their long estrangement breeds a certain awkwardness, especially toward the elite levels of the game. When is the first Test? Who are we playing this year? These are common utterances, born out of cricket’s inability to establish a set annual fixture that people can commit to memory.

The three One Day Internationals against Pakistan in November last year averaged an attendance of just 22,517 patrons, a somewhat disappointing figure, though one roughly consistent in that month since the 1980s. Like the Russian Army, cricket lovers in this country are slow to rouse.

However, as they settle into the summer the bond flowers once more. In stark contrast to the November ODIs, the three marquee Test matches at Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne this year recorded average daily crowds of 45,004, 47,738 and 74,738 respectively.

Much of this popularity, explains cricket journalist Daniel Brettig, owes itself to the ‘seasonal’ timing of key matches and the audience’s ‘habitual’ ritual of attending them. The core of the Australian cricketing season is tied to the Christmas holiday period, extending from mid-December to late January. In a strictly logistical sense, the absence of competing work and school commitments provides ample opportunity to attend a sport that demands piety for eight-hours a day across five consecutive days.

It is this structural feature that contributes to the festive, almost dreamlike atmosphere that wafts around the grandstands and into loungerooms across the Australian summer. There is no tomorrow, so the days and nights roll into one another with an amnesiac effect. Though the cricket lover’s attention ebbs and flows, momentarily broken by a trip to the beach or a family gathering, the sound of bat on willow always seems to be somewhere in the background. On the television. In the backyard. Faintly perhaps, but always there. To quote The Sandlot, a film celebrating the great American pastime of baseball: ‘They never kept score, they never chose sides, they never even really stopped playing the game. It just went on forever.’

The cricket lover’s breezy relationship to their companion is indeed a healthy one. Devotees enjoy cricket, rather than being consumed by it. Team selection and the results of the day, though discussed, always seem less important than the memory and myth associated with the endless summers of yesteryear. Debates over Usman Khawaja’s selection become lost amidst reminisces of Punter’s pull shot, Warnie’s drift, or Lillee’s runup.

There is consequently little saturation of cricket in the media. Outside major cultural flashpoints, such as Sandpapergate, the Bairstow stumping, or Justin Langer’s sacking, SEN radio struggles to harness the kind of “talk back” anger so crucial to its business model.

The most popular podcasts covering cricket come not from ex-players or beat-reporters but eccentric (The Final Word) or irreverent (The Grade Cricketer) followers. The most respected voices are writers (Malcolm Knox, Greg Baum, and Gideon Haigh), not news breakers or outrage columnists. Perhaps it is the sheer length of Test cricket that allows any boiling tension to quickly dissipate, thereby allowing minds to wonder, muse and dream.

Nor is the Australian cricket lover a jealous one. To be sure, when groups of young men congregate at Bay 13 or on the Adelaide Hill a cocktail of alcohol, heat and cultural ignorance can prove a recipe for disaster. ‘All Australians,’ Douglas Jardine once seethed, ‘are an uneducated, unruly mob.’

But on the balance tensions in the outer are generally subdued as audiences sit comfortably with one another, sharing in their mutual adoration for what has brought them together. It was the confrontation of a cricketing foe in England, scholar W.F. Mandle argued, that helped to bind Australia’s otherwise divided colonies together, thereby laying the groundwork for their Federation in 1901.

Any vulgar nationalism, meanwhile, takes a backward when a worthy foe is met. Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar spoke warmly of the adoration he received whenever he toured Australia: ‘It’s truly a special feeling to walk in to such a reception, when I don’t know if I am batting on zero or on 100.’ The cricket lover is devoted to their team, though not prisoners to its fate.

The same cannot be said of the football fan. Common use of the term ‘fan’ to describe its supporters is indeed instructive. An Americanism, deriving from the ‘fanatical’ baseball supporters who emerged during the 1880s, the Australian footy fan’s mania is just as visceral.

Born and nurtured by suburban-based clubs in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, the game “grew up” with these cities and thus became engrained into their local identities and rivalries.The hereditary nature of this fandom, where one traces loyalties to ancestors long passed and homes left behind, cements a cradle to grave devotion to ‘their boys’. As Bruce Dawe’s 1967 poem “Life Cycle” so eloquently reads:

When children are born in Victoria
they are wrapped in the club-colours, laid in beribboned cots,
having already commenced a lifetime’s barracking…
And the tides of life will be the tides of the team’s fortunes…
But the dance forever the same – the elderly still
loyally crying Carn… Carn… (if feebly) unto the very end…

For working-class clubs in particular, footy became a vehicle for attaining individual and collective pride where a life of labour and destitution allowed for none. ‘Becoming a club member was a way a nobody could rightfully feel a somebody,’ observed social historian Jane McCalman. There was no need for the workers of Richmond to pursue political revolution when they could exact revenge on their Hawthorn-barracking bosses each Saturday afternoon.

But a footy fan’s emotional intensity is conditioned as much by the mechanics of the sport as by its cultural roots. Short, frenetic, and combative, watching Aussie rules is like receiving an adrenaline shot that overrides the brain’s prefrontal cortex and fuels the amygdala and limbic systems. All sense of rational thought is quickly lost, and a mixture of fear, anger, and pleasure swamp the mind as the ball pings from end-to-end.

At her first AFL match last year, Western Australian writer Edie Mitsuda, having no previous attachment to the game, explained its sudden impact on her psyche: ‘At once my whole body commenced a spontaneous trembling, as though something was very close, either behind me or in front of me… I could barely talk.’

Where the cricket season meanders from match to match without any seeming consequence, footy fans endure a weekly ritual of pain and pleasure where life itself seems at stake. They are gripped by a state of constant anxiety, a condition rigidly reinforced by a gang of testosterone driven media outlets intent on attaining “cut-through” with the “hottest take” from the weekend. Garry Lyon’s criticism of opposing Indigenous players Eddie Betts and Sydney Stack, who giddily embraced after a stunning Betts goal in 2019, speaks to the joylessness of the footballing ecosystem at times, much to its great detriment.

Indeed, like Captain Ahab, the footy fan’s obsession often descends into a form of madness. SEN and 3AW’s “talk back” segments, after a bad Carlton loss, are nothing short of amusing. The bile spewed out on social media is less so. ‘It’s become a bit of a habit these days, a lot of racial stuff, a lot of abuse of players with their families, kids,’ lamented Brisbane Lions player Lachie Neale. ‘When players cop death threats from a game of footy, it gets a bit crazy.’

It is a combustible mix of sensationalism, fixation and aggression, one that is pushing the game into dangerous territory, with potentially tragic consequences.

But while acknowledging its excesses, it is this unbridled passion that makes footy not only a financial powerhouse in the sporting landscape but also an unrivalled cultural bedrock wherever it is played and loved. As historian Leonie Sandercock, writing on the opening bounce of the 1982 VFL Grand Final, observed: ‘The umpire blows his whistle, bounces the ball, and the game is on. At this moment, Melbourne comes to life.’

Corporate indoctrinated administrators and marketers may not desire uncouth fans with homemade lunches and scarfs at their games, or absentminded dreamers who leave screens to practise leg-breaks in their hallways. They prefer a uniform horde of unthinking, attentive, and orderly customers that wear KFC buckets on their heads while their pockets are emptied, before being politely shown the door.

But the two-headed monster must never be ashamed to show its distinct personalities each summer and winter season. What stands to be lost is not the victory of one head over the other, but rather the inability to differentiate them altogether.