Before the First Bounce
I have been to enough Sydney Swans games at the SCG that I thought I had a reasonable idea of what happens on game day. This time I arrived three hours early. It wasn’t really the plan. The opportunity presented itself, so I took it. The game against Port Adelaide didn’t start until 4.15pm, the gates weren’t opening until 2.15, and there I was at Moore Park at about 1.15 with nowhere in particular to be.
So I sat on the grass outside the SCG. It was one of those Sydney winter days that had decided not to be winter. The sky was almost perfectly clear and sitting there in the sun, reading and listening to podcasts, it felt more like spring. It certainly hadn’t felt that way when I left home that morning. I started wondering what the SCG looked like before a game. Not empty. I knew what an empty sporting ground looked like. I wanted to see it wake up.
It turned out I was already late. The merchandise stand on Driver Avenue was being set up. Food trucks were getting ready. Signage and the various game-day activities were already in place. The light rail was running, although not yet with the extra services I associate with a big event, and people in Swans colours were already moving through Moore Park.
By the time I wandered over to my gate, I was seventh or eighth in line. Then the players started walking past us. They were coming from the car park and walking perhaps a hundred metres towards the ground. Kids called out for high fives, signatures and selfies. Some players stopped repeatedly along the way, with a couple taking what must have been close to fifteen minutes to travel that short distance. Others kept walking, headphones on. Fair enough. They were there to work. I liked watching the ones who stopped, particularly with the kids. I have been to plenty of games at the SCG, including times when I have arrived early for cricket, and I don’t remember seeing the players arrive like that before.
When the gates opened, different parts of the ground began filling at very different speeds. The Members and Ladies’ stands were among the quickest. SCG members don’t have allocated seats in those areas, so arriving early matters if you want a particular one. There was something mildly amusing about watching some of the people with the most privileged access to the ground also needing to be among the first through the gates.
The Red Zone behind the goals was doing something similar, as were people in general admission. Get inside, find the preferred seat, claim it and then disappear again for food or a drink. I used to have general admission membership myself. I never arrived this early, which probably explains why I never got those particularly good general admission seats.
I had an allocated seat, so I wasn’t in much of a hurry. I stopped for a coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich before finding my section, which for quite a while I had almost entirely to myself. A number of the food outlets still weren’t ready. The sushi place didn’t have sushi and some of the hot-food outlets didn’t appear to be cooking yet. The bars, on the other hand, were already serving.
For the next hour and a half, I mostly sat and watched people arrive. Players came out to warm up. Kids played on the field. The screens started their pre-match entertainment, including a camera searching the stands for distracted spectators. Talking on a phone or reading a book could suddenly make you part of the show.
The security guards were already in position too. At previous games I have sometimes looked at the security staff around the fence line and thought they seemed bored or disengaged. Arriving this early gave me a different view of that. They were already standing there two hours before the first bounce, watching sections containing almost nobody. By the time I normally arrive excited about the game, they may have been standing in roughly the same place for hours. Then there is the match itself and whatever happens afterwards. I had been a little unfair to the bored-looking security guard.
Other things were easier to notice while the ground was empty. Ground staff were still working, and the logos painted on the grass suddenly looked very obviously positioned for the television cameras. I had seen those logos plenty of times before. I had just never really looked at them while there was almost nothing else happening.
Slowly, the empty seats disappeared. Families arrived. Groups found one another. People began appearing higher and higher in the stands. It wasn’t a sellout, but by the time the crowd had built to around 40,000, the SCG felt properly full.
The people around me were not all experiencing that crowd in quite the same way. One teenager, despite wearing the appropriate team gear, appeared to find solitaire on their phone considerably more interesting than the football. Another young person seemed to spend part of the afternoon hunting down increasingly surprising food for the family. At one point an enormous bowl of ice cream, berries and cream appeared. Later there was something resembling a hot dog on a stick. I have been coming to the SCG for years and didn’t know either of those things were available.
Eventually there was football to watch. The first quarter didn’t suggest anything particularly unusual was coming. Both teams made mistakes and Port Adelaide went into the first break slightly ahead. Then Sydney came out for the second quarter and the afternoon changed very quickly. Goals started coming one after another. Sydney kicked nine goals for the quarter, turning a close game into a comfortable lead with remarkable speed. By halftime the SCG I had watched slowly fill was making considerably more noise than it had been an hour earlier.
During the break, several much smaller football matches took over the ground. Young kids spread across the SCG in three or four games, and different sections of the crowd effectively adopted whichever match happened to be in front of them. A little kid kicking a goal could earn a genuine cheer from thousands of people who had no idea who they were. Most of the kids chased the football in one enormous group. Occasionally one stood behind the play looking for Mum or Dad, watching the crowd, scratching their head or otherwise showing very little concern about whatever tactical system their coach might have been attempting to implement.
I stood up, stretched my legs and checked the Sydney Ice Dogs score. They were losing. Perhaps I shouldn’t judge the teenager playing solitaire too harshly.
Sydney kept going after halftime and eventually the contest disappeared altogether. By the final quarter, people were leaving despite the Swans being on their way to an enormous win. Elsewhere, the crowd started doing the wave and paper planes appeared. That always strikes me as slightly strange at an AFL game. The football normally gives you very little time to look elsewhere. This time there was enough certainty about what was happening on the field for parts of the crowd to start finding other things to do. Sydney eventually won by 97 points, which I think may be the largest Swans victory I have actually witnessed at the ground.
There had been something else I had noticed during the afternoon. A few people were wearing South Sydney Rabbitohs jerseys. Green stands out fairly well in a Swans crowd, but I didn’t think much of it. South Sydney are a local club and seeing the occasional Rabbitohs supporter at a Swans game didn’t seem particularly strange. I noticed them, supplied myself with an explanation and moved on.
Late in the game, someone sitting near me put on a Parramatta Eels jersey and, a few minutes later, got up and left. That made me check my phone. South Sydney were playing Parramatta next door at Allianz Stadium after the Swans game. The Rabbitohs jerseys suddenly made considerably more sense.
When I came out of the SCG, I didn’t immediately leave. I stood outside for about ten minutes because I couldn’t decide whether to take the light rail home or walk to Central. Around me, two crowds were moving through each other. Swans supporters were leaving the SCG in red and white. Coming the other way were Rabbitohs and Eels supporters heading towards Allianz Stadium, with considerably more Souths colours among them. Somewhere among all of that were people who had apparently decided one game wasn’t enough and were simply moving from one stadium to the other.
Eventually I decided to walk. For part of the journey I moved with the Swans supporters leaving Moore Park and against the rugby league supporters still arriving. A few hours earlier, I had been sitting on the grass watching the first Swans supporters arrive. Now I was walking in the other direction. My game was over. Theirs was about to start.
