One more night at Brookvale
I had actually tried to avoid this game. When I went to Brookvale a couple of weeks earlier, part of the logic was that I would not need to come back for the final home game against St George Illawarra. The Dragons had spent most of the season near the bottom of the table, Manly had fallen away badly in the second half of the year, and there did not seem much reason to rearrange a Friday evening around it.
Then I looked at the schedule again and realised I could make it. So I bought the cheaper general admission ticket and decided I would have one more night at Brookvale.
The 6pm kick-off made getting there from work difficult. I took the Military Road route, which turned out to be a mistake. The buses crawled through the traffic and the game had already started by the time I reached Brookvale.
The queue at the gate was tiny, which seemed about right. My previous visit had been fairly subdued, and I had expected something similar. It was an early Friday night game, and the season was essentially done.
Then I walked through the tunnel and there were people everywhere.
The official crowd was 13,597, nowhere near the number I would have guessed from that first impression, but the number does not really capture what hit me when I walked in. The ground felt busy straight away. People filled the areas around me, the noise carried across the ground, and there was a buzz that had been missing the last time I was there.
I could not quite work out why it felt so different from my previous visit. I was there for one final 2026 game, and apparently plenty of other people had decided to spend their Friday night there too.
Within a few minutes of arriving, before I had even worked out where I was going to stand, Manly scored. General admission had seemed like a sensible way to save some money when I bought the ticket. Arriving after kick-off made it less clever.
I did a quick lap of the area where I was meant to sit and found very little available. There were still spots on the grass, but I did not particularly feel like climbing the embankment and settling there for the evening, so I stood. Then I moved. Then I stood somewhere else.
I bought a drink and some hot chips, regretted both the quality and the price, and kept watching from whichever part of the ground happened to work.
The football itself was strange. Manly kept scoring while still finding ways to make a comfortable game look harder than it needed to be. There were butchered tries, dropped balls, passes that appeared to be aimed at nobody in particular, attacking bombs that went almost straight up instead of forward, including one that somehow travelled backwards, and enough poor goal kicking to become its own source of frustration.
The Manly supporters around me were laughing at St George. We were laughing at ourselves too. Some of our play was so odd that frustration kept turning into amusement. The scoreboard was getting healthier while both teams continued finding new ways to make a mess of things.
There were also plenty of Dragons supporters scattered through the crowd. They were clearly in the minority, although you could hear them whenever St George finally did something well.
During the second half, one supporter stood out for a completely different reason. He was dressed almost entirely in South Sydney gear: jersey, cap, scarf, shorts, socks, possibly a beanie as well.
He walked through the crowd in front of me and I found myself watching him instead of the game. I was not the only one. People around me were turning to look as he passed.
My thought was fairly simple: what are you doing here?
A little further along he greeted some friends and the mystery more or less solved itself. He was a rugby league supporter at a rugby league game with his mates. Fair enough.
The night never really became tense. Even when Manly were making mistakes, there was very little anger around me. People groaned, laughed, shook their heads and then waited for the next thing to happen.
Maybe that was partly because the season had already taken most of the pressure away. There was still a mathematical path to the finals, but I had largely stopped believing in it. I had not bought this ticket because I thought I was going to witness the beginning of some late surge. I just wanted another night of football at Brookvale.
There was a bit of freedom in that.
By the end, Manly had won 44–10. The score was emphatic. The performance never really felt that way. I still did not walk away convinced we were about to become a serious finals team.
I did walk away feeling better than I had expected.
I headed back towards the buses and ended up talking with a couple of St George supporters. We gave each other a bit of grief and then started talking about the game and what came next.
At one stage I offered my assessment: we had played badly, but they had played worse. One of them feigned offence, then laughed and more or less agreed.
There was not much bitterness in it. Just a couple of supporters from opposite sides walking towards the bus stop, giving each other some grief and already looking towards next year.
